Africanus
Journal of Development Studies
Vol 37 No 2 2007
ISSN 0304-615x
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Capitalism and racist forms of political domination
David Masondo
Department of Politics, University of the Witwatersrand
Abstract
South African political economy has long been pre-occupied with the relationships between class, racist and patriarchal forms of political domination. These relationships are not only contentious between Marxists and non-Marxists but also within these schools. At the heart of the older scholarly debate, dating to the 1960s, is the extent to which racial domination, in particular Apartheid was functional for capital accumulation. Subsequent Marxist political economists failed to apply dialectical method thoroughly, and thus did not theorise the relationship between race and capitalism as contradictory. Worse, unreconstructed vulgar Marxism and modernisation theory have together supported the conceptual underpinnings of neoliberalism, which attempts to draw the ‘second economy’ into the ‘first’ so as to expand the market.
1 INTRODUCTION
South Africa has been varyingly characterised as suffering from Colonialism of a Special Type or ‘CST’ (by the SA Communist Party), ‘racial capitalism’ (John Saul and Stephen Gelb), ‘the articulation of modes of production’ (Harold Wolpe), ‘racial Fordism’ (Gelb), ‘uneven and combined development’ (Patrick Bond and Ashwin Desai), the ‘Minerals-Energy-Complex’ (Ben Fine and Zav Rustomjee) and control by ‘fractions of capital’ (Rob Davies and David Kaplan).
The theoretical debate needs revisiting at a time when liberalism is returning to its dualist perspective on the South African social formation. Liberals have tradition- ally argued that the economy was divided into two. The first economy (capitalist) was a desirable model for development, while the pre-capitalist was traditional and backward, and had to be obliterated. It was argued then – and now – that the two modes were structurally disconnected, and that capitalism would modernise and swallow the pre-capitalist forms. The demise of apartheid is indeed celebrated in these terms by liberals – namely that capitalist growth undermined racist irrationality (Michael O’Dowd). (In reality, it was capitalist crisis that finally broke the relationship between white English-speaking capitalists and the racist rulers in Pretoria during the mid- and late1980s.)
In contrast, this article reclaims from Marxist political economy an organic conception of the connection between capitalism and pre-capitalist modes of production. The functional relationship between the two was systematically theorised in Wolpe’s work (1975). The liberals maintained that racism was dysfunctional for capital accumulation. But as we will see, Marxist political economists did not stretch the dialectical method far enough, for they should have theorised the relationship between race and capitalism as more contradictory – a realisation that Wolpe came to in his arguments from the early 1970s to late 1980s.
Wolpe (1988) ultimately analysed what he termed the ‘conjunctural’ relationship between capitalism and racist forms of political domination: there is no necessary functional relationship between racist forms of political domination and capitalism, and therefore the destruction of the former does not necessarily mean the end of the latter. In other words, the end of national oppression does not mean the end of capitalism. Nevertheless, South African capitalism had an opportunistic relationship with racist political domination, which became dysfunctional due to the working class struggle and the rise in the organic composition of capital (a point we return to later).
Unfortunately, I will conclude, a combination of unreconstructed vulgar Marxism1 and modernisation theory have provided the conceptual basis for contemporary neoliberalism, which is dressed up as the ‘first economy’ drawing in the ‘second economy’ to a successful market process. The racial Fordism thesis (Gelb) provided a foundation for export-led growth strategies. The CST and its National Democratic Revolution (NDR) strategy is also used by some in the African National Congress to justify the current neoliberal incorporation of the emerging black bourgeoisie into the structure of capital accumulation. However, the neoliberal approach, and creation of black capital, is not necessarily inscribed in the NDR itself.
2 LIBERAL DUALISM
The dualist conceptual separation of politics from economics made it possible for liberals to artificially separate racial political domination and capital accumulation. They saw racism as an inherent obstacle to the industrialisation and modernisation project. The early liberalism was predicated on the Victorian liberal dualism of civilisation and barbarism (Macmillan 1930). The former was associated with whiteness and the latter with blackness.
Liberals argued that racism was incompatible with capitalism, and they believed that the development of capitalism would eventually get rid of racism. The liberal paradigm borrowed from modernisation theory which argues that pre-capitalist institutions, ideology (racism) and culture are not compatible with the capitalist growth. Liberal dualism counterpoised capitalist rationality against pre-capitalist irrationality. W.W. Rostow’s stage theory provided a theoretical arsenal for liberals to argue for the teleological obliteration of both the pre-capitalist modes of production and of state racism (O’Dowd 1996 and Houghton 1964).
