From: Patrick Bond (pbond@MAIL.NGO.ZA)
Date: Fri Feb 24 2006 - 08:57:48 EST
Hi comrades on CCS-list, debate list, PEN-L and OPE-Lists (and feel free to forward this onward if you find interested readers), The CCS Economic Justice Colloquium starts next Tuesday and runs through Saturday afternoon. A great deal of interesting material has come in, which we're processing and hoping to have put together by Monday in a coherent CD for those attending. If you can't come but want a sense of the discourses, we're now sending the early papers out; just email me at this address offlist: pbond@mail.ngo.za To whet appetites and reintroduce everyone to some of the themes, especially 'articulation of modes of production' with which we'll begin our deliberations next Tuesday, we have a couple of sections from a Michael Burawoy Wolpe Memorial lecture in July 2004 (which by the way we are publishing as the lead chapter in the brand new book Articulations to be launched on 28/2 at Ike's Books in central Durban). The sections cover strengths and weaknesses of the Wolpe thesis on class/race, capitalist/precapitalist relations. Burawoy isn't with us next week, but other work in this tradition will be considered, by a variety of political economists. We anticipate that two journals - Capitalism Nature Socialism and Review of African Political Economy - will carry many of these papers; and others will be produced by the Centre and our partners in other forms. Meanwhile, we can send the papers to you in batches of three if you'd like. Cheers Patrick http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs *** THE UKZN CENTRE FOR CIVIL SOCIETY, HAROLD WOLPE MEMORIAL TRUST, OPEN SOCIETY INITIATIVE OF SOUTHERN AFRICA, ROSA LUXEMBURG FOUNDATION, RESEARCH COUNCIL OFNORWAY, SA NATIONAL RESEARCH FOUNDATION, SANPAD AND TWO LEADING JOURNALS - CAPITALISM NATURE SOCIALISM AND REVIEW OF AFRICAN POLITICAL ECONOMY - PRESENT A COLLOQUIUM ON ECONOMY, SOCIETY, NATURE In cooperation with partners, the Centre for Civil Society will be opening thematic research projects on 'Economic Justice' in 2006. We will launch this theme by reviewing some of the finest traditions of South African, regional and global political-economic theory and contemporary analysis, and invite you to join us. We are mainly concerned with market-nonmarket interactions and new forms of 'primitive accumulation'. Given the sustainability and volatility problems that capitalism faces today, the time is opportune to consider whether formal markets, the informal economy and other nonmarket aspects of society and nature are divorced or interconnected. Under contemporary conditions of 'globalisation', does the fight against exploitation, racism, sexism and ecological destruction require contesting the market itself? If so, how? Four scholar-activists - Harold Wolpe in South Africa, Guy Mhone and José Negrão in Southern Africa and Rosa Luxemburg in Europe - developed consistent arguments about the way market forces systematically exploit other modes of production, society (especially women's unpaid labour, via racist colonialism) and the natural environment. In Pretoria, government explains this legacy as 'first and second economies' and claims a 'developmental state' is being built to fix matters. How do we understand it - and what do we do about it? Social scientists will be addressing the problems from 28 February through 2 March, in an event open to the public (decommodified - no conference fee). On 3-4 March, activists from across KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa and the region are especially invited to help move from analysis to praxis, with open discussions and strategic debates in the framework of the Rosa Luxemburg Political Education Seminar. *** 28/2 - SOUTH AFRICA (Dedication to Harold Wolpe) OPENING AND INTRODUCTION: LEGACIES OF 'ARTICULATION OF MODES OF PRODUCTION' Ann-Marie Wolpe (Wolpe Trust) 'ARTICULATION' FROM FEUDALISM TO NEOLIBERALISM: Michael Perelman (CalState) SA SOCIAL CRITIQUE POST-WOLPE: Ari Sitas (UKZN) 11:15AM PANEL 1 - SA URBAN-RURAL, RACE, GENDER AND LABOUR MARKETS Caroline Skinner & Imraan Valodia (UKZN) Renato Palmi (UKZN) Sthembiso Bhengu (UKZN) Richard Pithouse (UKZN) 11:15AM PANEL 2 - SA'S NEW 'DEVELOPMENTAL STATE'? Nina Hunter (UKZN) Hein Marais (ind.) Devan Pillay (Wits) Mark Butler (groundWork) 2PM PANEL 1 - SA URBAN-RURAL, RACE, GENDER AND LABOUR MARKETS David Hemson (HSRC) Simon Mapadimeng (UKZN) Lubna Nadvi (UKZN) Richard Ballard (UKZN) 2PM PANEL 2 - SA'S NEW 'DEVELOPMENTAL STATE'? Isobel Frye (Naledi) Charles Meth (UKZN) Bill Freund (UKZN) Ashwin Desai (UKZN) 4PM CAPITALISM, RACISM, SEXISM IN SA POLI-ECON THEORY Vishnu Padayachee (UKZN) Margaret Legum (SANE) David Masondo (Wits) Martin Legassick (UWC) 6:30PM EVENING EVENT (INCLUDING DRINKS/FOOD) Booklaunches at Ike's Books, 48a