The Causes of Ongoing Social Injustice

Ivor Chipkin

A Report for the RAITH Foundation

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Table of Contents

Executive Summary.................................................................................................................................3

The Causes of Social Injustice......................................................................................................................8

1. Introduction.....................................................................................................................................8

2. A Just Society?...............................................................................................................................10

3. The Theory of National Democratic Revolution.............................................................................13

3.1. Articulation of Modes of Production......................................................................................15

3.2. Another Relationship between Race and Class......................................................................16

4. Freedom and Capitalism today......................................................................................................18

5. Another Economy..........................................................................................................................19

6. Bringing the State Back In..............................................................................................................25

7. Public Sector Reform.....................................................................................................................29

7.1. Integration.............................................................................................................................30

7.2. Transformation......................................................................................................................33

7.3. Service Delivery.....................................................................................................................37

8. Social Justice in South Africa today................................................................................................39

8.1. The view from above.............................................................................................................41

8.2. The View from Below:............................................................................................................46

References.............................................................................................................................................51

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Executive Summary

This paper is about the causes of social injustice in South Africa today. Drawing on previous work I

discuss social justice as a situation where economic goods, political rights and social status are distributed

fairly. In particular, social justice arises when the relationships between groups and between social

classes are justified on the basis of a more or less equitable distribution of public and private goods and

the benefits associated with national, economic growth. Central to this conception of justice, moreover, is

the idea of a fair distribution of rights, of entitlements, of benefits, of burdens, of responsibilities. In this

conception of a ‘just society’ the State is supposed to be the arbiter of this equilibrium between groups

and classes and is, therefore, understood to be the condition of social peace.

How, in South Africa, has a fair distribution of goods come to be understood? I will discuss the notions of

‘fairness’ and its opposite ‘unfairness’ in relation to their connotations in South Africa – rather than in

relation to a now massive philosophical literature. Resistance to Apartheid and before that, segregationist

policies produced a large repertoire of terms and concepts to describe and analyse the injustice of South

Africa’s political systems. I will focus on the notion of South Africa as a ‘colony-of-a-special-type’

because its terms and concepts informed the most important political movement that arose to resist

Apartheid, the African National Congress and its various alliance partners. Furthermore, the political

programme associated with this analysis, the pursuit of National Democratic Revolution, has been central

to the ANC government’s own reading of how to ‘transform’ the South African political-economy in the

interests of social justice.

One of the features of Apartheid society was the way that social and economic goods were allocated to

the benefit of white people and to the prejudice of black people. Moreover, in order to sustain this

situation, political and civic rights were denied Black South Africans, most notably through the denial of

the franchise and, in millions of cases, of formal citizenship. From the late 1960s in South Africa, the

social justice agenda was increasingly defined in terms of rights for blacks and for workers. In the 1970s

and1980s, women’s rights began to feature in their own right. Under the influence of gay and lesbian

activists in the 1990s, moreover, sexual orientation was also added to this cluster of issues.

What made it sensible to bring these diverse struggles into alliance was an idea of apartheid. Apartheid

was understood as a system of race and class domination that allocated benefits in society primarily to

whites and capitalists and burdens primarily to blacks and the working class. In later versions of the

Theory of National Democratic Revolution, apartheid was also conceived as a patriarchal system that 3

privileged men. Under the influence of gay rights activists, from the 1990s this notion of patriarchy was

extended to include hetero-normativity. As such apartheid patriarchy was said to discriminate against

gays and lesbians. In other words, apartheid was conceived as the primary obstacle to the liberation of

blacks, of workers, of women and of gays and lesbians.

This report reviews the progress made in South Africa in changing the social and economic structures of

social injustice in South Africa. It considers the ways that economic, political and social assets are

allocated in society today and the degree to which historical patterns of unfairness and discrimination

have been changed or are changing. In other words, is contemporary South Africa a place where race,

gender, class and region no longer or to a lesser degree determine patterns of accumulation, production

and consumption?

The paper starts with a paradox. Despite important and positive changes to the way that many private and public

goods are allocated in South African society, South Africa resembles less and less the society imagined in the

Constitution, a non-racial democracy where all citizens have more or less equal access to goods and services.