Hutt (1964), one of early liberal political economist theorists, argued that if the English in South Africa had continued with the development of a liberal economy it would have prevented or ameliorated the racist forms of political domination which were part of the pre-industrial attitudes which impeded the development of capitalism in South Africa. From his perspective, racial prejudice was a manifestation of irrational customs which will dissolve under the pressure of economic rationality. Restriction on the investment to the reserves by the apartheid state has prevented the industrialisation, which would have led to the eradication of the tribal customs and traditions, liberal political economists argued.
According to Hutt (1964), African wages were low not because of the rate of exploitation, but because black workers’ needs were less, and because they did not like accumulation of private property (except in the form of cattle). Hutt’s theorisation is misleading because it assumes that there is only one form of capitalism which is static, and that racial capitalism was not capitalism. Furthermore, it is also historically inaccurate that capitalism did not provide support to racist forms of political domination. For instance, mine owners drafted the Law No. 23 of 1895, which imposed passes on Africans working on the mines in order to curb their movement in search for better wages in other sectors of the economy.
3 MARXIST FUNCTIONALISM
Marxian political economists challenged the idea that racial domination has always distorted and impeded capitalist accumulation. In rebutting the modernisation and liberal theory advocated by Houghton and others – with its implication that South African capitalism could not develop because of ‘irrational’ African traditions and customs which impeded the capitalist development of agriculture – Colin Bundy (1979) showed that in fact, African peasantry responded competitively to new market conditions during the late 19th century and early 20th century.
But owing to the mining industry’s demand for cheap labour, Bundy argues that the South African peasantry became proletarian through a process of primitive accumulation. The familiar methods included land dispossession and the imposition of hut and dog taxes, in order to force wage-labour to come to market. As a prominent Anglican cleric once remarked, Africans ‘are peasant farmers, why should they send their sons and daughters to work for wages? They prefer supplying their ones from the soil, as they can easily do so they stay at home’ (Bundy 1988:92). The hut tax was introduced on Zulu land as a specific mechanism to proleteriase the peasantry, as documented by Jeff Guy (1982:175). The peasantry had to work for a wage in order to earn money to pay the tax. Some sold cattle to raise cash and some paid in cattle, pushing prices ever lower (Guy 1982:176). In sum, for capital, the problem was that self-sufficient African small farmers withheld labour from the mine owners. Hence the dispossession of Africans and the destruction of the African peasantry were linked to the needs of capitalist development in South Africa.
Contrary to the view of liberal political economy that capitalism in the periphery has a tendency to do way with pre-capitalist features, Wolpe (1975) argued that capitalism can co-exist with – and prosper from – pre-capitalist modes of production, which served as source for cheap labour. Wolpe was not only concerned about the pitfalls of setting dependency theory against liberal political economy, but also felt the need to correct the CST thesis, which lacked its own intrinsic theory of exploitation. Even Bundy, South Africa’s leading dependency theorist, had ignored exploitation in his theorisation of the process of primitive accumulation. By emphasising the market and the circulation of commodities within which the African peasantry could have thrived (were it not for systematic destruction by big capital), Bundy implies that the African peasantry could have become incorporated into the capitalist system as petty owners of capital, as opposed to being wage-labourers.2
To be sure, the CST does not provide adequate theoretical tools to illuminate the relationship between national oppression and class exploitation, and without a theory of exploitation the CST was not all that different from race relations theory (Wolpe 1975). To overcome both the pitfalls of the dependency theory and the CST, Wolpe developed the theory of cheap labour to tease out the extra-economic mechanisms by which capital pumped out more surplus value from the black working class by drawing on Bantustan mechanisms. In trying to explain the nature, origin and the reproduction of racist forms of domination, and their subsequent consolidation in the post-1948 apartheid policies, Wolpe expanded upon Marx’s concept of exploitation, and eventually arrived at the cheap labour thesis.
Consider Marx’s concept of exploitation, as clarified by Holmstrom (1993) using the concepts of ‘necessary, free and surplus labour’. Necessary labour is the amount of labour necessary for the reproduction of the worker and her dependents regardless of a mode of production – whether capitalism or communism. Under capitalism, workers are required to do more than necessary labour, in other words, to generate surplus labour which is appropriated by the owners of the means of production. Necessary labour is required under communism, but it is not forced labour in a sense that direct producers are not subordinated to the power of owners of the means of the means of production. In other words necessary labour is free if it is controlled and ownership of the direct producers. The direct producers do not have control over the surplus.
