9 February 2010: "Is Die Antwoord a ternative band?"

This post is about expropriating the expropriators. In his epochal tract Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin, at the time waiting in exile for the opportunity to lead the first truly proletarian revolution, wrote a withering critique of optimism and opportunism in light of monopoly capital's ability to co-opt the working class by offshoring a certain amount of exploitation.

The receipt of high monopoly profits by the capitalists in one of the numerous branches of industry, in one of the numerous countries, etc., makes it economically possible for them to bribe certain sections of the workers, and for a time a fairly considerable minority of them, and win them to the side of the bourgeoisie of a given industry or given nation against all the others. The intensification of antagonisms between imperialist nations for the division of the world increases this urge. And so there is created that bond between imperialism and opportunism.... Some writers, L. Martov, for example, are prone to wave aside the connection between imperialism and opportunism in the working-class movement—a particularly glaring fact at the present time—by resorting to “official optimism” (à la Kautsky and Huysmans) like the following: the cause of the opponents of capitalism would be hopeless if it were progressive capitalism that led to the increase of opportunism, or, if it were the best-paid workers who were inclined towards opportunism, etc. We must have no illusions about “optimism” of this kind. It is optimism in respect of opportunism; it is optimism which serves to conceal opportunism. As a matter of fact the extraordinary rapidity and the particularly revolting character of the development of opportunism is by no means a guarantee that its victory will be durable: the rapid growth of a painful abscess on a healthy body can only cause it to burst more quickly and thus relieve the body of it. The most dangerous of all in this respect are those who do not wish to understand that the fight against imperialism is a sham and humbug unless it is inseparably bound up with the fight against opportunism.

Carles seems to have this passage in mind in conducting his own rigorous analysis of the emerging cultural animus in Africa, which bears of course the marks of imperialism in its modern form perhaps more deeply than in any other region, colonial, post-colonial or otherwise. Carles directs his dissection of the problematic of imperialism in an era of globalization and multinational corporate entities at one particular instantiation of the incipient social relations, a "rap music" organization from South Africa known as Die Antwoord, who successfully staged an intervention in the media and disseminated their intersubjective positionality through a post-samizdat "viral" chain of transmission. In short, as Carles sums up bluntly, "Does n e 1 know what the deal with Die Antwoord is?" Or have they successfully masked themselves and their true intent as part of a larger and more shadowy socialist strategy that foregrounds outrageousness to conceal ambitions even more outrageous, at least to the running dogs of the neo-liberal capitalist front. The "deal" is no deal, or at least a refusal of the official optimism that Lenin had identified as crippling the left. The deal is in fact an opportunistic seizing hold of lacunae in the Western developed-world perception of Africa.

Still the approach of die Antwoord must be interrogated carefully; as Carles notes, they force themselves into our "realm of relevant awareness" in a not entirely comfortable manner. Hence Carles regards them as "ternative," not quite a viable alternative to capitalism as such. But as Carles is forced to rejoin, "WTF is ternative? What is marketing?" Can socialist strategy in a late capitalist problematic be differentiated from marketing, or is that difficulty in discerning a difference the very essence of the tactic? Opportunism is a subtle dialectic, subject to abuse precisely because it is so hard to acknowledge or even identify when deployed.

Die Antwoord, then, intend to replicate their message in the form of the commodity itself, which is why Carles likens them to the purveyors of the song "Barbie Girl" -- a similar approach to subversion through careful detournement of a hegemonic idol of sexism and first-world domination. But Carles is alive to the possibility that the group will be co-opted:

Feel sorta confused by Die Antwoord. I wonder if they will be the type of band that ‘opens up for Kanye West/Radiohead’, or if they will be more like the band Aqua who sang the hit song “Barbie Girl.”

The racial and aesthetic progressiveness of the commercial bands he cites indicate the specific nature of the dangers the imperialist order can present to neutralize threats. There is always the threat of killing the revolution with kindness.