Instead there has been progress at ‘meeting basic needs’, including providing welfare support to nearly 16 million

South Africans and improving access to public educational and health facilities. There have also been important

steps in deracialising patterns of ownership and control of private control and creating and expanding the middle

class. Yet the quality of government services is often poor and uneven. Moreover, massive structural

unemployment condemns millions of South Africans to a life of dependency (on the State, on family members, on

charity). Hence, South Africa increasingly resembles a country of several worlds: ‘multiracial’ middle classes in

the large metropolitan areas, with access to high-quality, largely private services and facilities; populations of

mostly Black, unemployed or underemployed young men located on marginal sites on the urban peripheries or in

pockets of the inner-city; informal settlements around secondary cities inhabited by millions of farm workers

displaced from the land and/or farm workers earning very low wages and rural districts under chiefly authority

where rural women eke our precarious livelihoods. All of these large mentioned groups rely on the State for

access to various social services.

It is this state of inequality and fragmentation that is described by terms like ongoing ‘social injustice’.

What is usually at stake in contemporary debates about South Africa’s current condition and future

(developmental state, failed state as the two extremes) are the ongoing reasons for this situation.

This paper discusses that efforts to ‘transform’ the economy have focused on ownership and control of private, for-

profit companies. In particular, Black Economic Empowerment policies, including Broad Based Black Economic

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Empowerment, have tried to shift patterns of ownership of capital and the control of capital (that is, who occupies

senior management and executive board positions in South African corporations) away from mainly white men, to

Black South Africans broadly defined. Testament to the legacy of non-racialism in the African National Congress,

the term ‘black’ in these laws and regulations is not simply a racial one. Although the subject of intense political

contestation when it comes to the conclusion of actual business deals or the awarding of tenders, the definition of

the term carries the deep imprimatur of the ANC’s historic understanding of Apartheid as a system of racial, gender

and national domination. ‘Blacks’ thus refer to Africans, Coloured and Indians. There is strong emphasis on

privileging women in economic empowerment. Even white women have been, controversially, included in the

remit of these policies. So have Chinese South Africans. In other words, the term ‘black’ refers to women in

general and all those people historically discriminated against during the Apartheid/colonial period.

The difficulty lies with black economic empowerment’s organisational rather than institutional focus. It has not

done much to change the ‘rules of the (economic) game’ (institutional change), or rather it has addressed only the

demographic rules of business (organisational change). It has not resulted in changes to the way business gets done

between firms or, more specifically, the tendency towards centralisation and capital intensity in many economic

sectors. Black economic empowerment in its current form has done nothing to stall these tendencies. Yet it is the

low labour absorptivity of the capitalist sector in South Africa that accounts for very high unemployment,

especially amongst young adults. Moreover, weak market competition and associated commercial procurement

practices serve to make food and other basic household goods expensive for South Africans and especially

expensive for the poor.

This report discusses the institution of traditional authority and customary law. Despite initial efforts to

democratise rural local governments, especially in former Homeland areas, the power of chiefs has not only been

preserved but strengthened – especially in relation to the allocation of land. What this means is that in large parts of

the country, concomitant with the boundaries of former Bantustans, the remit of democratic government, especially

at municipal level, is constrained by the institution of the chief. This situation also represents a severe limit on

women’s’ citizenship, the exercise of which is again mediated in and through a patriarchal institution.

Most commonly, the situation is explained in terms of a ‘democratic deficit’ on the South African political scene.

Numerous scholars and activists refer to the absence of the ‘voice of the poor’ in policy processes or in decision-

making concerning the allocation of economic resources and public funds. In other words, it is suggested that the

government has not tackled some of the more difficult challenges of socio-economic transformation because it does

not feel under sufficient pressure to do so.

The democratic transition had important consequences for civil-society broadly speaking. In the 1990’s many of

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the popular organisations that had arisen to oppose the Apartheid government either dissolved or were absorbed

into ANC structures. Organised social movements suffered a further set-back when international donors shifted

their funding strategies in the democratic period. Rather than support activist or community organisations directly,

many donors shifted to supporting the new government through bi-lateral agreements.

