Populist rhetoric by revolutionary Marxist-Leninists can get you bums on seats in a stadium, but not very many on the seats of Parliament, as the electorate has shown.

South Africans do not want a communist government. This is clear from even a most cursory look at the election data of the past three decades. Pretty much the same can be said about right-wing political parties that have popped up in the cracks of an otherwise stable road.

Mainly libertarians and anarcho-capitalists, those on the right often cloak themselves in coats of classical liberalism, and some of them slipped into a range of parties, from the identitarians, to the ethno-nationalists and the liberals. The communists, barely socialist or social democrats, have been beaten, resoundingly, over seven democratic elections since 1994.

The standout communist parties, those that are expressly Marxist-Leninist over most of the past three decades, have been Azapo, the PAC, the SACP, the insignificant solar flares of the Black First Land First movement/party/thing, the Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party (SRWP) (neither has quite been the solar superstorm that Andile Mngxitama or Irwin Jim imagined), and the latest, most aggressive of the communists, the EFF.

Whatever one may think of the ideological principles, beliefs and values, or of the programmes of action they inspire, the electorate have repeatedly rejected them. We have to assume, in the least, that all political...