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Anti-apartheid, Anti-capitalism, and Anti-imperialism: Liberation in South Africa
This essay aims to briefly collect the historical context of colonialism in Puerto Rico since the Spanish era but primarily focuses on revealing the reasons to consider Puerto Rico as a colony and non-self-governing territory of the US-rather than a neocolony of the US. Later, the article addresses the three non-colonial options recognized by the 1514 United Nations (UN) Resolution and the results of the five referendums on the political status of the Caribbean archipelago held over the last five decades. The essay concludes that Puerto Rico is undoubtedly a colony and asks for the United Nations and the sovereign countries of the world to denounce this illegal colonial relationship that subordinates residents of Puerto Rico to the will of the US Congress where they have no voting representatives.
The first full account of the Marikana Massacre, 2012. It includes workers’ testimonies (gathered immediately after the event), context, conclusions (including culpability), maps, and names of those who died. This is the 2013 revised version of the original edition, published in 2012, also by Jacana Media. The 2013 edition was used as the basis of subsequent versions published by Ohio University Press, Bookmarks Publishing and Mandelbaum - Kritik and Utopie,, all in 2013, the latter in German with two additional chapters. The Ohio edition was entitled Marikana: Voices from South Africa’s Mining Massacre, and the Mandelbaum edition as Das Massaker von Marikana.
This article situates the Marikana massacre, in which 34 mine workers were gunned down by police in South Africa, in the context of what the South African state has become, and questions the characterisation of the post-Apartheid state as a "developmental state". This contribution first highlights what is at stake when the post-Apartheid state is portrayed as a "developmental state" and how this misrecognition of the state is ideologically constituted. Second, it argues for an approach to understanding the post-Apartheid state by locating it within the context of the rise of transnational neoliberalism and the process of indigenising neoliberalism on the African continent. Third, it examines the actual economic practices of the state that constitute it as an Afro-neoliberal state. Such economic practices are historicised to show the convergence between the post-Apartheid state and the ideal type neoliberal state coming to the fore in the context of global neoliberal restructuring and crisis management. The article concludes by recognising that South Africa's deep globalisation and globalised state affirm a form of state practice beyond utilising market mechanisms that includes perpetrating violence to secure its existence. Marikana makes this point.
South Africa is torn between the persistence of an exclusionary socioeconomic structure marked by deep poverty and extreme inequality on the one hand, and on the other the symbolic and institutional rupture presented by the transition to democracy. This relationship produces a highly unstable social order in which intra-elite conflict and violence are growing, characterised by new forms of violence and the reproduction of older patterns of violence, a social order that can be characterised as violent democracy. I analyse three different forms of such violence – the struggle for control of the state institutions of coercion, assassination, and the mobilisation of collective violence. The prevailing forms of politics may shift quite easily between authoritarianism, clientelism and populism, and indeed exhibit elements of all three at the same time. Violent practices accompany each of these political forms, as violence remains a critical resource in a struggle for ascendancy which democratic institutions are unable to regulate.
This paper will examine the processes of class formation being augmented by South Africa's democratic transition and the impacts these processes are having on trade union organising. Through a case study of the National Union of Mineworkers in the energy industry, it will be argued that affirmative action and employment equity policies are opening up divisions within the union and eroding its unifying class identity. This poses a great challenge, not only to trade union organisation, but also to how we understand the political role of South Africa's trade unions within the post-apartheid era.
[Le travail organisé et la politique de formation des classes après l'époque de l'apartheid en Afrique du Sud.] Le présent document examine les processus de formation des classes mis en croissance par la transition démocratique en Afrique du Sud et les impacts que ces processus ont sur l'organisation syndicale. Grâce à une étude de cas du Syndicat national des mineurs (NUM) dans le secteur de l'énergie, on fera valoir que l'action positive et les politiques d'équité dans le domaine de l'emploi suscitent des divisions au sein de l'Union et entament l'identité de la classe unificatrice. Cela pose un grand défi, non seulement à l'organisation syndicale, mais aussi à la façon dont nous comprenons le rôle politique des syndicats d'Afrique du Sud à travers l'ère d'après- apartheid.