The growing gulf between formal politics (the space of law-making, parliamentary contestation, policy-making and

government action), civil society and political society has also been deepened by South Africa’s electoral

landscape. Since the first democratic election, the African National Congress has secured overwhelming electoral

majorities. Many authors have drawn the following conclusion: confident in its electoral majority, the ANC as an

organisation has been unresponsive to voters’ needs and unaccountable in. The image of a gulf or breach between

the political elite and citizens, especially poor South Africans, might not be a good one, however. New work is

beginning to show how electoral politics is in embedded in local strategies and contestation for wealth and income.

Under these conditions ‘blacks’ don’t simply vote for the ANC because it is a ‘black’ party, but because their

livelihoods are caught up in the electoral fortunes of the organisation.

Preoccupation with the ANC and government has also created blind spots.

The first concerns the character of the South African State. The paper explores what measures have been taken to

‘transform’ the South African state and how effective they have been. It makes the argument that even when there

is political will, government departments often lack the organisational means to perform their mandated tasks. This

is not, as so much of the public debate suggests, because public servants are simply unskilled or incompetent.

Instead, the uneven performance of the public service and of local governments has a lot to with how they have

been structured (the influence of New Public Management), how they recruit staff (there is no minimum

qualification, no entrance exam) and how they incentivise their staff. What the report discusses is public sector

reform privileged a model of managerial control at the expense of administrative and bureaucratic capacity.

Furthermore, the poor quality of government services is not the only cause of on-going social injustice.

Unemployment remains the principle driver of inequality in South Africa. Unemployment is, in turn, a

consequence of the capital intensity of business processes in South Africa. This situation is aggravated by

rudimentary market competition in many sectors that, in turn, drives high prices for consumer goods (food retail,

telecoms, electricity). South Africa, in other words, has a capitalist economy with a weak market economy. One

does not have to be a socialist to agree that this arrangement is unsustainable. It is not simply that ‘white’

ownership and control in the private sector remains high. The structure of the economy itself distributes benefits to

a small multiracial elite while condemning the vast majority of South Africans to a life of dependency (on social

grants and often poor public services). One of the glaring gaps in the social justice sector consists of social

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movements agitating in favour of a just economy.

The report concludes with some remarks about the social justice agenda itself. Earlier work on the ‘social justice

sector’ revealed that the vast majority of social justice organisations were involved in some form of advocacy,

usually to advance the socio-economic rights of various groups. Often this work takes the form of litigation to force

government departments to make available the services they are constitutionally obliged to provide (HIV/Aids

treatment, school text books, shelter, basic services and so on) (see Chipkin and Meny-Gibert: 2013).

The social justice agenda could be further advanced by:

Addressing social injustices arising from the way that the South African economy works to drive

up prices of basic goods (like food and energy). Consumer activism is an especially propitious and

yet neglected field of action. In the first place, high consumer prices and poor services unduly

affect poor South Africans. Food prices are especially high. Most poor families survive on a diet

that excludes dairy products and only occasionally includes meat. High prices, moreover, are often

a consequence of weak or poorly performing markets. Consumer activism, that is, opens a hitherto

unexplored route to reforming or even transforming aspects of the South African economy.

Engaging more fully with the reasons why government fails or is seen to fail in changing the way

private and public goods are distributed. In this regard, the sector would be assisted by ongoing

research in relevant sectors, including on patterns of social stratification in South Africa and social

change, on the character of the South African economy, on the form of the State, on the dominant

political and intellectual traditions in South Africa.

Expanding the strategies and tactics social justice organisations use to pursue social justice. This

report has shown, for example, that understanding the limits of what government does in terms of

political will or in terms of accountability misses as much as it explains. There are opportunities

where partnerships with government departments/ agencies/ officials may be as valuable a form of

engagement as opposition and litigation.

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The Causes of Social Injustice

1. IntroductionThis paper is about the causes of social injustice in South Africa today. Drawing on previous work I

discuss social justice as a situation where economic goods, political rights and social status are distributed

fairly. In particular, social justice arises when the relationships between groups and between social

classes are justified on the basis of a more or less equitable distribution of public and private goods and

the benefits associated with national, economic growth. Central to this conception of justice, moreover, is

the idea of a fair distribution of rights, of entitlements, of benefits, of burdens, of responsibilities. In this

conception of a ‘just society’ the State is supposed to be the arbiter of this equilibrium between groups

and classes and is, therefore, understood to be the condition of social peace.

