Did capitalism in South Africa 'need' apartheid?
On 4/27/2012 12:22 AM, Louis Proyect wrote:
On 4/26/12 6:18 PM, Jim Devine wrote:
Of course, we can always _define_ capitalism as requiring forced labor
in the periphery, since definitions are very arbitrary. Does that
definition say that capitalism _cannot exist_ without forced labor?
Maybe in a parallel universe based on nitrogen rather than carbon life
forms. But not on the planet Earth historically.
In South Africa, the race-class debate posed this question repeatedly. I
have a brief essay on this in a new encyclopaedia of SA, but the bottom
line is that it was /in order /to break out of various constraints that
capital ditched formal race apartheid - replacing it with class
apartheid - which in turn decreased the ratio of employed labour to
people, and (with the state) increased the immigrant inflow,
successfully turning around the 1960s-80s decline in the profit rate:
*
Political economy traditions in South Africa *
By Patrick Bond
version in the /Encyclopedia of South Africa/ (edited by Sean Jacobs and
Krista Johnson), Boulder, Lynne Rienner
The study of South African political economy has an extraordinary set of
lineages. There remains in political economic research an excellent
potential for praxis-based scholarship and for revitalizing what was
once a world-leading intellectual tradition, even if there is not a
single program in a tertiary educational institution that carries its name.
Taking a longer view of economic and social relations, the
various South African traditions of radical political economy were
always infused with concern about race, geography and also,
increasingly, gender and environment. All came together in studies of
superexploitative capital-labour relations that underpinned apartheid.
While fierce debates between radicals and liberals (whether Weberian or
modernisationists) motivated 1960s-70s political economic studies, these
matters go much further back as research problems, as they draw upon
longstanding concerns within Marxism about superexploitation.
The origins of British capitalism, after all, were in 'primitive
accumulation', the initial capitalist strategy of dispossessing
non-capitalist spheres of social life, most famously in land enclosures
which forced peasants into the proletarianisation process. But in South
Africa the use of political power to dispossess black people of their
livelihoods, so as to compel them into wage labour relations, entailed
durable extraeconomic, crudely racist methods which were not just a
once-off initial condition for primitive accumulation.
For researchers of South African political economy during the
20th Century, the idea of superexploitation was a way to understand an
ongoing history of extremely biased accumulation, combining capitalism
and non-capitalist sites of work, of life and of nature. This process of
'uneven and combined development' can be identified not solely on the
basis of exploitation (surplus value extraction) at the point of
production -- the main point of Marx's Das Kapital -- but instead in
relations between market and non-market activities. It is here that an
'articulation of modes of production', between capitalism and
non-capitalist systems is also of great relevance on the world stage today.
Racial restrictions were initially considered by political
economists primarily as power relationships. As an early Trotskyist,
Moshe Noah Averbach (1936, 131), explained, migrant labour would
'prevent the formation of a stable, hereditary urban proletariat which
would become used to the traditional methods of organisation and
struggle -- trade union and political -- of the city working classes.'
But the Chamber of Mines also recorded how the 'cheap labour' system was
crucial to their profitability (in official testimony to a 1944
government commission): 'the mines are able to obtain unskilled labour
at a rate less than ordinarily paid in industry... otherwise the
subsidiary means of subsistence would disappear and the labourer would
tend to become a permanent resident upon the Witwatersrand, with
increased requirements' (cited in Wolpe, 1972).
Labourers also began generating their own analysis of this kind
of political economy. Amongst urban black African workers, intellectual
and political figures, there were exceptional speakers in the
revolutionary tradition -- e.g., C.B.I. Dladla, Dan Koza, Isaac Bongani
Tabata, T.W. Thibedi -- whose arguments have only sporadically been
recorded. At the same time, the South African Communist Party (SACP,
1989) developed the theory of 'colonialism of a special type' (CST).
Drafted by leading Johannesburg Communist Mick Harmel, CST was
officially adopted during the early 1960s, and represents an internal
version of dependency theory. According to the most widely-circulated
analysis, 'The South African capitalist state did not emerge as a result
of an internal popular anti-feudal revolution. It was imposed from above
and from without.'
But because the CST framework implied that the underlying dynamic
of South African political economy was not capitalist, it came under
repeated questioning from left intellectuals. New generations of
political economists added several other branches of Marxian analysis:
Harold Wolpe's articulations of modes of production argument during the
early 1970s; neo-Poulantzian 'fractions-of-capital' analysis during the
late 1970s; the concept of 'racial capitalism' during the early 1980s;
the Social History school of the 1980s; French regulation theory (and
'Racial Fordism') during the late 1980s; and the 'Minerals Energy
Complex' from the mid-1990s.
