The aesthetic politics of fighting for black economic freedom: between militant socialism, fascism and bling-bling

ABSTRACT In its nine-year existence, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) consolidated itself as South Africa’s third-largest party, despite continuous, damaging denunciations of some of its key aspects. I argue that a highly aestheticised politics is key to understanding this persistence, necessitating a political-aesthetic reading. I especially focus on the EFF’s adoption of a militarised party aesthetic in its self-stylisation as a contemporary black liberation army, identifying six ways in which it serves to differentiate the party ideologically from its adversaries and manage its organisational challenges. I further examine how the EFF’s highly aestheticised and militarised politics might confirm recurrent criticisms of fascist tendencies. Based on Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of fascism, I consider the functioning of aestheticisation and militarisation as diversions from the EFF’s duplicitous commitment to revolutionary socialism. Being found too limited in engaging the aesthetic as a relatively autonomous dimension of politics, the Benjaminian reading is supplemented with one that takes the EFF leaders’ conspicuous display of material wealth to function as an important, unofficial party aesthetic rooted in black emancipatory politics. The EFF’s political aesthetics is thus conceptualised as a contradictory and perplexing, yet not ineffective mixture of a socialist-revolutionary and bling-bling aesthetic.