In contrast, racial forms of domination were used as mechanisms to facilitate the process of pumping out surplus labour from the black working class. Marx’s labour theory argues that capitalists generate surplus value through the exploitation of labour. Under capitalist production relations, a capitalist buys a worker’s labour power like any commodity. The value of the labour power is determined by labour socially necessary to reproduce a worker. A worker needs clothing, food and shelter in order to reproduce, and a wage plays this function. The value of labour power is thus determined by means of subsistence. Here we see the importance of the articulation of modes of production, for the non-capitalist reproduction of labour power creates a basis for the relative reduction in the value of the labour.
For Wolpe, racial domination over black workers through the migrant-labour system was functional to capitalism, because the Reserves subsidised the way the black working class was subjugated as forced necessary labour. Subsistence agriculture in the reserves contributed to the social reproduction and maintenance of migrant workers. Put differently, the Reserves took care of the worker in his old age or illness (or youth). Capitalism thus benefited from the continued existence of the pre-capitalist mode of production. The Reserves took care of those who were not immediately useful (children) and those who were no longer useful (retired or ill workers). Since capitalism treated workers as means for capital accumulation, physically-disabled workers – victims of widespread occupational hazards – as well as old workers no longer functional for capital accumulation were thrown into the reserves. Though he is critical of the CST, Mahmood Mamdani (1996) developed the concept of the bifurcated state, which provides a useful framework for understanding the political superstructure in the Reserves, which were controlled by the chiefs in the interests of broader systemic stability.
4 LIBERAL AND MARXIST CONVERGENCE ON CONTINGENCY
Nel (1987) argues that the early Wolpe used the beneficial effects of apartheid to capitalism as a ‘sufficient’ explanation for the origins of the system after 1948. But Wolpe’s initial explanation – that South African capitalism needed Bantustans to generate super profits – falls into a trap of functionalism, and could not explain aspects of racial political domination that may be in contradiction with capitalism.
The functional fallacy was later overcome by the theory of contingency in Marxism (Wolpe 1988), which was also adopted by at least one liberal, Merle Lipton (1985). Wolpe and Lipton could agree that the relationship between capitalism and racial order is contingent outcome of the struggles between contending groups or classes, and the outcome of the struggle may be functional or contradictory by advancing the interest of the certain classes at the expense of others.
Lipton (1985) conceded that apartheid had some benefits for capitalism, particularly the agricultural and mining fractions, until the 1970s. In line with Hutt’s (1964) idea that the maturation of capitalism erodes prejudices, Lipton (1985) argued that dysfunctionality of the racist forms of political domination arose from structural changes.
The key shift was from ‘labour intensive’ to ‘capital intensive’ forms of work which required skilled labour. Apartheid became dysfunctional for capital accumulation because the growth of the manufacturing industry required skilled labour and rising black purchasing power, and the latter was depressed by poor wages.
From this perspective, racism had benefits and costs for capital accumulation. The benefits were provided by cheap labour, which was in demand by mining and agricultural capital, and the state intervened with a variety of apartheid techniques to reproduce the cheap labour. But costs became detrimental, as the absence of skilled black labour resulted in capital relying on ‘expensive’ white labour. This view was also developed in the thesis of ‘racial Fordism’ (Gelb 1986). It could be argued that the manufacturing sector benefited from racial policies which prevented the formation of trade unions, and allowed for the relatively easier suppression of workers’ struggles.
Lipton’s main theoretical shortcoming is failure to distinguish between capitalism and capitalists. The former is a social order or structural system, and the latter are agents in the structure who may have different interests in how the structure should function. The significance of this distinction is her capacity to show that racist forms of political domination were functional and dysfunctional to the interests of different fractions of capital, but incapacity to address the capitalist system as a whole. Therefore it was misleading of her to argue that capitalism did not benefit from racist forms of political domination, on the basis of some relatively narrow contradictions.