The central concern remained race/class at the point of
production. Although more and more workers began living permanently in
cities near manufacturing jobs, there was still a large supply of
migrant labour. From 1948 through the 1970s, 3.5 million people were
forcibly removed onto the reserves, which could simply not handle the
environmental demands placed on them. What Wolpe did not express was how
gendered the process became. The migrant 'tribal natives' did not, when
they were young, live under a system that required companies to pay
their parents enough to cover school fees, or pay taxes for government
schools to teach workers' children. When sick or disabled, those workers
were often shipped back to their rural homes until ready to work again.
When the worker was ready to retire, the employer typically left him a
pittance, not a pension that allowed the elderly to survive in dignity.
From youth through to illness to old age, the subsidy covering
child-rearing, recuperation and old age was provided by rural African women.
The economic functionality of apartheid was, for Wolpe, a logical
and necessary outcome of the post-war development of South African
capitalism. But there was ample room for contesting Wolpe's chronology
and understanding of the dynamics of capitalism. Historian Martin
Legassick's (1974) work on the increasing capital intensity of
manufacturing offered a more fertile direction of inquiry, and a
critique emerged of the chronological argument about capitalism and
apartheid. In a subsequent book, Wolpe (1988) backtracked substantially
from the earlier position that apartheid was necessary to capitalist
development, and instead agreed with critics that central aspects of
their mutual evolution were contingent.
From the mid-1970s, international trends in historical
materialism ? especially the success of Althusserian and Poulantzian
structuralism ? began having a larger impact on South African political
economy research, via the University of Sussex. There emerged a
fascination with which 'fractions of capital' controlled the state at
particular moments of political change. Although the various fractions
became increasingly blurred by the 1960s as South Africa's big mining
finance houses diversified into manufacturing and services, several
leading neo-Marxist researchers identified prior distinctions between
capitals in terms of their sector of production (mining, manufacturing
or agricultural), their location within the circulation of capital
(industrial, financial, commercial, landed), or their 'nationality'
(Afrikaner, English-speaking, foreign) (e.g., Davies 1979). According to
some critics, however, the Poulantzians' focus on fractions of capital
highlighted questions of state power but distracted from the capital
accumulation process and capital-labour conflicts.
With an upsurge in protest beginning with the Durban labour
movement in 1973, and with the economic slowdown beginning around 1974,
political economists' attention turned from aspects of
apartheid-capitalist stability and control, to instability and crisis.
The theory of 'racial capitalism' was invoked to link the political and
the economic. As explained by John Saul and Stephen Gelb (1981), 'From
the late 1960s, the growing saturation of the white consumer market
limited not only sales but also the ability of the manufacturing
industry to benefit from economies of scale.' On top of new-found worker
militancy beginning in 1973, Saul and Gelb identified the shortage of
skilled labour as a crucial weakness created by the apartheid system's
colour bar and Bantu Education policies. These shortages became acute by
the early 1970s. In addition, as Charles Meth (1991) posited,
overaccumulation of capital also set in, reflecting the saturation of
local consumer and capital goods markets, simultaneous to similar
problems at the world scale.
The fractions and racial capitalism perspectives were most
harshly criticized, starting in the early 1980s, by a Thompsonian school
of South African social history which prided itself for looking at
society and economy not from the top (state and capital), but from the
very lowest levels of the voiceless majority. Charles van Onselen (1996)
did the most publicized work in drawing out detailed empirical
information, although the social historians' aversion to theory was
criticized by Mike Morris (1988). Indeed, no matter how rich and
interesting the particularities of the social history case studies
proved, they added up to very little that was generalisable for the
purpose of answering the larger questions of capitalist development. The
broader theoretical discourse about race and class in South Africa
seemed to peak in the 1970s, and with rigorous detailed probing underway
in the 1980s in the context of the search for specificity, research into
the nature of the mode of production tailed off markedly.
By the late 1980s, the larger questions were again placed on the
agenda. It was a time when South Africa's capitalist class demanded,
perhaps for the first time, an end to formal apartheid. The reasons for
this are closely related to economic stagnation and financial crisis,
but what was disconcerting was how dramatically this shook many
political economists who, earlier, so profoundly rejected the liberal
thesis that apartheid and capitalism were incompatible. As Gelb (1987)
put it, radicals must 'develop a substantial and consistent analysis of
capital accumulation which preserves their view of the earlier
relationship between apartheid and capitalism, explains the
transformation from long run apartheid boom to economic crisis and then
analyses the crisis itself.' To that end Gelb introduced the French
Regulation Theory of Lipietz, Aglietta and Boyer to dissect the relative
stability of South African capitalism from 1948 through the early 1970s.
In honour of a phrase coined by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci,
'Fordism' (signifying the symbiotic relationship between mass production
and mass consumption, the product of Henry Ford's assembly line and
$5/day wages), the French considered this linkage as the basis for a
full-fledged 'regime of accumulation.' South African 'Racial Fordism,'
as Gelb termed it, could not succeed in linking black producers with
white consumers. Others used the idea of 'peripheral Fordism' to reflect
the partial linkages to the world economy.