Florida Road Articulations: A Harold Wolpe Memorial Lecture Collection (editor: Amanda Alexander, CCS; copublished by AWP) Dennis Brutus: Poetry and Protest (UKZN Press & Haymarket Press) Tributes: Vonani wa ka Bila (Timbila), Mphutlane Bofelo and Pinky Magwaza (Jubilee SA) *** 1 MARCH - SOUTHERN AFRICA AND AFRICA (Dedications to Guy Mhone and José Negrão) OPENING AND INTRODUCTION: LEGACIES OF 'ENCLAVITY': Adebayo Olukoshi (Codesria) 11:15AM REGIONAL LABOUR MARKETS AND LABOUR REPRODUCTION Lloyd Sachikonye (UZ) David Moore (UKZN) Horacio Zandamela (Wits) Judica Maketha (ILO) 2PM REGIONAL ECONOMIES: IS SOUTH AFRICA SUB-IMPERIALIST? Tandeka Nkiwane (Unisa) John Daniel (HSRC) Riaz Tayob (Seatini) Patrick Bond (UKZN) 4PM SOUTHERN AFRICAN AND AFRICAN RESISTANCE Mohau Pheko (Genta) Dennis Brutus (Jubilee SA) Horman Chitonge (UKZN) EVENING EVENT LAUNCH (MTB COURTYARD) The Great Trek North by Console Tleane Personal Tributes to Guy Mhone and José Negrão: Yvonne and Pat Mhone, Omano Edigheji (CPS), Sabina Asselle, Patrick Bond (UKZN), Horacio Zandamela (Wits) and Tawanda Mutasah (Osisa) *** 2 MARCH - GLOBAL (Dedication to Rosa Luxemburg) LEGACIES OF LUXEMBURG'S 'IMPERIALISM' LUXEMBURG AND SA HISTORY: Jeff Guy (UKZN) NEOLIBERALISM, IMPERIALISM AND THE COMMONS: Nicola Bullard (Focus on the Global South) ACCUMULATION OF CAPITAL IN CONTEXT: Arndt Hopfmann (RLF) 11:15AM FRONTIERS OF PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION Massimo De Angelis (U.of E.London) Ahmed Veriava (UKZN) Prishani Naidoo (UKZN) David Whitehouse (ISR) 2PM IMPERIALISM AND NEW COMMODITY FORMS Elmar Altvater (Free University) Gill Hart (Berkeley) 4PM CONTESTING COMMODIFICATION Joel Kovel (CNS) Virginia Setshedi (FXI) Rehana Dada & Trusha Reddy (UKZN) Salim Valley (Wits) 5:45PM ROSA LUXEMBURG'S TRADITIONS: Arndt Hopfmann (RLF) EVENING OPTIONS INCLUDE THE 'TOXIC TOUR' OF SOUTH DURBAN WITH THE WORLD-RENOWNED COMMUNITY ENVIRONMENTAL ALLIANCE, AND A NEW FILM ON IMPERIALISM'S FEBRUARY 2004 KIDNAPPING/OUSTER OF HAITIAN PRESIDENT JEAN-BERTRAND ARISTIDE *** 3-4 MARCH The Rosa Luxemburg Educational Seminar 2006 will air political-economic ideas, strategies, tactics and debates amongst social, labour and environmental activists from KZN province, SA and the region. Resource people include Elmar Altvater, Vanessa Black, George Dor, Des D'Sa, Ulrich Duchrow, Lenny Gentle, Joel Kovel, Muna Lakhani, Thabo Madihlaba, Ntwala Mwilima, Trevor Ngwane, Bobby Peek, Karen Read, Greg Ruiters, Virginia Setshedi and S'bu Zikode. 3 MARCH ACTIVISTS AND SOCIAL SCIENTISTS SHARE STRATEGY SESSIONS 'Accumulation of capital in national, regional and global perspective' Film screening of »Rosa Luxemburg« by Margaretha von Trotta (Including drinks/food) 4 MARCH ACTIVISTS AND SOCIAL SCIENTISTS SHARE STRATEGY SESSIONS 'Popular resistance to the accumulation of capital' *** MICHAEL BURAWOY FROM LIBERATION TO RECONSTRUCTION: THEORY AND PRACTICE IN THE LIFE OF HAROLD WOLPE II: Liberation: Modes of production, the state, and class analysis We begin with Wolpe's classic paper, 'Capitalism and Cheap Labour-Power in South Africa: From Segregation to Apartheid', which helped to transform our understanding of South Africa.13 Here he takes issue with two literatures: on the one hand the literature of the South African Communist Party with its internal colonial model and the more conventional sociological literature that saw South Africa as a plural society held together by coercion. Paradoxically both assess South Africa in a similar way, namely as a society in which racial divisions - the domination of white over black - trump all others. The SACP defined South Africa as an archaic colonial superstructure fettering the spontaneous development of capitalism. This gave political priority to the National Liberation struggle that would mobilise Africans against apartheid, and either immediately or in a second stage, bring South African capitalism down with it.14 Wolpe develops a more contingent understanding of the relation between racism and capitalism, insisting that apartheid was not simply the deepening of segregation but reflected the transformation of the underlying economic order. But here again he locates himself against two opposed alternatives: his economic turn dwelt neither on the racial division of labour nor on the distinction between forced and free labour,15 but on the articulation of capitalist and pre-capitalist modes of production. He brought to life this rather arcane conceptualisation by showing how it could be used to describe the specificity of the South African racial order. It proved to be Wolpe's most significant contribution to the theory of racism as well as the analysis of South Africa. The African redistributive mode of production, based on kinship, cattle and tilling the land subsidised the reproduction of labour