Oh Lord, I’m just weeping here. This truly is the funniest timeline in history. Consider the following paragraph from the lugubrious American alt-right tastemaker Compact, an online magazine that, like the spectre of a lonely night-shift mortician lovingly tending to the dead, is only funny if your sense of humour is sufficiently twisted:
For decades, opponents of public ownership have invoked the specter of government inefficiency. They argue that only the private sector can deliver innovation. But the Pentagon is already the world’s largest employer, with nearly 3 million military service members and civilian employees—more than Walmart and Amazon. It has also been one of the most powerful engines of innovation in modern history, responsible for splitting the atom, developing the internet and Silicon Valley, and laying the foundation for artificial intelligence. The question is not whether the state can innovate, but whether innovation should be steered by the public interest or by shareholder returns.
Um, say what?
This comes from a commentator named Indigo Olivier, who has written a piece advocating for US state ownership of the Big Five weapons manufacturers: Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, RTX (formerly Raytheon), and Boeing. All five have profited massively from the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East; there’s a solid argument to be made that their profiteering encourages war.
And so, “Nationalise the defense industry,” demands the headline, as if this were a working group of a three-person EFF chapter in Washington, DC.
Indeed, US alt-righties are coming around to the joys of state ownership. The Trump administration has taken a stake in the failing chipmaker Intel, has forced a sale of the social media garburator TikTok, and is taking a slice of Nvidia chip sales in China, to name only a few examples.
Has anyone checked up on Gareth Cliff, the Pod Bros and the free marketeers at the South African Institute of Race Relations? Are they okay? This can’t be easy. Almost everything advocated for in the EFF’s various manifestos is being adopted by the current US administration, who pretend that they’re stripping back the government while centralising authority in the Presidency.
Which is, very literally, the head of the government.
The Pod Bros may argue that the Americans at least have competence and experience in other fields of expertise, like flattening Vietnamese kindergartens and failing to kill Fidel Castro with an exploding cigar. But let’s take Howard Lutnick, the bestubbled New Yoik shyster who serves as the commerce secretary, aka minister of tariffs.
In his “private sector” career, Lutnick wrestled control of the trading house Cantor Fitzgerald from its founder’s family, and made billions investing in harebrained “start-ups” that were backed by shit-tons of Treasury certificates, aka US government debt. The dude is, very literally, a late-stage Andropov-era communist. He talks like a capitalist, and probably thinks he’s a capitalist.
But he’s Floyd Shivambu without the overalls.
Let’s not blame the Trump administration for this phenomenon, which precedes them by centuries. In living memory, following the 2008 financial crisis, the US government bailed out car companies, big banks, trading houses and mortgage lenders — anyone who wasn’t a schlub with 300 bucks of credit card debt and a car that needed filling up. Many other administrations have behaved equally expediently in times of trouble. The term “too big to fail” is not a descriptor, but an ultimatum: guarantee us, or you go down with us in the jobs carnage.
The bailout craze has extended to other countries. Yell loud enough about the free market, like Argentina’s chainsaw-wielding nutter Javier Milei, and you get $20-billion from the Americans as a reward for ideological purity combined with incompetence. (As of this writing, the loan has been upgraded to $40-billion. )
So let’s all say it together: There. Is. No. Such. Thing. As. A. Free. Market.
Try to engage on any of this with an allegedly communist member of the ANC over the age of 25, and they’ll go scurrying into the broom closet in Luthuli House. This just isn’t something polite South Africans discuss. We have some state-owned companies, the same ones owned by the whites during apartheid, which inures us to allegations of socialism because Boers can’t be socialist. (In fact, they ran a communist command economy, but that’s a matter for another time.) And for the most part, we have a private sector in which elements of the state invest, but remain silent partners because the private sector knows best.
Turns out, this doesn’t really work as an economic model, especially when you add in governance dysfunction and obscene amounts of corruption.
Endemic cronyism
Meanwhile, over the pond, the Americans are finally getting real. Make no mistake: the current US system is straight-up State Capitalism, which leads neatly to endemic cronyism, and which is exactly what the EFF had been advocating for since 2014.
Why are the Americans allowed to consider (and enact) these options, and we’re not? It’s not like they’re sober stewards of their own economy: they’ve sold so much debt that we all have to pretend that they won’t collapse the global economy within the next five years.
They’re irresponsible assholes, just like us.
And yet, in the American revolution currently under way, they’re going full EFF. Lutnick has called the profits generated by arms manufacturers “a giveaway”. This is exactly right. Let’s transfer this thinking to a local context. In South Africa, social grants are spent at Shoprite and Checkers, and yet no one seems to consider how those companies generate a profit. Why shouldn’t they be part-owned by the government? Why shouldn’t there be price controls?
Why shouldn’t we profit, along with the “private sector”?
What holds back South African state capitalism is our inherent distrust of the state. The ANC (sorry, GNU) is so awful that you can’t blame us. But Americans are apparently too tame for this kind of circumspection.
The hilarious thing, however, is that Julius Malema would be perfectly at home at the White House. He’s a supremacist, a rhetorical blowhard, a crony capitalist, and an advocate of state ownership of private resources. And, ultimately, he’s a racketeer.
He’s Maga, my friends. And he looks sensational in red. DM