1/ In South Africa, there is a dichotomy being drawn between elite instigators and spontaneous masses, the first lighting the match, while the second proceeds to give the unrest its own, autonomous, potentially progressive dynamic. I think this is a false dichotomy.
2/ The Zumaist machine is itself a mass-based organisation. It ruled the country for a decade, played the ANC to a stalemate when it lost in 2017, and it remains in control of large swathes of the provincial and local state.
3/ It likely organises dozens of ANC regions, hundreds of branches, and tens of thousands of people. It has strong relations with the Zulu traditional authorities, military veterans, charismatic churches, business fora, and other groups like the All Truck Drivers Foundation.
4/ I don't think these people lit a match last Friday, only to lose control and sit at home by Monday. The Ramaphosa faction, the Zuma faction, and parts of the independent Left have just converged, albeit for very different reasons, on variants of that same narrative.
5/ I'm not sure exactly what "lighting a match" means, but in this context it's not so simply. We have evidence that the Zumaist machine worked on defining repertoires and political content, chose targets, mobilised followers toward them, and sometimes provided transport.
6/ The activity of looting is not something that is ordinarily associated with strict regimental organisation, but at this point to call it "spontaneous" seems to be to say something rather limited... I'm not sure I would use even the limited term...
7/ Consider, in this relation, the sociology of political machines. Their core function, often illegal, is to use political power to appropriate resources from the state and private business, then to distribute these resources as patronage to operatives and supporters.
8/ In this way, machines link a political elite, through intermediary operatives, to a mass base. These roles correspond to class positions, with different sorts of elites, operatives and supporters occupying a hierarchy of ranks stretching from upper to lower income brackets.
9/ The sociology of the looting that we've seen is analogous. The Zumaist machine has, illegally, appropriated resources from private businesses. These resources have been dispersed across class positions, with people who drive expensive cars pictured alongside people who walk.
10/ Yet dichotomists suggest that despite the early involvement of Zuma's machine, despite its numbers, its core function, the sociological parallels with the looting, they suggest that despite it all the machine simply vanished from these spaces.
11/ Its structure, its people, its aims and influence on the scene, all this is said to evaporate into pure spontaneity... I'm sure, if we looked, we'd find people who aren't organised into Zuma's machine. But if the machine simply vanished, I'd be very surprised.
12/ I'd think it a miracle. In my next post, I may attempt to tease out some political-strategic implications of believing in miracles.
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