power, so that capitalists, especially mining capital, could pay their workers a wage that corresponded to little more than what was necessary to maintain a single worker. The wage did not have to support children, elderly, disabled, women so long as the reserves - 13 per cent of the land area into which Africans were herded in accordance with the 1913 Natives Land Act - did indeed provide a subsistence existence. This was the period of Segregation when the state's function was to maintain the circulatory flow of African migrant labour between town and country, by protecting the reserves from white expropriation on the one hand and by making it difficult for Africans to settle permanently in urban areas on the other. Segregation prevailed, Wolpe claims, from 1870 to the 1930s whereupon population pressure, soil erosion, and the concentration of land ownership began to undermine the reproductive role of the reserves. Rural impoverishment led to urban impoverishment, especially affecting workers in the expanding manufacturing sector, leading to intensified class struggles in the 1940s, and creating a deep crisis for the political regime. A new mechanism for producing cheap labour had to be found: either the racial order (with its color bars, limited education for blacks, migrant labour system, etc.) would be modified to allow Africans to take over positions monopolised by the white labour aristocracy or the latter - by combining with Afrikaner farmers - would shore up the racial order with intensified repression. The latter solution - Apartheid - won the day and cheap African labour was perpetuated not through the reproduction of pre-capitalist modes of production but through an elaborate political and ideological edifice that outlawed African organisations, regulated urban residence, and turned the reserves into dependent homelands, or, as they were officially called, Bantustans - satrapies for a small African elite. 'Capitalism and Cheap Labour-Power in South Africa' became a foundation stone for a new research program into the study of South Africa, the extent of which I cannot explore here. Rather I will follow the logic of Wolpe's own contribution. Focusing on the mechanisms of the reproduction of cheap labour turned his attention to the state. In the original formulation, the state was a mere reflection of the need for cheap labour. It did what it had to do - maintain cheap labour power - because that was its function! But how was it that the state so effectively and seemingly miraculously always managed to create the conditions for the reproduction of cheap labour power? How was it that it understood what to do and had the capacity to do it? Was this animal acting of its own accord or at the behest of a master? The knee jerk response of Marxism has always been that the state is an instrument of the capitalist class. And indeed such crude views were often found in the SACP literature wherein the South Africa state was regarded as a species of fascism created by and for a unified capitalist class. But that assumed away the problem. How was it that out of individual competing capitalists sprung a coordinated ruling class that magically comprehended and enforced its common interests? This was the point of departure for a group of Marxists - known as the gang of four - influenced by one of the icons of Marxist structuralism, Nicos Poulantzas.16 They argued, following Poulantzas, that the dominant class in capitalist society was made up of class fractions (mining capital, manufacturing capital, land owners, merchant capital, etc. in the case of South Africa) that become organised into a 'power bloc' in which one fraction - the hegemonic fraction - comes to represent the interests of all. In a series of essays and books the Poulantzians periodised South Africa capitalism as a succession of different power blocs, handing the initiative for change to forces within the dominant class. While not discounting this approach altogether Wolpe took them to task for neglecting the fundamental contradiction between capital and labour but also for continuing with an 'instrumentalist' view of the state.17 Although it was a major advance to break up the dominant class into its different fractions, still it was the hegemonic fraction that wielded the state in the general interest of capitalism. In identifying the hegemonic fraction by the policies the state pursued the Poulantzians assumed precisely what had to be demonstrated, namely that the state was indeed an instrument of some hegemonic fraction. The trouble with the instrumentalist view of the state, Wolpe argued, is that when it is not tautological it too often lapses into its opposite. That is to say instrumentalists tend to work back from some given policy, say pass laws and influx control, to the fraction of capital that