Testing times in ANC call for shift towards new approach bringing harmony despite differences, writes Muxe Nkondo.
A factional, dualistic way of thinking predominates within the ANC. That is, questions are conceived in terms of either one option or another, and then one of them is defended as the correct one.
This is indeed the case in the debates about the call for President Jacob Zuma to resign and the choice of a successor.
The questions posed invite a “yes’ or “no” response, and the factions are opting for one or the other of these responses, which, as expected, undermines the unity earned over years of Struggle.
An urgent intervention is to call this factional way of thinking into question.
Time and again, we have seen that options posing as competing alternatives are not in necessary opposition; that positions masking as complete answers are only partial and one-sided, requiring their supposed opposites for completion; or that questions which invite a choice between two or more candidates, for example, are better answered by questioning their presuppositions and thereby undermining them rather than answering them in their own terms.
Confronted with this situation, we should define the debates about the recall of the president and the choice of a successor as that discourse in which certainty is sought but only general agreement can be had.
A great temptation in the factions is the lure of patronage. They are particularly prey to one set of constitutive meanings. But the ANC, in the tradition of the Freedom Charter, provides a plurality of meanings - a
political and linguistic space for complexity.
To assess the divisive effect of factional thinking and the potential unifying power of the dialectical approach, should be the focus of political debates within the ANC.
Here are 10 observations on the dialectical approach to factional thinking:
1. Much debate on the resignation of Zuma and the choice of his successor consists of oppositional categories - faction vs faction; insider vs outsider; “one of us” vs “not one of us”. Such thinking promotes an “either-or” mentality in which one category precludes its supposed opposite. But viewed closely, many factional categories are potentially fluid and open, with one side of a factional category depending on and invoking the other - in binary but dissolvable alternatives resting on fallible presuppositions which mistakenly restrict the range of possible choices.
2. The logics of difference and equivalence that constitute the factions, although they seem antagonistic to one another, nonetheless need one another. They inhabit a space of a tension between mutually related dimensions.Tension, conflict and deliberation can be contingently combined in an unstable equilibrium, though neither is entirely able to eliminate the other.
3. We should not think of comrades in the other factions as “other”. We should explore differences and equivalences between faction members because equivalences and differences require each other. We are members of the faction in which we are in virtue of our relations with comrades in other factions; indeed, all factional identity is dialogical in character. Instead of trying to harden factional differences, we should try to interact with members of other factions by means of the differences, with an eye on ongoing mutual learning and growth within the discipline of the ANC.
A faction is never simply a faction, utterly different from other factions. Particular factions express what is political in particular ways, though no single faction exhausts the full meaning of the ANC. As a “broad church”, the ANC exists in an open and changing set of particular embodiments, each of which expands its context and range.
4. Members of the ANC should think processurally, not just substantively (that is, think in terms of decision processes, not fixed decisions). Deliberation, movement, change; this should be the order of discourse within the ANC. Much factional thought reifies decisions and processes, turning them into positions with fixed identities.
The ANC is a movement, not a stone, and should not be treated as an object with definitive boundaries. Members should appropriate its political orientation, and not just reproduce it.
They should apply old codes to new situations and in the process adjust the codes. That way, they learn, adapt, alter, create.
5. As human agents, members are also subject to all sorts of constraints imposed on them by others, and the system of meaning and power within which they think. Factions are not integral monads isolated from one another simply as members of particular factions. Within its ideological landscape, the ANC provides border areas in which members rub up against one another and change in the process.
6. The oldest liberation movement in Africa, the ANC, is now undergoing a deep process of redefinition of its identity and is experiencing the establishment of a new political frontier.
This is linked partly to the collapse of apartheid capitalism and the disappearance of the comrade/enemy opposition that, prior to 1994, provided the main political frontier enabling discrimination between comrade and enemy.
This disappearance confronts the ANC with a dilemma. The unity created in the common struggle against apartheid colonialism prior to 1994 has vanished, and the comrade/enemy frontier is now taking a multiplicity of new forms linked to the emergence of new antagonisms within itself.
The identity of democracy within the ANC is at stake, in so far as it depended on the apartheid other that constituted its negation.
7. All those who believed that the fall of apartheid colonialism would necessarily be followed with greater unity in South African society are quite unable to understand the specificity of various factional formations.
For that reason, it is vital to inculcate, among members of the ANC, to start with, the dialectical perspective on conflict that would enable the ANC coming to terms with the contingent nature of the tasks before it.
8. If members accept this view, it follows that differences can play an important role in giving expression to conflict. But if they fail to do this, conflict will assume other guises and will be more difficult to manage democratically.
9. The emphasis on the dialectical as a force for unity does not naively take the world to move just because of words. But, unlike the factionalist approach, words and language, especially combined with power and human interests, are themselves recognised to be forms of action, and thus critical data for conflict resolution.
10. Instead of understanding power only in negative terms, such as the ability to control and manipulate others, the dialectical approach emphasises that deliberative power can determine the very fields of action, including the tracks along which resolutions of conflict travel.
The evasion of the dialectical could jeopardise the 2019 elections and the hard-won gains of the liberation movement, which is why we should take issue with the conception of factional politics that inform a great deal of political thinking in the ANC today.
Through its rejection of public reasoning, factional thinking is extricating much of the very lifeblood that drives democratic politics and is, in the process, distorting understanding of the range of choices available.
It shows that we need a much more refined understanding of the interactions that construct decision processes in a democratic society, and opens the way to a much more textured analysis of competing arguments.
Therein lies the future of the ANC and South African democracy.
* Nkondo is a policy analyst, a member of the Freedom Park Council and Council of the University of South Africa. He writes in his personal capacity.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.