From: gavan@elc.mth.uct.ac.za (Gavan Tredoux)
Subject: Re: The ANC and the SACP
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 92 11:23:12 GMT
Organization: University of Cape Town
X-Newsreader: Tin 1.1 PL4

lkk@panix.com (Larry Kolodney) writes:
[ANC and its ethnic basis]

: Every grass roots political party starts out
: based in a particular community.  As the SACP example shows, a party with a
: truly non-racial ideology will end up attracting the support of those
: whose interests it would represent, totally apart from race.
 
The ANC certainly didn't start out as a grass-roots party, having
an exceptionally elitist beginning, but that's beside the point.
It's a well-known feature of ethnically divided societies that ostensibly
neutral parties, say ones with class-based ideologies, simply get
captured by asn ethnic segment. The parties become ethnic by association,
by support, by leadership and by organization. They pursue willy-nilly
ethnic goals with ethnic support, regardless of their "formal" ideological
program. The communist party here has been captured in this manner,
a long time ago. They're now overwhelmingly black, despite their beginnings
among ex-Lithuanian labour organizers and a fair percentage of white
labour support early on.

: And you readily admit that the ANC does not have a racialist or
: tribalist agenda (in fact that was the entire basis of their split
: with the PAC).  So what's your point?

You misunderstand me. They don't mobilize explicitly on the basis
of Xhosa ethnicity, and they try to make out some sort of non-racial
appeal. But they're Xhosa dominated, at the highest levels, and that's
one of the reasons why in the context of the violence on the Reef,
they find themselves on the side of Xhosa vs. Zulu, and do so because
that is the perception on the ground. That's extremely important,
and will probably become critical in the future. As for their
non-racialism, that's pure fantasy. When Mandela refers to *our*
people, we all know how to resolve the reference. The ANC is and
always has been a black party, and that is reflected in its support,
which is a rather better guide to its ethnic/racial role than its
policy documents - documents which nobody has read anyway. The split
with the PAC doesn't affect this one iota.

: Gavan, maybe they're really a class based party.  After all, they have
: virtually no support among the economic elites of SA either.  Or could
: it be that there's just a slight correlation between skin color and
: economic interests?

That's quite wrong. There is no class profile in their support,
and they have never, nor will they conceivably, attract white class
based support. That's why our politics is ethnically based. 
Examining black elites one finds what is really the core of the
ANC's leadership, and the principal movers in its history. Correlation
between phenotype and economic interest misses the wood for the trees,
not to mention the lack of any viable cross-ethnic coalition of class
interest. Think of it this way: they're an ethnic organization 
pursuing, among other things, the economic and material interests
of their supporters. They also pursue
rather more important interests, like *status*, especially ethnic
and racial status.

Why is this important? Because it could lead to the capture of the state
by partisan ethnic interests, leading to an irreparable tear in
the social fabric of the kind now witnessed in Yugoslavia and Northern
Ireland. Nothing is more important here politically.

Gavan Tredoux
UCT