IN his Private Eye: The First 50 Years (2011), author Adam Macqueen recounts how Dave Spart, the magazine's resident polemicist, took a principled stand and declined to be interviewed for this entertaining history. An ultra-left wing activist, he declared "the celebration of anniversaries is an inherently militaristic act and as such totally unacceptable while Britain retains its illegal, repressive and imperialist presence in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Falkland Islands".
Spart first appeared in December 1971, when he joined the National Amalgamated Union of Sixth-Form Operatives and Allied Trades. He is, of course, a fiction used to parody the Marxist dogma popular in the 1970s with institutions like the University of Sussex, where former President Thabo Mbeki and his good chum, Essop "The Thinker" Pahad were taught economic theory and how to speak in bilge.
With the collapse of communism in Europe, Spart disappeared from the frontlines of the international struggle against the hegemonical bourgeoisie - only to surface in spirit a few years ago in the local labour movement.
Castro Ngobese, the National Union of Metalworkers of SA spokesman, is particularly adept at Spartist rhetoric. His statement this week expressing "unflinching and worker-to-worker solidarity" with striking miners and threatening to call on Cosatu affiliates to "embark on solidarity actions" was full of it:
"About 90 000 workers in the mining Gold sector have downed tools . . . after the filthy rich and stinking greedy mining ruling oligarchy, as represented by the Chamber of Mines refused to concede to wage demands of workers. This clearly demonstrates that the mining oligarchy is hell-bent on reversing the democratic gains of workers, particularly the mineworkers by perpetuating and reproducing apartheid Bantu income inequalities and horrendous living conditions."
As an aside I must point out that slop like this leaves me in a quandary. It's clear that English is not Ngobese's native tongue but - quoting him here - do I extend him the courtesy of a tidy-up? Drop in a comma here and there? Edit for clarity? Or do I do that "sic erat scriptum" thing? The one leaves me vulnerable to charges of cultural imperialism, the other of being a supercilious prat.