ABSTRACT
In September 1989, when I first drafted this chapter, I criticized the low status accorded to political pluralism and civil liberties in the democratic discourses of the South African left. Since then the public positions of the African National Congress (ANC) and the South African Communist Party (SACP) have begun to shift in a direction more promising for the construction of democratic institutions and the constitutional guarantee of rights in a postapartheid South Africa. Apart from the commitment to multiparty democracy spelt out in the ANC’s 1988 constitutional guidelines (discussed below), the SACP and the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU) have proposed a workers’ charter guaranteeing the right of workers to form independent trade unions and to strike in a future order. In 1989 the SACP adopted a new programme redefining its “vanguard” role and its vision of a postapartheid polity in more pluralistic terms. Albie Sachs (1988; 1988a), a leading ANC lawyer, has argued for a wide-ranging bill of rights as part of any future constitution, while Joe Slovo, a leading Communist, has come out in favour of a pluralist, multiparty system (“A New Party Programme” 1989; “The Workers’ Charter” 1989; Observer 21 Jan. 1990).