benefits, say mining capital, and concludes that the state is the instrument of mining capital without ever showing that mining capital was indeed the force behind the legislation. Alternatively, when the state does something in opposition to the supposedly reigning fraction of capital, eg.when color bars are introduced against the will of mining capital, then the instrumentalist position has to be given up for one that stresses the autonomy or potential autonomy of the state. From being an instrument of the hegemonic fraction it suddenly becomes a subject with a will of its own! Here then, once again, Wolpe constructs a debate between two opposed perspectives: the state as an object (instrument) and the state as subject (autonomy). Both suffer from the assumption that the state is a unified organ whereas it is made up of contradictory apparatuses between which, within which, and over which there is much contestation. The two opposed perspectives cancel each other out and Wolpe comes away with his preferred theory: the state is a contradictory unity, neither subject nor object but a terrain of struggle. The structure of the state, therefore, shapes not only internal struggles on its own terrain but also influences external struggles in civil society. Wolpe refocuses the debate onto the nature of the state, viewed not as an external object to be conquered, but as having a specific structure with specific effects. This is all very abstract but Wolpe tries to make it concrete in his book Race, Class and the Apartheid State.18 Its major thesis is that the state creates opportunities and sets limits on struggles both on its own terrain, especially within and among the judiciary, the legislature, executive, and military, as well as outside the state in civil society and the workplace. Just as Wolpe's earlier work highlighted the discontinuity between segregation and apartheid on the basis of economic change, so now he seeks to distinguish three periods within the era of apartheid on the basis of forms of state and their effects on patterns of struggle. - In the first period, 1948-1960, the judiciary, although nominally independent, became increasingly subordinated to the executive through parliamentary edicts. Even though spaces for political action were increasingly restricted, mass struggles nevertheless continued to expand, culminating in the Sharpeville massacre of 1960. - The second period from 1960 to 1973 saw the abandonment of even the pretense of the rule of law, and the extra-parliamentary political terrain was systematically destroyed, organisations were banned and activists imprisoned. The liberation movements went underground and turned to armed struggle. The state responded with declarations of emergency, enhancing its police powers and closing down virtually all possibilities of reform. - The third period, which Wolpe calls the 'rise of insurrectionary struggles', begins in 1973 with the Durban strikes, and the Black Consciousness Movement in communities and schools. How are we to explain these new developments? Certainly, as Wolpe claims, the state is not weaker. If anything it has become substantially stronger: the government arrogated greater power both to itself as well as to the military and security forces. Along with the militarisation came a series of reforms - recognition of trade unions, representative bodies in urban areas, greater autonomy for Bantustans, tricameral legislature. While many maintained that these reforms were a facade, Wolpe insisted that they opened spaces for the mass democratic movement, which was also being fueled by changes in the economy. Let me recapitulate so as to better appreciate what Wolpe is up to. If his first contribution was to identify the economic structure that underlay apartheid, that is, the (re)articulation of modes of production, and if his second contribution was to foreground the changing form of state that is always creating new political possibilities as it sustains (or not) that articulation of modes of production, then the third contribution, to which we come to now, was his analysis of class formation, viewed as the combined effect of economic and political structures. Thus, in the analysis of the third period Wolpe focuses on the way the economy restructures the relation between class and race. The concentration and increasing capital intensivity of industry called for skilled blacks who moved into positions vacated by outwardly mobile whites. As compared to the migrant workers, these 'urban insiders' were better educated and had deeper routes in the city, which therefore meant increased class capacity of the most unambiguous opponents of apartheid. At the same time economic changes reconfigured class interests within the white society. Unprecedented growth in manufacturing and service sectors overtook mining, so that ever larger fractions of capital depended on a wider and more stable labour force that would not only produce more but also consume on a bigger scale! As capital's opposition to apartheid stiffened, so support for apartheid from white workers and the white petit bourgeoisie also waned. They were displaced by a black petit bourgeoisie, growing in the towns, and the consolidation of a black 'bureaucratic bourgeoisie' in the Bantustans. Wolpe warned, however, that these classes - the black petit bourgeoisie in the cities and bureaucratic bourgeoisie of the Bantustans - also had a growing interest in apartheid's racial segregation of consumer markets and administrative apparatuses.19 . 