How, in South Africa, has a fair distribution of goods come to be understood? I will discuss the notions

of ‘fairness’ and its opposite ‘unfairness’ in relation to their connotations in South Africa – rather than in

relation to a now massive philosophical literature (from Rawls to Nozick). Resistance to Apartheid and

before that segregationist policies, produced a large repertoire of terms and concepts to describe and

analyse the injustice of South Africa’s political systems. I will focus on the notion of South Africa as a

‘colony-of-a-special-type’ because its terms and concepts informed the most important political

movement that arose to resist Apartheid, the African National Congress and its various alliance partners.

Furthermore, the political programme associated with this analysis, the pursuit of National Democratic

Revolution, has been central to the ANC government’s own reading of how to ‘transform’ the South

African political-economy in the interests of social justice.

One of the features of Apartheid society was the way that social and economic goods were allocated to

the benefit of white people and to the prejudice of black people. Moreover, in order to sustain this

situation, political and civic rights were denied Black South Africans, most notably through the denial of

the franchise and, in millions of cases, of formal citizenship. From the late 1960s in South Africa, the

social justice agenda was increasingly defined in terms of rights for blacks and for workers. In the 1970s

and1980s, women’s rights began to feature in their own right (Nzimande: 2009). Under the influence of

gay and lesbian activists in the 1990s (Cock, p.25), moreover, sexual orientation was also added to this

cluster of issues.

8

What made it sensible to bring these diverse struggles into alliance was an idea of apartheid. Apartheid

was understood as a system of race and class domination that allocated benefits in society primarily to

whites and capitalists and burdens primarily to blacks and the working class. In later versions of the

Theory of National Democratic Revolution, apartheid was also conceived as a patriarchal system that

privileged men. Under the influence of gay rights activists, from the 1990s this notion of patriarchy was

extended to include hetero-normativity. As such apartheid patriarchy was said to discriminate against

gays and lesbians. In other words, apartheid was conceived as the primary obstacle to the liberation of

blacks, of workers, of women and of gays and lesbians.

This report reviews the progress made in South Africa in changing the social and economic structures of

social injustice in South Africa. It considers the ways that economic, political and social assets are

allocated in society today and the degree to which historical patterns of unfairness and discrimination

have been changed or are changing. In other words, is contemporary South Africa a place where race,

gender, class and region no longer or to a lesser degree determine patterns of accumulation, production

and consumption?

The report offers a broad political-economic analysis of post-Apartheid South Africa to understand how

poverty and wealth, social value and political rights are distributed in society. It will provide examples

from a range of sectors and institutions. The study will explore:

the role of the corporate sector as an instrument of production and distribution, especially as it

affects consumers and the unemployed.

the role of the state in overcoming the ‘legacy of Apartheid’ and the consequences of policy

interventions in the fields of health and education, for example.

how the configuration of rights, benefits and burdens in society affects historical patterns of race,

class and patriarchy in South Africa

forms of resistance or opposition to changes or continuities on the South African political

economy.

This report, however, seeks not primarily to describe the state of affairs in South Africa today. In

exploring the causes of ongoing social injustice, this paper considers how and why social, economic and

political benefits and prejudices continue to be allocated unfairly. That is, it considers those areas where

the State in South Africa has not made progress in regulating the distribution of private and public goods

or the benefits of economic growth fairly amongst South Africa’s diverse groups and social classes.

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To the extent that this paper makes a contribution to the ongoing debate in South Africa, it seeks to move

explanations for ongoing social injustice away from the usual explanatory culprits: lack of political will

and/or lack of popular pressure. This paper engages with both explanations to find that they are not

sufficient to their task. As a result this paper offers two additional perspectives. It argues that the ANC

government has struggled to define a coherent social justice politics, vacillating between a definition of

social justice that, ultimately, priviliges a poltics of race and a politics of social justice that emphasises

class and gender. Furthermore, itt argues that there has been a tendency to overlook the organisational

make-up of the state and, hence, to over and underestimate state capacity to regulate affairs in the

direction of social justice.

