Seven years after the first democratic government, South Africa has not lived up to the promises of the ANC government's election manifesto and charter-the Reconstruction and Development Programme. This is so despite strong social movements that emphasized notions of participatory democracy and emancipation in linked struggles against economic exploitation and racial oppression of the vast majority of Black South Africans. Post-apartheid government policy has resulted in little change for the majority of South Africans. Poverty, homelessness, joblessness continue unabated and have perhaps even worsened given the bent of government economic policy towards global competitiveness. Unequal social relations inherited from the days of apartheid continue into the present, with poverty and inequality taking a racial, gendered and spatial form.

The new South Africa is characterised by a formal legal democracy which privileges markets and the law. What is sidestepped in this approach is that access to markets and the law are shaped by the previous race, class and gender advantage and disadvantage which citizens bring with them from the apartheid era.

This chapter attempts to understand the present context. It notes the limitations of the transformation from apartheid to a democracy, given that this was an outcome of negotiations between the old order and liberation movements, and given the powerful role of national and international capital in shaping outcomes. It highlights that the once powerful movements, which brought pressure on the apartheid state, became marginalised once negotiations were underway, and that these movements have been unable in the post apartheid era, to bring pressure on the state to act in the interests of the vast majority of Black South Africans.

The author argues that the relationship between movements and the new state was not problematised, since it was assumed that the African National Congress liberation movement, once in government, would promote the policies that drove it during the years of liberation struggle. The strategy that the ANC list of parliamentarians would include members of the liberation movements-the trade unions, the South African Communist Party, the civic organisations, and women's movements-has not worked to ensure that the interests of the poor and working classes are the focus of government policy.

The chapter attempts to understand the dialectical relationship between movements and the state during apartheid, during the negotiations and in the post apartheid era. It focuses on trade unions and women's movements, and points to the weakness of movements in the present moment. It argues that hope for social emancipation-the redressing of the continued social, political and economic imbalances in South African society-lies in groups in society coming together to take up the needs and interests of the poor, the working class and marginalised women and men.