The task for the regulationists - whether relying upon internal
or international causality - then became how to stitch together a new
set of 'post-Fordist' institutions and assist in the process of
kick-starting capitalist growth. Wage restraint, productivity quid pro
quos, social contracts and even Taiwan-style export-orientation were
advocated by Gelb and other economists connected to the Economic Trends
Group 'Industrial Strategy Project. At the same time, however,
Regulation Theory lost momentum internationally, and after 1991 there
were no further major academic works published in this tradition.
Ben Fine and Zav Rustomjee (1997, 21) cautioned, 'The
relationship between abstract theory and empirical application is not
unique to the study of South Africa. But the virulent form taken by its
racism within the bounds of a predominantly capitalist economy has cast
considerable doubt on the simple expedient of examining South Africa's
development in terms of hypotheses derived from ready-made analytical
frameworks.' Their own approach was relatively institutionalist, by
identifying the nexus of a Minerals-Energy Complex around which
accumulation, state, labour relations and other economic phenomena could
be understood. Within a decade, Fine (2008) addressed the post-apartheid
political economic nexus in terms of financialisation, as 'macroeconomic
policy has been designed to /manage /the capacity of the South African
conglomerates to disinvest'.
In contrast, leading ANC intellectuals - such as Thabo Mbeki
(2003) and Joel Netshitenzhe - justified the neoliberal economic
policies they inherited and amplified, arguing that South Africa was
suffering from 'two economies', and as for those left out, 'Of central
and strategic importance is the fact that they are structurally
disconnected from our country's "first world economy".' Yet there remain
many structural connections still reminiscent of older labour migration
systems, as SACP youth leader David Masondo (2007) observes: 'A
combination of unreconstructed vulgar Marxism and modernization theory
have provided conceptual basis for contemporary neoliberalism, which is
dressed up as the "first economy" drawing in the "second economy" to a
successful market process.' Moreover, warns Masondo, 'The CST and its
National Democratic Revolution (NDR) strategy is also used by some in
the ANC to justify the current neoliberal incorporation of the emerging
black bourgeoisie into the structure of capital accumulation.'
With growing SACP and Cosatu critiques of Two Economies political
economy, Netshitenzhe (2006) became aggrieved by 'the ideological
bloodletting that sometimes accompanies policy making. It would be
better if we could leave all our "isms" at home when rethinking policy.'
The SA Communist Party (2006) replied, 'The point is to reflect
critically upon our reality and our engagement with it, in order to
unify ourselves around the most effective strategic and programmatic
interventions. We need to be practical, but being practical does not
mean being merely pragmatic, still less anti-intellectualist. Theory
does matter, and we do need to constantly re-visit our "isms".'
*REFERENCES *
**
Davies, R. (1979), /Capital, State and White Labour in South Africa,
1900-1960/, Atlantic Highlands, Humanities.
Fine, B. (2008) "The Minerals-Energy Complex is Dead: Long Live the MEC?",
Amandla Colloquium,
http://www.amandlapublishers.co.za/component/option,com_docman/task,cat_view/gid,100/Itemid,163/.
Fine, B. and Z. Rustomjee (1997), /The Political Economy of South
Africa/, Johannesburg, University of the Witwatersrand Press.
Gelb, S. (1987), 'Making Sense of the Crisis,' /Transformation/ 5.
Legassick, M. (1974), 'South Africa: Capital Accumulation and Violence,'
/Economy and Society/, 3.
Mbeki, T. (2003), 'Letter from the President: Bold Steps to End the Two
Nations Divide', /ANC Today./ 26 August. www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/anctoday
<http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/anctoday>.
Meth, C. (1991), /Productivity and the Economic Crisis in South Africa:
A Marxist View/, Working paper, Durban, University of Natal Department
of Economics.
Morris, M. (1988), 'Social History and the Transition to Capitalism in
the South African Countryside,' /Review of African Political Economy/, 41.
Netshitenzhe, J. (2006), 'Deepening Class Inequalities seen as major
social Challenge for SA', /Business Day/, 27 June.
SA Communist Party (1989), /The Path to Power/, London.
South African Communist Party (2006), 'Is the ANC leading a National
Democratic Revolution, or Managing Capitalism?', Johannesburg,
http://www.sacp.org.za/main.php?include=docs/docs/2006/anc.html
Saul, J. and S. Gelb (1981; 1986), /The Crisis in South Africa/, New
York, Monthly Review.
van Onselen, C. (1996), /The Seed is Mine: The Life of Kas Maine, A
South African Sharecroper, 1894-1985/, Cape Town, David Philip.
Wolpe, H. (1972), 'Capitalism and Cheap Labour Power,' /Economy and
Society/, 1.
Wolpe, H. (1988), /Race, Class and the Apartheid State, /Paris, UNESCO.
**
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