JOHANNESBURG: Fists raised and red flags flying, the “comrades” of South Africa’s government-allied leftist parties and unions still invoke Lenin in retro rhetoric that bears little relation to the country’s course.

Campaign speeches by the Communist Party and the trades union congress ahead of May 7 elections retain a striking socialist tone inherited from the communist nations that supported the liberation movement when white-ruled South Africa was a Western outpost against the Soviet bloc.

But the ruling African National Congress (ANC), to which they are allied, has pursued a liberal policy during its 20 years in power since Nelson Mandela became the first post-apartheid president in 1994.

The past lingers, though, even in the colourful names of many activists, such as Soviet, Tito and Castro.

And political discourse is peppered with communist diatribes, invectives and slogans that have all but disappeared from the rest of the world since the Berlin wall fell.

The ANC’s youth brigade mourned the passing of North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il, and said they would “dip our revolutionary banners in honour” at the death of a well-loved public television presenter.

The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa), the country’s largest union, often quotes Lenin on the class struggle in the preamble to its media statements.

Its recently launched Marxist-Leninist school gives lessons that hark back to the output of a 1980s communist propaganda radio station. Module Two is entitled “Capitalism & its Gravediggers: Building a United Front to Resist Neoliberalism”.

The same goes for the umbrella workers’ movement, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu).

“In many statements by not only Cosatu, but also the SA Communist Party and the ANC, we quote Lenin and other Marxist leaders, revolutionary positions which still survive,” said its spokesman Patrick Craven.

“Sometimes we have to ensure that they survive in reality and not just in words. Cosatu is still very committed to a socialist society,” Craven told AFP.

But the ANC’s more moderate approach is a sizeable obstacle to the crusade against “the forces of reaction”.

After years of support Numsa has withdrawn its backing for the ruling party ahead of the elections and now talks of founding a labour party and possibly pulling out of Cosatu.

“All the promises that they have been hearing over the years have not brought much for the working class,” said Witwatersrand University sociologist Devan Pillay.

Economic Freedom Fighters

“As long as current economic policies persist... and there is no particular enthusiasm to reduce inequality, for example, the labour movement can only become more radical,” Pillay told AFP.

A new party, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), also finds the ANC too market-friendly.

Under the leadership of the fiery Julius Malema — a one-time ANC star who was expelled from the party in 2012 for indiscipline — the EFF has gained a following among unemployed township-dwellers with promises to nationalise mines and redistribute white-owned land.

Its “commissars” explain that South African society needs a “socialist transformation” before it can progress to communism.

All these movements and unions make a big show of red flags, red t-shirts, and even red berets in the case of the EFF.

“The red symbolises the blood which was shed by those who fought to establish trade unions in workers’ strikes,” Cosatu’s Craven explained.

The metaphor is all the more compelling after South African police shot dead 34 striking miners in the platinum-belt town of Marikana in 2012.

The killings left an indelible mark, even on government allies like Cosatu.

In protest at expensive tolls on the highway to neighbouring Botswana, one of the union’s provincial branches said last September that only a Marikana-style massacre could silence its members.

“The police must be ready to shoot, as they were ready to do in Marikana. We are prepared to die for our rights,” it said.

The Marikana massacre also cemented the rise of the radical Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU), whose ongoing three-month wage strike on the platinum belt is the longest in post-apartheid history.

But University of Cape Town academic Joseph Salazar takes the communist oratory with a pinch of salt.

“The invocations of Lenin and all of that, it’s nonsense really,” the professor of rhetoric told AFP.

“It’s amusing, but entirely folklore,” he said, adding that the ANC’s black, green and yellow are much stronger revolutionary colours in South Africa.

The ruling party still basks in the glory of overthrowing white-minority rule and enjoys the support of roughly 60 per cent of the electorate.

After two decades in government Mandela’s party uses far less flowery discourse, though it retains the defiant raised fist from its heroic past, as well as some slogans and liberation chants to stir up the crowds.

And its members, including the president, still call each other “comrade”.—AFP