1: Producing cheap labour power Wolpe's original argument was that under segregation cheap labour power had an economic basis - the homeland economies provided welfare for non-employed family members. As this economic basis for cheap labour power eroded, it was replaced by political mechanisms of apartheid. This argument, however, overlooked new economic foundations of cheap labour and the political conditions of their reproduction. · Where is gender? Amy Mariotti argued that the influx of women into the apartheid labour force, in manufacturing but especially in service sector and professions, such as teaching and nursing, turned multiple earner families into a new basis for cheap labour power. Still, the apartheid system focused on the employment of black men. Today that is changing. First, the expansion of consumerism increases clerical, service, and retail jobs where women prevail. Second, as the unemployment of men increases, women are forced to become the new breadwinners, the new migrant labourers traveling to urban areas for employment as vendors, domestic workers, and sex workers. Xolani Ngonini has argued that the men left behind in the reserves are unable to adapt to the new circumstances, but women, already accustomed to flexible economic strategies under apartheid, are better equipped to deal with destitution. More generally, how are patterns of gender relations and kinship organisation imbricated in the manufacture of cheap labour power?34 · The expansion of rural industrialisation. When Wolpe wrote his cheap labour power paper border industrialisation was little more than a paper program. However, in the 1970s and 1980s capital did migrate to the new rural slums created by forced removals from the black spots within agricultural areas. Gillian Hart writes of the textile and steel industries that moved to KwaZulu-Natal where they could exploit the dispossessed peasantry. What have been the dynamics of rural industrialisation and with what consequences for the African working class?35 · Global connections. When he referred to the erosion of subsistence in the homelands and later Bantustans, Wolpe overlooked the transnational migration of workers from all over Southern Africa (Malawi, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique) not just to the mines but to other urban occupations such as domestic work. Today we see an influx of immigrants from all over Africa as South African cities become the regional consumer and industrial Mecca. By the same token, South African mining, manufacturing, and retail capital migrates northwards, just as foreign capital - from both West and East - continues to invest in South Africa. How has the lowering of trade barriers dismantled manufacturing, increased unemployment, flooded the market with cheap consumer goods, and thus reduced the costs of labour power? More generally, what are the significant patterns of South Africa's incorporation into Southern Africa, the continent of Africa as a whole and the globe with respect to flows of labour and capital?36 · Privatising the state. In Wolpe's account of cheap labour power there was always the unposed question: cheap for whom? It may have been cheap for capital (low wages) but it became increasingly expensive for the apartheid state, which bore the ultimately unbearable burden of regulating the social and geographical mobility of African labour. The apartheid state absorbed the cost of cheap labour. Today, it would seem that the post-apartheid state is shedding that cost by privatising its public services (water, electricity, housing). It is cutting its subsidies for cheap labour and creating much misery in the process, especially for the mounting numbers of unemployed. By way of reaction, it has set in motion community struggles across the nation. What are the class bases of the struggles outside the state but also within the state over the social wage?37 · The non-reproduction of labour power? In his original article Wolpe assumed that capital has to reproduce labour power, that it is necessary to maintain labourers on a day-to-day basis and somehow the labour force has to be renewed intergenerationally. There is ample evidence, however, that capital is not concerned about the reproduction of labour power. African labourers have suffered deplorable and dangerous working conditions in the mines, for example, where they have suffered high rates of accidents. Furthermore, capitalism was indifferent as to whether the Bantustans were subsistence plots or burial grounds. Today, the relative weak response to AIDS suggests that South African capitalism can withstand the decimation of the country's active labouring population. What, then, are the interests and the capacity of the South African state and South African capital to support the reproduction of its labour force? 