We need to talk about Floyd Shivambu, especially in light of his latest attack, on National Treasury official Ismail Momoniat.
In March Shivambu attacked a journalist on the street outside parliament. This was an act of brazen thuggery, and one that expressed a clear disregard for a basic principle of all genuine left-wing politics - respect for media freedom.
As no less a figure than Karl Marx famously insisted, "the free press is the ubiquitous vigilant eye of a people's soul".
Some of the young people making their politics on Twitter like to indulge in the lazy conflation of thuggery with radicalism. Those of us who lived through the civil war of the late 1980s know better.There are times when armed resistance to oppression is necessary. But violence always does deep damage to a society, and it is almost always the most vulnerable who are hit the hardest.
To present thuggery as somehow radical in a democracy is a deeply reckless form of politics that is more or less always complicit with forms of toxic masculinity. Our society is systemically violent, and moving away from that colonial hangover is among our most urgent priorities.
Moreover, thuggery cannot substitute for the work of democratic organising. We should not forget that the infatuation with charisma and thuggery has led to irrelevance before.
But the problem with Shivambu exceeds his penchant for thuggery.
The man is also a crude chauvinist. Also in March, Shivambu sank to a new low when he questioned Malusi Gigaba's citizenship. In a deeply xenophobic society this was a grossly reckless act.
As many commentators noted at the time, Shivambu's xenophobia had disturbing similarities with Donald Trump's encouragement of xenophobic prejudices against Barack Obama in the form of the "birther movement".Around the world, xenophobia has become the central dividing line separating the right from the left.
The election of Trump, Brexit and the rise of right-wing populism in countries like Italy, Hungry, Austria and France are all forms of reactionary politics centred on xenophobia. It has also driven reactionary projects across the global South. Opposing xenophobia has been a key principle for the left. Shivambu's xenophobic antics place him very firmly in the camp of the right.
Now Shivambu has objected to Momoniat on the grounds that he is "non-African".
Besides the fact that Momoniat's struggle credentials are well known, this is racial chauvinism as its most brazen and crude.
The Black Consciousness Movement, the PAC, the United Democratic Front, the trade union movement and the progressive wing of the ANC all developed conceptions of identity and belonging that transcended apartheid classifications. They all had space for individuals to make their own political choices and to be recognised on that basis.
In each case their conception of African identity was ultimately political rather than simply racial. Despite their important differences, these different political movements were all recognisable progressive political projects.
Shivambu is spitting on the legacies of all these histories of progressive political struggle. Steve Biko, for one, must be rolling in his grave. But Shivambu is not alone.
The EFF has a well-documented history of taking crude anti-Indian positions. These are not a mere matter of a backward form of racial chauvinism but a distinctly right-wing form of politics, presenting itself as a clear degeneration of all the progressive traditions in South Africa.
Despite its very small percentage of the vote, the EFF enjoys huge and often uncritical media attention. It has real power to shape the national debate.When that power is misused to drive an agenda marked by crude racial chauvinism the consequences can be severe.
Just as in Trump's America or Narendra Modi's India, legal forms of citizenship are undermined by reactionary populism. Muslims may be legal citizens in the US or India, but in these countries reactionary populism, sometimes taking a fascist hue, has meant that legal forms of citizenship can no longer be freely enjoyed in practice.
The EFF is doing something similar in South Africa. It is not just a matter of ill-mannered young people conducting themselves in a thuggish manner. By normalising chauvinism the EFF is, not entirely unlike Trump or Modi, chipping away at the very citizenship of some South Africans.
• Buccus is a senior research associate at the Auwal Socio-Economic Research Institute and a research fellow in the School of Social Sciences at the University of KwaZulu-Natal..