The title of this chapter, essentially that of Vladimir Lenin's (1902) famous essay, may seem pretentious but it is merely meant to indicate that the analysis of the preceding pages need not discourage leaders and activists from working towards the construction of a better society. This chapter defines the contours of an alternative progressive political agenda that recognises and flows from an understanding of the balance of power, without compromising the goals of democratisation, empowerment and inclusive development. This agenda involves two distinct tasks: (i) conditioning political elites to become more accountable and responsive to the concerns of citizens; and (ii) fulfilling the overall objectives of the Constitution when the provisions of different clauses come into conflict with each other.

The lack of accountability among the political elites towards citizens (or their greater responsiveness to stakeholders who hold more leverage than ordinary voters) has been identified as a problem in several chapters of this book. In Chapter Two, I engaged with the accountability deficit to explain not only the aloofness of the state and its adoption of policies that do not speak to the interests of ordinary citizens, but also the service-delivery problems that continue to plague all tiers of government. Similarly, in Chapter Three, the conservative macro-economic policy of the Mandela and Mbeki eras, and the continued resonance of this perspective in some quarters within the ruling party and the state, was shown to derive from the leverage of domestic and foreign businesses with their command over investment resources. In Chapter Four, I showed that the balance of power in favour of the business community explains the failure of the social pact of the 1990s. Attempts afoot in 2012 and 2013 to establish a similar pact are likely to come to naught unless political elites develop the will to challenge elite aspirations as much as they challenge those of ordinary citizens. And in Chapter Five, I explained that the evolution of civil society in the post-apartheid era can be seen as a response to consequences of the state's adoption of policies that reflect the inequitable balance of power.

The analysis in the preceding chapters also identified policies and political choices as having compromised the substantive fulfilment of the Constitution because of trade-offs made when different constitutional priorities came into conflict with one another. Three such trade-offs were explicitly identified.