Both Lipton and a 1970s generation of Marxists who studied fractions of capital in the tradition of Nicos Poulantzas, arrived by different routes at the same conclusion regarding the relationship between class and race. The fraction of capital thesis was not, as Simon Clarke (1978) argued, fundamentally different from the liberal-pluralist theory of interest groups and power. That theory tends to locate state activities in relation to policies proposed by different social forces, and it fails to locate the state within the broader framework of social reproduction and transformation (Clarke 1978, Therborn 1978). Both blame particular sections of capital for racism. The only difference was that Lipton blamed the political power of the state for overruling those capitalists who increasingly wanted deracialisation.
For several vulgar Marxists, a late 1980s analysis replaced the idea of apartheid capitalism with that of ‘racial Fordism’: mass production by blacks, mass consumption by whites. The result of this analysis, again, was a set of policies that maintain the wage-labour system. The modernisation project has been justified in terms of overcoming racial Fordism, and in the crucial transition period of the early 1990s, the concept also influenced the trade union movement’s analysis. The racial Fordist thesis, like Lipton’s analysis, traces the roots of the South African social crisis to insufficient demand and a poor skills set. Labour’s early 1990s Industrial Strategy Project and its 1996 Social Equity and Job Creation document were policy alternatives that reflected this theoretical approach. Building on underconsumptionist assumptions, Kaplan and Lewis (1996) attributed economic problems to lack of skills, lack of demand and lack of efficient technology.
5 RETURNING TO MARXIST THEORY
In contrast, a deeper-rooted Marxist political economy should have used its unique theory of capitalism to demonstrate the contingent, conjunctural relationship between capitalism and racism in terms of broader social relations. Capitalism transforms the means of production and labour into commodities to be purchased in the market. The means of production are purchased as constant capital and labour power as variable capital. Capital accumulation requires constant reproduction of the variable and constant capital. In order to make surplus value, the value of the product must be greater than the constant and variable capital used up in the process. The additional value is found in the labour power. The capitalist can increase surplus value either through extension of working day or through the rate of work (‘absolute surplus value extraction’) or through applying more efficient systems of work (‘relative surplus value’). The latter extraction of relative surplus value refers to a decrease in the value of labour power required in production, through increasing labour’s productivity. This usually comes as a result of improvement of technology or innovation (Marx 1967). As a result of mechanisation, the value of workers’ basic needs should also decline, thus lowering the value of labour power. As one capitalist increases productivity through inventions and innovations, others have to follow in order to compete and continually accumulate.
Marx (1967) argues that crisis tendencies are inherent in the capitalist mode of production because competition amongst capitalists leads them to invest more in capital equipment or ‘constant capital’ than in ‘variable capital’ (workers who operate the means of production), hence pushing up the organic composition of capital and reducing the amount of surplus value that is extracted in production. The rate of profit thus tends to fall over time.
The basic problem for capitalism is that capitalists invest in constant capital in order to increase profits in the short term, by gaining an edge over competitors. For this reason, the necessary labour associated with a given level of output declines, thus decreasing market prices and rewarding the capitalists who invested in constant capital with a competitive advantage over other capitalists. But the system as a whole draws out less surplus value as a result.
In the early period of industrialisation, capital mainly used the absolute surplus value mechanism to extend the working day and the rate of exploitation. One route that proved crucial was the turn to extra-economic measures – such as enclosures of land commons – to recruit and control labour. In South Africa, this process of imposing primitive accumulation was codified in the 1894 Glen Grey Act and consolidated in the 1913 Land Act which dispossessed the African peasantry and incorporated black male workers into migrant wage labour. In early South African capitalism, mining and farming labour requirements were dominant, and these capitalists relied on absolute surplus value mechanisms to control labour. This required more repressive extra-economic apparatuses, culminating in apartheid.
The contradiction, of course, was that this process gave rise to massive struggles and also to the ecological decline of the reserves. Moreover, as Wolpe (1975) and Saul and Gelb (1981) point out, agricultural and manufacturing capital gradually increased their constant capital to the point that mechanisation required a new generation of skilled labourers. By the 1960s, older aspects of national oppression had become dysfunctional to capital accumulation (Wolpe 1988).
6 FROM VULGAR MARXISM TO NEOLIBERAL NEOMODERNISATION
A new problem arises in this analysis, which again shows the limits of the vulgar Marxism that sometimes characterised South African debates. Modern development is associated with science, technology and the development of productive forces. Modernisation theory named some alleged sources of underdevelopment in pre-capitalist forms of societal organisations, especially lack of technology, markets and ‘entrepreneurial spirit’. The cure was to dismantle traditional customs and institutions (like property rights, titles to land, markets, credit), and provide modern technological instruments for production. In this spirit, the current government has set as its key role to modernise the ‘second economy’, integrating the unsophisticated second economy into the first economy. This is ‘neomodernisation’ theory, which posits that the first and second economies are structurally disconnected.
