>>> "Patrick Bond" <pbond at wn.apc.org> 12/23/99 03:29PM >>>
This is a debate that really waylaid the SA Left for many years!
Conclusion by most radical intellectuals here after several false starts: the apartheid-capitalism bedfellow relationship was "contingent" not "necessary." But that too doesn't satisfy. SA capitalism is still unbelievably racist, but unevenly so.
I think many of us still search for a coherent Line on this.
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CB: The way I would argue this is that racism/colonialism is a necessary condition of capitalism. Racism/colonialism has had many forms in the history of capitalism: slavery, the older forms of colonialism, with settler populations from Europe, imperialism, neo-imperialism, Jim Crow, Apartheid, which was a combination Jim Crow/settler colonialism, et al. The main capitalist countries have always had somekind of , what is it, critical segmentation of the labor force , the relations of production. whether internally or internationally. Racism IS capitalism.
Before apartheid, which as I understand started in about 1949, there was another constellation of racism and colonialism in South Africa. So, the specific form apartheid is contingent. But there has been no capitalism in South Africa without some form of racism.
The color line is the question of the 20th Century, hell all capitalist centuries.
CB