Democracy and dictatorship

Abstract

This article discusses recent developments in South African politics from the perspective of a paradox, even a contradiction, inherent in the democratic project itself. Democracy requires that the people, the source of democratic authority, are considered purely as an ideal. This is precisely what is at work in the notion of ‘human rights’, for example. The specific qualities and character of individuals – their culture, norms, values and history – are stripped away to venerate them simply in their essential humanness, that is as a pure abstraction. The moment, however, democracy is located in a specific state, the people are transformed from abstract and essential humanity into a concrete one, unified on the basis of some or other shared characteristic or norm (commitment to freedom, investment in a particular culture and notion of the good and so on). Yet, if ‘people’ is really a normative term, rather than a descriptive one, then ‘democracy's people’ refers only to those persons who fit this norm. What this authorises is the privileging of certain classes of people, in democracy's name, within the political system. I will argue that authoritarian tendencies in South Africa's political culture are effects of the contradiction above. I will consider this tendency to dictatorship, not simply in ‘totalitarian’ constitutions or political dispensations, but in the heart of the most classically democratic ones as well. In this regard, I will review the American Constitution to discuss some of its ‘undemocratic’ features. In the last part of this article, I will consider the effects on South Africa's democracy of trying to incarnate the people of South Africa as an ‘African’ people. What is at stake here is the concretisation of the people of democracy as a particular people. We will see that this has unleashed an identitarian politics about the content of this African identity. More importantly, it has authorised those who claim to be authentic Africans to assume privileged positions in politics and in the state.

Keywords:

• democracy
• dictatorship
• the people
• totalitarianism
• Vladimir Lenin
• American Constitution
• Thomas Jefferson
• African values
• Thabo Mbeki
• South Africa
• national liberation

Notes

1. ‘Zanufication’ suggests a movement towards authoritarianism. The reference is to Zanu‐PF, Robert Mugabe's political party.

2. The Congress of South African Trade Unions is, together with the South African Communist Party, formally in alliance with the ANC. Collectively, the three organisations are often referred to as the ‘Alliance’ or the ‘Tri‐partite Alliance’. The raison d'etre of this alliance finds expression in the notion of the apartheid as ‘colonialism of a special type’. On these terms, apartheid was not simply a system of racial domination, but also a system of capitalist exploitation. On these terms, workers, communists and African nationalists found common cause in resisting apartheid.

3. All translations, unless otherwise stated, are my own.

4. I shall refer to this document in an abbreviated form as SPR&T. The document is made available on the ANC website without page numbers. As a result, references will refer to the section from which the citation was taken.

5. Note, for example, the ANC's response to the SACP discussion document ‘Managing national democratic transformation. Does the Alliance share common objectives?’ prepared for the bilateral meeting between the National Working Committee of the ANC and the SACP held on 19 June 2006 (ANC 2006).

6. ‘Historically, the ANC developed to appreciate the central importance of property relations in the context of Colonialism of a Special Type … In the recent period, the Alliance summed up this question aptly in a Discussion Document for their 1998 Summit “The State, Property Relations and Social Transformation”’ (ANC 2006).

7. ‘Private capital’ refers to large private conglomerates in the productive and financial spheres, large institutional capital such as pension and provident funds, state or public capital in the form of parastatals and the fiscus itself and small‐scale community and co‐operative/social capital.

8. Referring to how Mbeki applied ‘his abiding faith in Leninism's core strategic precepts’ in South Africa, Gevisser (2007, p. 276) writes that this was ‘most marked in his faith in a newly empowered black bourgeoisie, and in the way he tried to develop the post‐apartheid ANC into an elite cadre of trained change‐agents rather than a mass movement’.

9. My apologies to Al Gore.