The mirror of this on the left is a crude kind of dependency theory, in which the ‘underdeveloped’ society is a product of the colonial-era imperialism which inaugurated capitalist relations in much of Africa. In reaction, the vulgar Marxism advocated by Bill Warren agreed with dependency theorists that colonialism exploited and underdeveloped the poor countries. But Warren and Cristobal Kay next argued that there was not enough exploitation of these countries, because the productive forces did not develop. South African neoliberalism has also been justified by Josiah Jele and Jabu Moleketi (2002) on grounds of the need to develop our productive forces.
Both vulgar Marxism and neoliberalism have arrived at the same conclusion via different conceptual schemas. Both vulgar Marxists and neoliberals argued for the increase of the rate of profit in the production process. One hand, the neoliberals argue for re-organisation of the labour process to weaken labour through greater ‘flexibility’. In opposition to this, vulgar Marxists who advocate ‘post-Fordism’ – Alec Erwin, for example – do not question the exploitative production relations, but instead argue for improved conditions of exploitation.
In sum, both vulgar Marxism and neoliberalism agree that there is a need to increase the productivity of labour and capital. The government’s Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa advocates making the ‘cost of doing business cheaper’, that is, lowering the barriers to capital accumulation. State-owned enterprises are being geared towards facilitating capital accumulation. Constant capital will be made cheaper through state-subsidised electricity, telecommunication, water and transport infrastructure. Even though there have been significant corporate tax breaks, neoliberals are still pushing for further tax reductions – in sites such as the Coega complex – as a way of lowering the cost of doing business in South Africa.
So too does the Communist Manifesto glorify the role of the bourgeoisie in developing the productive forces. Even though Marx saw the negative effects of colonisation in Ireland, he wrote of the positive role of colonisation in India. The modernisation perspective within the works of Marx and Engels armed Warren and those who would justify neoliberalism.
But this view draws an incorrect interpretation of Marx’s material conception of history. The vulgar Marxists suggest that capitalism has to mature first, before less developed countries can advance to socialism. Therefore, more exploitation is required for the poor countries to develop. Marx’s view was more nuanced, for in a letter to Vera Zulisch, he drew attention to the ‘unevenness’ of the global capitalism, and argued that not all countries had to first establish capitalism in order to move to socialism.
In this spirit, the Bolsheviks ran a programme of industrialisation which treated workers as a means of development. Trotsky proposed the militarisation of labour. Marxist political economists still need to think hard about political society in the post-revolutionary period, and learn from the mistakes of the Bolshevik tradition.
7 CST AND POST-1994 PRACTICES
Armed with ideas like the articulation of modes of production, there was a tendency by some in the Congress tradition to frame national oppression and class exploitation in dualistic fashion. For some, class exploitation was seen as the essence, of which one epiphenomenon was national oppression. For example, Joe Slovo (1976) argued: ‘Yet for all the overt signs of race as a mechanism of domination, the legal and institutional domination of the white minority over black majority has its origin in, and is perpetuated by economic exploitation’. He went on to say that ‘race discrimination is the mechanism of this exploitation and functional to it… and the struggle to destroy white supremacy is ultimately bound up with the very destruction of capitalism itself’.
For SACP theorists, the struggle for national liberation was linked to socialism because the former undermined the conditions for exploitation of the black working class. The NDR was conceptualised as anti-capitalist as opposed to merely building a bourgeois democracy. Indeed, the NDR was a strategy developed by the Comintern to deal with colonial and semi-colonial social formations in which the productive forces and the proletariat were miniscule (Hudson 1986). The tasks of the NDR were to lead an agrarian revolution which would transfer land to the peasantry. National liberation would end imperial oppression and ensure state control of ‘commanding heights of the economy’ (Lowy 1981). Because national oppression was conceptualised as functional to global capital accumulation, the struggle for national liberation was also explicitly anti-capitalist. While there was a strategic convergence over the need to build worker alliances with the peasantry, which would open non-capitalist roads towards socialism, there was also heated debate within the Comintern on tactics to achieve this goal. This was particularly sharp between the Indian communist M.N. Roy and Lenin, who saw the need to form tactical alliances with nationalists.