2. A Just Society?

Let us start at the beginning, however. What would a state of social justice look like in South Africa? Let

us approach this question at a moment of unease, if not disappointment.

At least since the Presidency of Thabo Mbeki government officials and members of the African National

Congress have expressed ambivalent attitudes about the constitutional settlement of 1996.

“How do we understand April 1994?” Pallo Jordan asked in a paper prepared for the 50th ANC National

Conference in 1997. Jordan’s chief concern was with the ‘national question’ by which he meant the

degree to which “South Africans share a common patriotism and a common vision of the future of their

society” (Jordan, 1997). Was there still a “material basis of white racism”? (Jordan, Affirmative Action,

Corrective Measures and the Freedom Charter).

A cornerstone of the ANC’s non-racialism - that which distinguished it from say the Africanism of the

Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) - was that racism was not explained in terms of the peculiar psychology

or culture of whites as individuals or as a group. It reflected, rather, the way that capitalism had developed

in a colonial setting and the institutions created to sustain productive relations (Jordan, Towards

Solutions). This is what gave to the ANC’s platform its specific character and its peculiar terminology.

The ANC was engaged in a National Democratic Revolution that sought to eliminate the origins of white

domination in the colonial-capitalist economy (the base) and its supporting racist institutions (the

apartheid superstructure). The objective was a “democratic, non-sexist, non-racial” society.

What did 1994 represent on these terms? “The ANC,” Jordan writes, “had to make a number of distasteful

concessions to the old order in order to secure the beach-head of majority rule in 1994. These were made

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with the implicit understanding that the main thrust of movement policy would be to consolidate that

beach-head and employ it to lay the foundations of a truly democratic society” (Jordan, Affirmative

Action, Corrective Measures and the Freedom Charter).

On Jordan’s terms, national unity was delayed as long as racism continued to be institutionalised – in both

apartheid institutions (that arose to support the productive forces) and in the structures of the economy

(colonial capitalism). Therein lay both the disappointment of 1994 and also its promise. “Distasteful

concessions” were made to the white minority regime, such that institutionalised racism, especially in the

economy, survived. In 1997, however, Pallo Jordan was hopeful that the bridgehead that the democratic

breakthrough represented, could be progressively advanced and expanded.

Thirteen years later there is an intemperate atmosphere in the ANC. It suggests that such optimism is over

or waning.

The ANC Youth League, especially under the then leadership of Julius Malema, argued that the legacy of

institutional racism was long. “The slow pace of transformation in the private sector,” it suggests, “is

mainly due to the dominance of white males, men who were bred and cultured under institutionalised

racism and who are unable to appreciate and comprehend that black people, and Africans in particular,

are human beings too, who are capable to do the job”. “The underlying message could not be worse,” it

continues. “White South Africa is still unable to embrace their black brothers. It doesn't stop with

corporate South Africa. Millions of farm and factory workers and domestic helpers live with brutal racism

on a daily basis” (ANC Youth League, 2009)1.

The Youth League’s insistence on nationalising the mines must be seen in this context; of a growing

impatience with past and current efforts at changing the structure of the economy. Whereas Jordan,

nonetheless, sees the Constitution as an opening, there are signs that in parts of the ANC, it is viewed as

an impasse. Let us note a subtle shift in the Youth League’s argument relative to that of Jordan. It is no

longer that certain institutions necessarily function in racist ways. Rather, it is that the now defunct

ideologies that supported such institutions survive in the minds of the white managers and directors that

run them. I will return to this point.

This sentiment was not that of then Youth League leaders alone. The former Director-General of the

Department of Labour, Jimmy Manyi, called for amendments to the Constitution. At a BMF function

1 Malema, Julius, ‘We should openly confront racism in SA’, ANC Youth League, Nov 27, 2009, http://www.ancyouthleague.org/home/index.php?option=com_myblog&show=THE-NDR-AFRICAN-LEADERSHIP-AND-NON-RACIALISM-105.html&Itemid=0, consulted the 30 April, 2010.

