Johannesburg — AFRICAN National Congress (ANC) secretary-general Gwede Mantashe has recently fulminated against growing "factionalism" in the movement, and announced its political education subcommittee will soon propose new guidelines to limit factional competition for office.

Factions make an easy target because the term has overwhelmingly negative connotations. A faction is a group within a party that is organised in pursuit of specific political objectives. By its nature, it does not announce its existence or institute formal rules of membership. A faction is fluid and elusive and it is easy to believe that it is acting secretively to further its members' own interests.

The ANC has absorbed anti factionalist ideas across its history. Colonial divide-and-rule strategies set one purported "tribe" against another. Post-colonial ruling parties reacted by co-opting opposition groups and building one-party regimes in pursuit of national "oneness". Influential western doctrines were also antifactional. Ancient Athenians famously tolerated temporary cliques and class groupings but viewed prolonged division as antithetical to the public interest. Later western thinkers claimed a harmonious "body politic" would be debilitated by factional conflict.

Soviet Marxism, another influence, premised the scientific knowledge of society on the party's unitary character. Leninist doctrines and the exigencies of exile further predisposed the ANC to ban factionalism. The modern ANC's foundation myth of armed struggle and its presumed divine right to rule have reinforced its unity ideologies. Even the movement's liberal intellectuals have supposed that factionalism would encourage ethnic division, racial antagonism and political violence. Who in such circumstances would not prefer unity to factional division?

Thabo Mbeki 's machinations, however, have exposed these doctrines to critical scrutiny. First, it is now recognised that factional politics can never be eliminated. Authoritarian governments force factional battles underground because the co-option and intimidation of opposing factions cannot erase differences of interest and value.

Second, many ANC activists today recognise that alleged controls on factionalism in fact result from one faction's attempt to achieve ascendency over others. Mbeki's incumbent faction claimed to speak on behalf of the whole ANC, while dissenting voices were silenced as factionalist.

Third, it took a faction to stop Mbeki's sinister designs. As political theorist Edmund Burke observed more than two centuries ago, factions can "speedily communicate the alarm of any evil design ... fathom it with common counsel, and oppose it with united strength": they can do good.

Fourth, in the interregnum between Mbeki and Jacob Zuma, activists discovered that contending factions can create space for political freedom.

Finally, the banning of factionalism is historically related to the prohibition of opposition parties. The emergence of party competition, and so representative democracy, in modern Europe required a prior realisation that factional division can be benign.

In the 1740s, philosopher David Hume began to differentiate between more or less appealing types of faction or party. Factions based on interests were inevitable, whereas "factions of affection", organised around prominent individuals or families, were dangerous. Hume also heralded "factions from principle" in which parties supported themselves with a "philosophical or speculative system of principles".

Mantashe shares Hume's view that factions based on divergent interests, such as the Congress of South African Trade Unions and the South African Communist Party, are inevitable in class societies, and do not require special regulation. Factions from affection, by contrast, are malevolent and must be curtailed. A faction gathered around a prominent businessman, for example, might use his money and power to destabilise office-holders and to push for control over state resources.

New ANC guidelines on factional competition may be based on reason. They may also, of course, serve the interests of Mantashe's own faction.

Butler teaches politics at Wits University.