South African capitalism was advanced in comparison to other colonial and semicolonial social formations. The NDR as a strategy was adopted because of how the CST theory focused on what Simons and Simons (1968) called ‘colour consciousness’. From within this tradition, Wolpe did not disconnect the struggle against racism from capitalism. Wolpe still saw the national liberation struggle as entailing the socialisation of the means of production in the hands of the people.3 But Wolpe (1988) acknowledged that national liberation struggles can have both pro-capitalist and anti-capitalist content. In the post-1994 period, the pro-capitalist forces have won the battle, and in the process has vulgarised Marxist political economy to justify neoliberal socio-economic development policy and political practice.
In contrast, the underlying political programme of the NDR was to inaugurate a genuine national democracy, based on a non-capitalist economic strategy. The Freedom Charter conceived such a programme, and the ANC itself admitted that it was fighting for socialism in its Politico-Military Strategy Commission,4 which reported as follows regarding the ANC’s approach to socialism: ‘It should be emphasised that no member of the Commission had any doubts about the ultimate need to continue our revolution towards a socialist order; the issue was posed only in relation to the tactical considerations of the present stage of our struggle’. The Freedom Charter was not meant to build black capitalism, as Thabo Mbeki argued in 1978, ‘black capitalism instead of being an antithesis is rather confirmation of parasitism’.
The direction of the NDR was always contested within the ANC, and there were two ideological interpretations of the Freedom Charter. Nelson Mandela argued that the NDR and Freedom Charter will usher in bourgeois democracy, against Govan Mbeki’s view, which was that it would bring about a deeper people’s democracy (Mbeki 1991). Mandela’s version of that Freedom Charter, which rested upon building a black bourgeoisie, won the battle in post-1994 South Africa. During his address to the Black Management Forum in 1999, Mbeki declared, the ‘struggle against racism in our country must include the objective of creating a black bourgeoisie… I would like to urge, very strongly, that we abandon our embarrassment about the possibility of the emergence of successful and therefore prosperous black owners of productive property’.
The project of building a black bourgeoisie and middle class as a buffer between white monopoly capital and the white working class was initiated in the 1960s, and intensified in the 1970s (Hudson and Sarakinsky 1986, Nzimande 1990). Since the ANC came into power, various institutions, charters and pieces of legislation were passed to create this class, and the leadership of the ANC owned capital directly or indirectly. Without doubt, this has changed the character of the ANC. Below is a table originally printed in City Press (2005) that shows ANC leadership in business.
Table 1 The ANC’s leading business-politicians
Name
Company
Sakie Macozoma
Stalin Group, Standard Bank, Volkswagen SA, Murray and Roberts, Liso, Investment Vehicle and Safika
Penuell Maduna (former Minister of Minerals and Energy and Justice)
Amabusi, Sasol, Tshwarisano LFB Investment
Popo Molefe (former North-West Premier)
Sun International and Leroko Investment
Valli Moosa (former Minister of Local Government, and Envriomental Affairs)
Sun International and Leroko Investment
Smuts Ngonyama, (former Eastern Cape, MEC for Economic Affairs )
Elephant Consortium and Fishing Industry
Matthews Phosa (former Mpumalanga premier)
BMW, ABSA, KPMG and Ruslyn Minning and Plant Hire
Cyril Ramaphosa ( former NUM and ANC Secretary General )
MTN, SABMiller, Standard Bank, Shanduka Investment Co. Alexander Forbes
There is, as a result of this, a drastic shift from the 1960s and 1970s ANC position towards socialism, to what Mbeki termed ‘parasitism’ back in 1978. The adverse global balance of forces has been used to rationalise not only neoliberalism, but also the creation of black bourgeoisie. However, it should be noted that the form of black participation in South African neoliberalism is justified in terms of race equity. A new round of primitive accumulation is underway through the capitalist dispossession of the state, either through illegal corruption or legal corruption, and this broad-based privatisation is justified in terms of race.
It is not my intention to explain the shift here, for explanations have been provided in other works, notwithstanding some pitfalls (Marais 2000, Bond 2005). The RDP was also vague, and allowed room for misinterpretation. In his strongest rebuke of the SACP, in its 1998 Congress, Mbeki argued forcefully that GEAR was a logical outcome of the RDP. I would argue that the RDP was also shift from the Freedom Charter, which was grounded upon what might be considered a ‘non-capitalist’ path – the RDP was, at best, based on the Keynesianism.