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Jimmy Manyi complained that the constitution’s property clauses were hindering efforts to transform the

economy. Referring specifically to land reform he is reported as saying: “We are yet to see government

taking issues of a transformational nature to court and winning them. [...] Why does it seem that the

Constitution does not support the transformation agenda of the country” (The Times, 20/4/2010, p.4)2. He

was no doubt reflecting views circulating amongst emerging Black capitalists in and out of the African

National Congress. He was, lest we forget, also head of the Black Management Forum (BMF).

There are many reasons to be surprised by the pessimism of these statements. From the perspective of

social justice there is much to celebrate. That is, in terms of the way that private and public goods are

distributed in South Africa, a lot has changed. By the end of the Apartheid period, for example, spending

on a white child’s education in urban areas was still two and half times higher that of a black child.

Compared to black children in rural areas, spending on white children was five times higher (Spaull:

2012). By 2012, government expenditures on education across provinces had largely been equalised (Ibid,

2012). Furthermore, the South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR) reported in its 2010/2011

account of living conditions in South Africa that there had been important service delivery improvements

across the country. Between 1996 and 2010:

The number of South African households living in formal houses increased from 5.8-million to

11-million or by 89.9%. Over the same period the proportion of all households living in a formal

house increased from 64% to 76%.

The number of South African households with access to electricity increased from 5.2-million to

11.9-million or by 127.9%, while the proportion of all households with access to electricity

increased from 58% to 83%.

The number of South African households with access to piped water increased from 7.2-million

to 12.7-million or by 76.6%. The proportion with access to piped water increased from 80% to

89% (SAIRR: 2012).

The tone and substance of the political debate in South Africa often obscures these distributional changes.

The deputy CEO of the SAIRR, when presenting the institute’s findings above, conveyed his frustration

with the public discourse: a "myth has taken hold in South Africa that service delivery was a failure,” he

2 Mokgata, Zweli, ‘Constitution under Fire’, The Times, 30/4/2010, p.4. The Business Day reports that after a lengthy deliberation, panelists agreed that it was not so much the constitution itself that was at fault but the judiciary. “All the fingers are pointing at the judiciary, as the people who are interpreting the laws, (they) are untransformed” Jeremy Manyi is quoted as saying (Rabkin, Franny, ‘Manyi blames ‘interpretation of the constitution’, Business Day, 30/4/2010, p.3).

12

was reported as saying. “However, research we have published over the past several years suggests that

this is not the case." (Frans Cronje cited in SouthAfrica.info, 21/09/2013).

It is not just ignorance that drives public debate. What is at stake in them is nothing less than the identity

of the social groups that are supposed to be the beneficiaries of social justice: Blacks (as Africans),

Blacks ( as those historically oppressed, including Africans, Coloureds and Indians, Blacks (as the victim

of colonial capitalism, especially the working class), Blacks as the victims of patriarchy (women and gays

and lesbians) – and the various combinations between them.

Hence, the argument in South Africa today is not that patterns of distribution have not changed at all.

Rather, it is often that the wrong groups have benefitted (white women, for example, or “other

minorities”) and/or that the right groups (Africans, African women, the poor) have not benefited enough

or at all.

Underpinning this discourse is a more fundamental debate: what processes are responsible for the way

that goods (economic and social) are produced, valued and allocated? What can and should be done to

change, limit or transform these structures, organisations, firms, networks and people? At the heart of

these considerations is a profound disagreement within the ANC and the Alliance and more broadly about

the nature of the South African economy. In particular, to what extent can economic growth facilitate

prosperity for all or, does growth largely reproduce Apartheid-era patterns of inequality and poverty?

3. The Theory of National Democratic Revolution

In 1963, the South African Communist Party innovated viz. the analysis of the South African ‘social

formation’. In the Road to South African Freedom, it proposed that “the conceding of independence to

South Africa by Britain in 1910 [ ... ] was designed in the interests of imperialism. Power was transferred

not into the hands of the masses of the people of South Africa, but into the hands of the minority alone.

[...] A new type of colonialism was developed, in which the oppressing White nation occupied the same

territory as the oppressed people themselves and lived side by side with them”. 'Non-White South Africa',

the document went on further, 'is the colony of White South Africa itself.' (SACP, pp. 43-44)3.