2: Extracting surplus For Wolpe the success of capital accumulation depends on cheapening labour power. He does not consider the alternative strategy of extracting more surplus from labour whether through working them harder (longer hours, more intensively), or through changing the work process through deskilling and mechanisation. Curiously, when he studied the labour process it was always to determine the class position of certain occupations not as a mechanism for increasing exploitation. There is, of course a long century of struggles over job reservation and color bars that protected white labour against cheap African labour. Inasmuch as these have disappeared so one might argue that labour costs fall and production can be rationalised. More generally what has happened to the mechanisms of surplus extraction in post-apartheid South Africa? · The informalisation of work. Studies at the University of Witwatersrand's Sociology of Work Unit (SWOP) suggest that the erosion of apartheid laws that regulated both occupational and geographical mobility have not always led to a concomitant erosion of the racial division of labour. Thus, for example, color bars may float upwards without disappearing. Moreover, the deregulation of apartheid has coincided with the unfettering of market forces to produce new strategies of flexible work organisation. In labour intensive manufacturing industries, such as garments and shoes, there is now a widespread use of outsourcing to small employers and family production. Similarly in agriculture and wine production there has been intensified casualisation of labour. Wolpe's articulation of capitalist and precapitalist modes of production becomes a chain of subcontracting that stretches from high end manufacturing to small enterprises to self-employed workers to family production to subsistence production and unemployment. How does this chain develop and how is the working population distributed along it?38 · New despotism at work. We need to distinguish between the reorganisation of work - informalisation, casualisation, outsourcing - and the regulation of production relations. Flexibility in production, competition in the market, and new mechanisms of producing cheap labour power have effectively weakened labour, undercut the power of unions, and facilitated the emergence of a new despotism in production. Karl Von Holdt has identified three scenarios for the regulation of the post-apartheid workplace: negotiated compromise, a spontaneous version that he calls wildcat cooperation and a third which seems most prevalent, 'authoritarian restoration'. Along the chain of subcontracting from core to periphery, how are forms of production regime distributed? What are the dilemmas of trade unions in this economic context, but also the political context, of post-apartheid South Africa?39 · Racial division of labour. Wolpe argued that the basis of the racial order lay in the economic structure. What are the contours of the new racial order and how do they reflect the changing labour supplies, and the informalisation of work. In what ways does liberal democracy conserve/restore or challenge/dissolve the racial division of labour and racialised property relations? 3: Race, class and the post-apartheid state Only once the parameters of the economy have been established can one begin to pose questions of state and class. · What is the role of the state in reproducing cheap labour power and the extraction surplus value? We need to examine the fractions of the capitalist class - finance, mining, manufacturing, merchant criss-crossed by national and international connections - that make up its power bloc. What fraction is driving the (dis)accumulation of capital in South Africa today? · How shall we conceive of the contradictory unity of the post-apartheid state? What are the tensions within the state between its various branches? What is the relation between the ruling party and the state? How does the alliance of party, COSATU, and SACP organise hegemony over the wider society? · How do transformation of economy and state combine to shape processes