Re: South Africa

[Chris Burford <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

At 19/06/01 20:21 -0400, Louis Proyect wrote:
> Jim Devine:
> >DEVELOPMENT, in a different way, as have many others.) Thus, from an
> >Althusserian viewpoint, we can see a "social formation" such as
> >Apartheid-era South Africa as being _complicated_  (combining capitalist
> >and non-capitalist social relations in production, with the former being
> >dominant)
>
> Interesting. Very interesting. The commanding heights of the South African
> economy, which produced the foreign exchange and capital necessary to
> create Jo'berg, etc. were non-capitalist. Interesting. Very interesting.

The proposition that anyone considered the South African mining industry as
pre-capitalist rather than capitalist was improbable.

But the proposition that the commanding heights of the South African
economy were "pre" capitalist is interesting. One of the major unwritten
aspects of the political economy of apartheid South Africa was how big the
state sector was.

This was essentially a Boer national capitalism, built up after they won
dominance in the legislature in 1947. It was their weapon against British
imperialism. After the fall of apartheid many of the activists of the ANC
and the South African Communist Party had assumed that the new regime could
take over a strong state sector. But as the outgoing regime organised
"black on black" violence, the ANC leadership felt more and more
compromises were necessary for social peace.

The incomplete overthrow of apartheid (incomplete national liberation
struggle) was therefore accompanied by another revolution which all parties
had an interest in minimising:

the overthrow of Boer national capital by US-British international
capital/imperialism

The latter had found it in its interests to compromise with the world wide
anti-apartheid movement because it was likely to get more direct control
over means of production in South Africa and in any case was promoting
neo-liberal political as well as economic values.

The political formation of South Africa was complicated because it combined
two major strands of settler colonialism (Dutch and English) which had
started at different stages of the global rise of capitalism, plus major
adaptations to imperialist colonialism, that is colonialism as it mainly
took shape in the era of (Leninist) imperialism on subject populations.

Part of the tangle of apartheid was that the British government, weakened
by the Second World War was prepared to treat South Africa as a Dominion
(ie a settler type colony) to avoid anything like another Boer War, and had
allowed the Boers to restrict the Black franchise. The dominant political
economic formation of apartheid South Africa was therefore a Boer national
capital one, in which a few major international financial companies like
the mining companies were allowed to exploit provided they did so in close
cooperation with the apartheid state.

The strata of the liberal intelligentsia which opposed this was weak, and
had a long road to build an alliance with the oppressed black proletariat
and rural workers. That is why people of jewish and Indian background
played such an important role in bridging and developing the ultimately
successful strategy of the South African Communist Party.

Jim Devine was illustrating an Althuserrian approach. But just before, I
think he put his finger on the issue: in marxism abstractions are
abstractions from concrete reality which aim to illuminate the underlying
processes. It is not to be expected that they are concrete types in
themselves, categories into which we slot one state or another. I cannot
give the references here this morning, but I am sure that a close reading
of Marx and Engels shows that they always assumed a complex
interpenetration of different types of modes of production.

No doubt Patrick Bond and others may have interesting points to clarify on
the nature of the South African economy before and after apartheid, but the
essence of the theoretical argument, I suggest is as I have just said. Let
us learn more through the dialectics of debate and argument about how to
understand the underlying processes but it may fatally mispose the question
to ask whether a particular state is capitalist or precapitalist in
categorical terms.

Chris Burford

London