Differential interpretations in the discourse of ‘people’s power’ : unveiling intellectual heritage and normative democratic thought

Abstract: The period of 1980s people’s power in South Africa is often regarded as having held the promise of a participatory form of democracy, emerging either spontaneously from the grassroots or as a response to calls from the banned African National Congress (ANC). Examination of the ideas and intellectual traditions that shaped people’s power, however, suggests greater variation in its interpretation and conceptual development than existing literature suggests. Through examination of historic documents and interviews with ANC cadres, activists and participants, this paper analyses the theoretical heritage of people’s power and the normative understanding of democracy it entailed. It argues that people’s power did not incorporate any singular, uniform conception of popular participation but was rather shaped by a multiplicity of ideological and intellectual currents feeding into the ANC camp. As such, we can identify many common threads but also conceptual discomfort in the understandings that emerged. Crucially for democracy, these variations remained unreconciled. The presence of multiple discourses and survival of conceptual tension in effect posed an impediment to the translation of people’s power’s into an institutional model for a democratic state