of class formation, including the racial formation of new dominant classes, strategies of black empowerment, and the African new and old petty bourgeoisie? How is the working class being recomposed and what is its relation to the marginalised populations? In short, what is the new class structure of South Africa today and how does it reproduce a new racial order? Notes 13 'Capitalism and cheap labour-power in South Africa: from segregation to apartheid'. Economy and Society 1(4) (1972): 425-56. It should be emphasised that Wolpe's theorising of South Africa was very dependent on the work of historians, such as Colin Bundy and Martin Leggasick. He was a regular participant in Shula Marks's London seminar on the history of South Africa. 14 Wolpe takes on the Internal Colonial model or 'colonialism of a special type', in 'The theory of internal colonialism: the South African case'. Pp.229-252 in Ivan Oxaal, Toney Barnett, and David Booth, editors, Beyond the Sociology of Development (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975). 15 For the former see Jack and Ray Simons, Class and Color in South Africa, 1850-1950 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969), for the latter see John Rex, Race, Class and Colonialism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973). 16 Rob Davies, David Kaplan, Mike Morris, and Dan O'Meara, 'Class Struggles and the Periodisation of the State in South Africa'. Review of African Political Economy 3(7) (1976): 4-30. Nicos Poulantzas shifted his analysis quite considerably, but it was Political Power and Social Classes (London: New Left Books, 1973) that influenced Davies et al. while Wolpe would turn to his later book, State, Power, Socialism (London, New Left Books, 1978) for a very different view of the state. 17 See Wolpe, 'Towards an Analysis of the South African State'. International Journal of the Sociology of Law 8(4) (1980): 399-421; 'The Analysis of the South African State'. Paper presented to Conference on 'Southern African Studies: Retrospect and Prospect, 30 May - 1 June, 1983. 18 Race, Class and the Apartheid State (London: James Currey and Paris: Unesco, 1988). 19 This class analysis can be found in Race, Class and the Apartheid State but its foundations lie in two superb articles - one on the white working class and the other on the African Petit-Bourgeoisie. In the first he cuts through much confusion by first determining white workers' exact locations in relation to the means of production and then, and only then, considering the effects of political structures. In the second paper Wolpe again gives priority to relations of production in distinguishing between new and old African petit bourgeoisie in both urban and rural areas where political structures are so different. He admonished Joe Slovo for prematurely subsuming the interests of the African petit bourgeoisie under Africans in general. Where the SACP gave primacy to the racial divide, Wolpe still insists on putting class first. Again Wolpe was not making a definitive claim about the consciousness of African petit bourgeoisie but directing the SACP to a possibility it should examine and take into account! See 'The 'white working class' in South Africa'. Economy and Society 5(2) (May 1976): 197-240; and 'The Changing Class Structure of South Africa: The African Petit-Bourgeoisie'. Pp.143-74 in P. Zarembka (ed.), Research in Political Economy, 2 (1978). 34 Amelia Mariotti, The Incorporation of African Women into Wage Employment in South Africa, 1920- 1970 (PhD Dissertation, University of Connecticut, 1980); Xolani Ngonini, 'The Impact of Mining Retrenchments on the Survival Strategies and Livelihoods of Rural Homesteads: A Case Study of Two Villages in Mbizana Municipal District, Eastern Cape'. (MA Thesis, University of Witwatersrand, 2002). 35 Gillian Hart, Disabling Globalisation: Places of Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 36 Hart, op.cit.; Darlene Miller, 'The Regional Workplace in Post-Apartheid Southern Africa - A case study of Shoprite, a retail multinational'. In Webster and Von Holdt (eds.), Flexible Worlds of Work: Ten Years of Restructuring Post-Apartheid Workplaces (Durban: University of Natal Press, forthcoming). 37 Ashwin Desai, We are the Poors: Community Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002); Patrick Bond, Unsustainable South Africa (Durban: University of Natal Press, 2002). 38 Here I am relying on studies conducted at SWOP and elsewhere, gathered together in Webster and Von Holdt, Flexible Worlds of Work: Ten Years of Restructuring Post-Apartheid Workplaces (Durban: University of Natal Press, Forthcoming). This was based on a conference held at the famed Lilliesleaf Farm and sponsored by the Wolpe Trust.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Feb 25 2006 - 00:00:02 EST