3 South African Communist Party, 'The Road to South African Freedom: Programme of the South African Communist Party', The African Communist, 2.2 (January-March, 1963), 24-70.

13

This analysis was formally adopted by the ANC in 1969 at the Morogoro Conference in Tanzania. The

Strategy and Tactics document argued that: “South Africa's social and economic structure and the

relationships which it generates are perhaps unique. It is not a colony, yet it has, in regard to the

overwhelming majority of its people, most of the features of the classical colonial structures. [...] What

makes the structure unique and adds to its complexity is that the exploiting nation is not, as in the

classical imperialist relationships, situated in a geographically distinct mother country, but is settled

within the borders. What is more, the roots of the dominant nation have been embedded in our country by

more than three centuries of presence. It is thus an alien body only in the historical sense” (ANC: 1969,

The White Group).4

By this formulation white South Africans were rendered indigenous, despite that they were a settler

population. The 1977 Lisbon conference noted, for example, that “the white population in South Africa

has severed ties with their respective metropoles, that they recognise South Africa as their homeland”. As

a result, it continued, the “conference fully endorses and hails the ANC position, reflected in the

Freedom Charter, which declares that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white” (ANC:

1977)5.

If, however, whites and blacks were both, in effect, indigenous to the territory of South Africa, why

discuss the South African social formation as a colonial one at all? Why not, for example, simply describe

it as the Americans did – a civil rights problem?

The reason lay in the way that the ANC (and the SACP) understood colonialism. Following Lenin they

regarded colonial domination as a relationship between distinct peoples and capitalism. Blacks and

Whites may, in effect, be indigenous to South Africa, yet they constituted different nations nonetheless.

The domination of the one nation by the other was driven, not by cultural factors (or what Lenin

discussed as ‘superstructural’ phenomena), but by the development of capitalism in South Africa itself. In

other words, apartheid constituted a colonial situation because, firstly, it saw one nation dominating

another. Secondly national domination was a necessary outcome of capitalism at a certain stage of

development – that is, Imperialism.

The theory of Colonialsm-of-a-Special-Type, however, left the precise mechanics of race domination

and its relationship to class exploitation obscure. It was left to a generation of Marxist scholars to

4 African National Congress, Strategy and Tactics of the ANC, adopted by the Morogoro Conference of the ANC, Morogoro, Tanzania, 1969, http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/stratact.html, consulted 4/5/2010.5 African National Congress, ‘Colonialism of a Special Type’, Statement of the Lisbon Conference, March 1977, http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/special.html, consulted 3 May 2010.

14

work them out in South Africa.

3.1. Articulation of Modes of ProductionHarold Wolpe’s major contribution was to understand that the conservation of the rural ‘reserves’

was key to the reproduction of capitalist relations of production. It is worth dwelling on this

argument for a moment because it brings to the fore the theoretical and political burdens of treating

apartheid as a form of colonialism.

“The crucial function thus performed by the policy of Segregation was to maintain the productive capacity of

the pre-capitalist economies and the social system of the African societies in order to ensure that these

societies provided portion of the means of reproduction of the migrant working-class. […]

15

Wolpe invokes here a distinction introduced by Ernesto Laclau between an economic system and a mode of

production, to argue that in the South African situation, the economic system was characterised by a

combination of modes of production, pre-capitalist and capitalist. During the period of segregation (ending

in 1948), the cost of labour power for the mines was subsidised by the pre-capitalist, agrarian mode of

production in the reserve areas. In other words, what made labour power cheap was that wages payable to

miners had only to cover the costs of their social and biological reproduction alone; and not of their

families as well. Therein lay the system’s fatal contradiction. As the rural areas became more and more

impoverished – a situation generated and necessitated by the migrant labour system itself – so subsistence

on the land became less and less viable for migrants’ families. As agricultural yields were no longer able to

provide for the reproduction of the rural population, so pressure increased on migrants’ wages to fill the

gap. Yet growing upward pressure on wages threatened the rate of profit.

