This chapter investigates the theory of National Democratic Revolution (NDR) and its implications for the construction of a post-1994 South African social order on a terrain of constitutional democracy. More specifically, it analyses the nexus between two fields of discourse and practice – NDR and South Africa's 1996 Constitution – tracing their genealogies to Marxism-Leninism and a left-inflected or social-democratic liberalism respectively. How have followers and practitioners of each of these discourses comprehended the other? To what extent can these fields of discourse and practice coexist, and on what terms? To what extent are they ‘contradictory’ in a Hegelian-Marxist sense, with the contradiction between them liable for future resolution on some or other (non-liberal?) basis?

The source of the tension between them is clear. NDR theory comprehends entire social formations, including economic substructures. It is class-focused and historical-teleological; it deals in the currency of struggle and power under the sign of a socialist telos. The ascendant discourse of government and power, namely constitutional democracy, is a formal and superstructural theory, one concerned with fair procedures, political pluralism, institutionalised contestation and limits to power. To be sure, constitutional democracy in South Africa is left-inflected in two ways that offer possible terms of reconciliation with NDR: it provides for certain elements of substantive social justice (reflected in socio-economic rights) and for participatory democracy (a concession to the orthodox Marxist critique of ‘bourgeois democracy’). Even so, the nexus between NDR and democratic constitutionalism remains conceptually fraught. There is the further question of how it is actually construed by South Africa's principal political actors (particularly those in and around the ruling African National Congress (ANC)).

My interest, politically and normatively, is in drawing on the best of liberalism and the best of socialism. Unlike Marxist-Leninists, I consider it problematic to view these social orders or ‘ideologies’ in sequential terms, whereby a socialist stage supersedes a liberal-democratic one. An animating issue for me, therefore, is whether NDR theory conceptually allows its practitioners to pursue socially transformative goals on the terrain of constitutional liberal and social democracy, or whether it ultimately mandates its supersession. I consider the former possibility hopeful, the latter unsettling.