Re: Re: South Africa

[Chris Burford <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

At 19/06/01 18:42 -0400, Louis Proyect wrote:
> Leo Casey:
> "Given the historic role of migrant  labor and the reserves/bantustans in
> the very constitution of apartheid South  Africa, it was clear that entire
> sectors of the economy which remained pre-capitalist were articulated with
> other sectors which were capitalist in  nature. And the articulaton of
> modes of production can not be separated from  the articulation of race and
> class in South Africa."
>
>
> Louis Proyect:
> Leo refers to "entire sectors of the economy which remained
> pre-capitalist". Assuming he is referring to gold and diamond mining, then
> we are left with a rather unambiguous statement that the core of modern
> South Africa's economy has been "pre-capitalist".

I would have thought that gold and diamond mining were very obviously
capitalist.

Herding the blacks into arid bantustans was an artificial pre-capitalist
formation from which only male migrant labour was allowed to emerge to live
in barracks on the mines, vulnerable to drink and prostitution.

>  Since Leo is not a Marxist

Isn't this a characterisation? or certainly an unhelpful and dismissive
one? Leo as best as I can remember may have distanced himself from certain
political positions that he regards as marxist. But is there anything that
he wrote in the previous post that is *un*marxist in its approach to
analysing the political economy of apartheid South Africa?

The concrete analysis of concrete conditions is the basis of a materialist
approach and Leo was appealing to concrete analysis.  Further instead of
looking for neat categories, he refers to processes, consistently with the
way Lenin quotes Engels in "The Marxist Doctrine": "the world is not to be
comprehended as a complex of ready-made things, but as a complex of
processes, in which the things apparently stable no less than their mind
images in our heads, the concepts, go through an uninterrupted change of
coming into being and passing away ..." (Dialectics)

Chris Burford

London