“The policy of Apartheid developed,” on Wolpe’s terms, “as a response to this urban and rural challenge to the system

which emerged inexorably from the changed basis of cheap labour-power. What was at stake was nothing less that the

reproduction of the labour force, not in general, but in a specific form, in the form of cheap labour-power. Within its

framework Apartheid combined both institutionalizing and legitimating mechanism and, overwhelmingly, coercive

measures” (Wolpe, p. 446).

Therein lies the kernel of the CST thesis.

Whites and blacks may inhabit the same territory, yet the relationship between them was largely determined by their

respective positions in the capitalist relations of production. On Pallo Jordan’s terms we might say that the capitalist

system was the chief source of institutionalized racism. As long as gross repression was needed to reproduce cheap

labour, it was impossible to make democratic concessions in South Africa. As long as large-scale black urbanization

was a threat to the economic system, repressive and discriminatory laws were required to control the movement of

black people (Influx control, pass laws, group areas act, Bantustan policies). As long as black people were the

majority, it was necessary to deny them political rights in the state, less they change the laws and regulations that

sustained South African capitalism.

Let us note that on Wolpe’s terms the end of Apartheid was necessarily associated with the defeat of capitalism, at

least, with the end of the regime of cheap labour and the economic system that functioned on its back. This is the

proper sense of the National Democratic Revolution (NDR) as it was enunciated in ANC and SACP circles. Raymond

16

Suttner and Jeremy Cronin discussed the anti-capitalist character of the anti-apartheid struggle in terms of it being

‘socialist-in-orientation’ - this in recognition of the way that the capitalist economy was implicated in race domination

(Suttner and Cronin, 1985).

3.2. Another Relationship between Race and ClassWe can read Wolpe against himself, however. Wolpe’s own argument in 1972 suggested another more

ambivalent relationship between race domination and class exploitation. To the extent that the cheap labour

system was in crisis by 1948, there were other options than the Apartheid policy to preserve it. Wolpe

notes, for example, that “for English dominated large-scale capital (particularly mining but also sections of

secondary industry), the solution, both to the problem of the level of profit and to the threat to their political

control implicit in growing African militancy was to somewhat alter the structure of Segregation in favour

of Africans” (Wolpe, p. 445). In other words, even within the mining industry, it was possible to tolerate

higher African wages. Wolpe suggests that this would only have been possible by recovering the losses

from white, Afrikaans workers.

Hence, Wolpe’s argument is that, ultimately, Apartheid was driven by political, rather than economic

considerations. “The alternative for the Afrikaner working-class, resisting competition from African

workers, for the growing Afrikaner industrial and financial capitalist class, struggling against the

dominance of English monopoly capital, and, perhaps, for a petit-bourgeoisie threatened with

proletarianization by the advance of African workers (and the Indian petit-bourgeoisie), was to assert

control over the African and other Non-white people by whatever means were necessary. For the Afrikaner

capitalist class, African labour-power could be maintained as cheap labour-power by repression; for the

White worker, this also guaranteed their own position as a ‘labour-aristocracy’” (Wolpe, pp. 445-446)

Yet is also possible that mining capitalists would have accepted (or had to accept) a lower rate of profit. This is

hardly far-fetched. What constitutes an acceptable rate of profit is neither a law of economics, nor is it given by

strictly economic factors. It is contingent on the balance of class forces in the conjuncture and on a range of social

and cultural factors, including norms of remuneration, social attitudes to what constitutes value (greed, merit), the 6 On his terms, industrial enterprises, like gold mines, relied on cheap labour. Yet, whereas the reserve economies effectively subsidised the cost of African labour power in the mines, industrial firms relied on a different mechanism to keep wages low. This is how Wolpe explained the rise of the Bantustan system, as a mechanism to reduce the cost of African labour power in industry by encouraging industrial activity in areas exempt from labour reservation (hence where they could employ Africans to do jobs normally reserved for higher paid whites), where concessions made to trade unions did not apply and where workers where located in dormitory settlements where the costs of living were lower than in established townships. 7 Peter Alexander argues that matters were more uneven than that suggested by FOSATU. Even in manufacturing there was heavy dependence on migrant labour, exacerbating tensions within the ruling class (Alexander, p. 113).

17

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