Who Killed Apartheid (was Who Killed Vincent Chin? (was Barkley on WTO, etc)

Patrick Bond pbond at wn.apc.org
Sat Dec 25 02:55:13 PST 1999


The reason I retitle this subject line is that the very question of K's compatibility with apartheid remains up for debate insofar arrogant white "liberals" (neoliberals in US lingo) still claim they "won" the liberation struggle (really!): that the meritocracy and dynamism of the market forced the apartheid regime to rethink its main modus operandi, inexorably (they are wrong because the reason for the rethink was K's 1980s crisis, not its successes!) -- while ex- radicals mourn their mistake in dogmatically thinking that K and apartheid were inextricably interlinked, for obviously the form and the content diverged from around 1985 when Anglo American Corporation and friends began slowly but systematically changing alliance from Afrikaans nationalism to black nationalism, to the bewilderment of lefties, many of whom took the gap to go very reformist ("post-fordist," mainly) in search of class compromise.

What does this mean, politically? The white liberals today lose all the battles over particular hegemonic discourses here (the main party representing K's interests has a leader known as the chihuahua, for his whinging, moaning, barking and chirping)... but damn it if they didn't win the more general conceptual war, with much of the ANC leadership -- who not long ago excorciated big business -- now "seeing" SA K (in reality, still amongst the world's nastiest, rawest surplus extraction systems) as a potentially liberating, modernising force.

Contesting this practical understanding of the market and its alleged "opportunities" (against the far more realistic Brenner/Wood understanding of K's "imperatives"), is now the main way that some of us in the techno-loops of the SA left get into this debate today. That gives us an ahistorical bias, to be sure, and forces us into banal policy debates over the plan v. the market. In the old days, we would be happy squabbling about the Third-Internationalist, 1960s line known here as "colonialism of a special type"; about early 1970s Essex innovations around "articulations of modes of production"; about mid-1970s Sussex neo-Poulantzian explorations of which "fractions of capital" most influenced the SA state; about early 1980s York U./Canada "racial capitalism"; about mid-1980s anti-theoretical "social history" studies centred at my university, Wits; and about the late 1980s importation of French regulation theory with all the bad reformism that that entailed. Some great investigative work was done in each of these traditions, in the name of neo-marxism. But you can look around today and there is virtually nothing left in the way of intellectual footprints. Most of the trekkers all got off the path, doing U-turns (many white male marxists became consultants for the enemy even before 1994) or at best took a right fork whenever one appeared.

So Charles and Angela and Doug (and whomever else is interested), we remain at an impasse. Russell, Ish and Peter can correct me, but there's just not much if any metatheory of social relations to be had in SA anymore (though Ben Fine and Zav Rustomjee made a half-hearted effort with a great poli-econ book in 1996, and I continue to hope that some nuanced combined/uneven development seeds will take root and flower here).

That is to say ...

On 23 Dec 99, at 15:54, Charles Brown wrote:
> ... 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.

You are no doubt right. But we still seek a mode of convincingly explaining why superexploitation along race/gender/environmental lines worked very well (highest profit rates for TNCs in the world) up to a point, and then at some point probably shortly after WWII (and the formalisation of "apartheid" in 1948) actually became disfunctional (technically this isn't hard, as it was partly for reasons of bias following from insufficient effective demand by black workers, and hence a failure to establish backward-forward linkages; and also because of the emerging skills shortage that followed from the turn to excess capital intensity during the 1960s --

but we need more than an economistic angle of course).

I'll look at Angela's take on this in a moment for inspiration.

By the way, the race/gender overdetermination is amazing. You know that the white-owned mines and factories and farms relied on a migrant labour system that did this: took black men from ages 15- 50ish, and gave them insufficient wages (as goes the "cheap labour" thesis) to reproduce their labour-power, insofar as the system relied upon an extra "subsidy" so as to take care of the workers prior to age 15 or so, and to take care of workers when ill, and to take care of workers after "retirement" given that white capital put out next to nothing on black education in bantustans, black health care, and black pensions. Who provided that generous subsidy? In addition to bantustan land, which became degraded over time due to overpopulation pressure subsequent to many millions of people being forcibly removed from "white" SA, the answer is: rural women -- who played such a superhuman role in labour reproduction but who never saw the labour production process firsthand because without jobs they couldn't get pass- books, and without pass-books they couldn't go near the cities, even for visits.

A diabolical system that just isn't quite captured in the notion of contingency, eh. Patrick Bond (Wits University Graduate School of Public and Development Management) home: 51 Somerset Road, Kensington 2094, Johannesburg office: 22 Gordon Building, Wits University Parktown Campus mailing address: PO Box 601 WITS 2050 phones: (h) (2711) 614-8088; (o) 488-5917; fax 484-2729 emails: (h) pbond at wn.apc.org; (o) bondp at zeus.mgmt.wits.ac.za



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