The question that we need to ask is: what has happened to the CST since 1994? Put differently, has the South African social formation changed since 1994? There is no doubt that it has changed.
Table 2 Post-1994 political landscape shifts
Pre-1994
Post-1994
1910, political exclusion of black South Africans as citizens in South Africa
Political inclusion, in which blacks have political citizenship – the right to vote
Settler colonial-apartheid-capitalist state
Neo-colonial state, with key neoliberal features
Black working class main supplier of cheap labour, white economic ownership
Black working class main supplier of labour, but BEE, rapid rise of the black middle class and bourgeoisie
Racism as a dominant ideological instrument
Neoliberalism as a dominant ideology to maintain and reproduce neo-CST
Colonial/apartheid workplace regime
Relatively progressive workplace regime, but constantly under threat because of causalisation
ANC-led liberation movement – mass democratic movements
Contemporary social movements as a result of the crisis of reproduction
Anti-capitalist movements
Soviet Union, anti-capitalist liberation movements
Dominance of US-led imperialism and neoliberalism
Political independence is symbolised in the national flag and national anthem, but we have inherited economic dependence on white monopoly capital, which itself has largely moved offshore.
8 CONCLUSION: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE WORKING CLASS
To conclude, we can consider the ideas of Michael Lebowitz (2004) about what is termed ‘the political economy of the working class’. Lebowitz argues that even though Marx noted the critical role of workers’ struggles, Capital does not systematically deal with the goals of the wage-labourer, as well as her life outside the workplace. Wage-labour is present in an ‘underdeveloped form’ in Marx’s Value, price and profit.
In his Inaugural Address to the First International, Marx drew attention to the political economy of the working class. In contrast to the political economy of the bourgeoisie, for which workers’ time is for capital and the worker is alienated from herself, from fellow-workers and from products, there is a political economy of the working class according to which labour exists for a worker and is consumed by a worker, time is for the worker and she produces for herself. These political economies co-exist in a contradictory unity. They manifest themselves in the process of class struggle in which the working class attempts to impose its political economy. According to Marx the political economy of the working class found concrete expression when workers won the victory on the Ten Hours Bill, as well as the emergence of a co-operative movement. The political economy of the working class can only triumph if workers understand that commodities are a result of their exploitation, and as such overthrow capitalism.
Because of the absence of workers as an active and conscious subject in Capital, the result is sometimes a one-sided reading of capitalism, because everything that happens under capitalism corresponds to the needs of capital. Lebowitz deals with the functional fallacy of reforms under capitalism in which any reform by capital is seen as result of the benevolence of capitalists without working class struggle. If a workday declines, it is as a result of capital wanting workers to rest. If a health system is introduced, it is by virtue of the fact that capital wants healthy workers. According to Lebowitz, this is one-sided because it does not look at how wage-labourers struggle against capital. Lebowitz argues that workers’ struggles to satisfy their many-sided social needs – schools, health services, time for reading, decent housing and good food – are struggles against capital as a mediator.
Lebowitz acknowledges that these aspects of reproduction cannot be guaranteed under capitalism, and that workers have to ultimately overthrow capital as a mediator in production, circulation and consumption. He provides a theoretical and concrete platform upon which transitional demands towards socialism can be formulated. This in turn provides a theoretical basis for the working class to act for both its own immediate and long-term interests, based upon working-class political economy. The working class can only defeat capitalism if they move beyond economism – wage-struggles – and join struggles for health, social grants, education and welfare as well as other reforms such as co-ops. Put differently, the working class cannot just struggle for reforms within the capitalist system – it must negate capital.
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ENDNOTES
1 This kind of Marxism advocated colonialism unapologetically. Bill Warren argued that exploitation of the colonial countries is necessary for its development (for a critique see Bond 1997). This argument has also been appropriated to justify neoliberalism in South Africa (Jele and Moleketi 2002).
2 This argument has been appropriated by one of the key black capitalists in post-1994 South Africa: Macozoma 2003.
3 The notion of the ‘people’ is the ‘working people’ in a Leninist sense, that is, the working class, peasantry and middle class.
4 Thabo Mkeki, Joe Slovo, Moses Mabhida, Joe Gqabi and Joe Modise were members of this commission which accepted socialism as the ultimate goal for the South African revolution.
From: http://www.nu.ac.za/ccs/files/africanus
