Popular Power and Vanguardism: The Democratic Deficit of 1980s ‘Peoples Power’

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe era of ‘people’s power’ in South Africa between 1986 and 1987 is often considered to have held the makings of a participatory form of democracy. Analysis of the traditions that shaped it, however, reveals a discourse of participation that was not altogether democratic. Through examination of historic documents and interviews with activists, participants and cadres, this paper examines the role for the demos imbued in people’s power. It challenges the notion that the form of democracy established since 1994 is somewhat inferior to that prefigured by people’s power, and rather contends that people’s power itself did not constitute an entirely democratic form of participation. While incorporating ideas of grassroots participation as a basis for popular control, it also embodied a unitary form of democracy. Through absorption of a discourse of vanguardism and a concept of participation as teleological, people’s power failed to resolve the fundamental tension between political control from above and popular initiative from below.