Mots-clés : Afrique du Sud ; les syndicats ; l'action positive ; COSATU ; ANC
The South African Reserve Bank (SARB) announced in July 2010 its intention to introduce a new amnesty for illegal capital flight. For a flat rate fee of 10 per cent of the value of the assets, corporations and individuals disclosing their illegal expatriation of capital prior to February 2010 would receive no further penalties and be allowed to keep their assets offshore under the ‘Voluntary Disclosure Programme’ (VDP). SARB sees this as a first step towards the complete liberalisation of outflows. Such capital flight is not new but it has worsened significantly since the defeat of apartheid. As a percentage of GDP, it increased from an average of 5.4 per cent per year between 1980 and 1993 to 9.2 per cent between 1994 and 2000, and averaged 12 per cent between 2001 and 2007, finally peaking at a staggering 20 per cent in 2007. The vast majority of (illegal) capital flight arises out of transfer pricing by conglomerates, especially in and around mining, and forms part and parcel of a more general adjustment of such conglomerates to the imperatives of financialisation and globalisation in the wake of an apartheid backlog. In this sense, capital flight has been the most important form taken by the post-apartheid dividend, and has dictated and conformed with other less than satisfactory economic and social developments attached to the post-apartheid era, including elite Black Economic Empowerment. The impact has been to intensify falling domestic investment in productive activities, declining capital stock across almost all productive sectors, macroeconomic austerity and vulnerability, and de-industrialisation of the economy, further entrenching unemployment, poverty and extreme inequality in the provision of basic services. Rather than focusing on the motives of individuals, our approach emphasises that capital flight is a consequence of broader shifts in the global economy and the historical trajectory of South African economic development.
The idea that the South African ruling elite has the political will to establish a “developmental state” project early in the 21st century is popular, but is not borne out by evidence thus far. Patrick Bond reviews new information about the neoliberal project’s failures, which range from macroeconomics to microdevelopment to pro-corporate megaprojects, and which are accompanied by a tokenistic welfare policy not designed to provide sufficient sustenance or entitlements to the society. The critique by the independent left might be revised in the event that the trade unions and communist influences within the ruling Alliance strengthen, but there is a greater likelihood that the world capitalist crisis will have the opposite impact. Nevertheless, widespread grassroots protests and impressive campaigning by civil society keep alive the hope for a post-capitalist, post-nationalist politics, as bandaiding South African capitalism runs into trouble.
South Africa's gold mines are the largest and historically among the most profitable in the world. Yet at what human cost? This book reveals how the mining industry, abetted by a minority state, hid a pandemic of silicosis for almost a century and allowed miners infected with tuberculosis to spread disease to rural communities in South Africa and to labour-sending states. In the twentieth century, South African mines twice faced a crisis over silicosis, which put its workers at risk of contracting pulmonary tuberculosis, often fatal. The first crisis, 1896-1912, saw the mining industry invest heavily in reducing dust and South Africa became renowned for its mine safety. The second began in 2000 with mounting scientific evidence that the disease rate among miners is more than a hundred times higher than officially acknowledged. The first crisis also focused upon disease among the minority white miners: the current crisis is about black migrant workers, and is subject to major class actions for compensation. Jock McCulloch was a Legislative Research Specialist for the Australian parliament and has taught at various universities. His books include ‘Asbestos Blues’. Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Swaziland & Botswana): Jacana.
The South African economy experienced substantial growth and change over the twentieth century. By the time of Union in 1910, gold mining on the Witwatersrand had already and rapidly transformed what had been a peripheral agricultural economy into one that was industrialising around mineral exports. Gold attracted British capital and immigrants from Europe (as well as from across southern Africa), and made possible secondary industrialisation and four decades of sustained economic growth in the middle of the century. Between the early 1930s and early 1970s, the South African economy grew approximately tenfold in real terms. Even taking into account the steady increase in the population, real gross domestic product (GDP) per capita tripled (see Figure 11.1). Despite faltering growth in the 1980s, South Africa accounted for almost exactly one half of the total GDP of sub-Saharan Africa at the end of the apartheid period, in 1994.
This chapter examines unemployment trends since the time of the democratization of South Africa. It argues that the rise in unemployment is best explained by the rapid growth in the labour force relative to the growth of formal sector employment, as a result of which the burgeoning residual labour force was absorbed either into the informal sector, which might disguise unemployment, or into open unemployment. The growth of each of these variables is examined in more detail: in Section 2 the labour force, in Section 3 formal sector employment, and in Section 4 informal sector employment. The main topic, unemployment, is covered in Section 5. Section 6 updates the analysis by examining the period 2003-7 and poses the question: has a turning point now been reached? Section 7 concludes.
Charles Feinstein surveys five hundred years of South African economic history from the years preceding European settlements in 1652 through to the post-Apartheid era. Following the early phase of slow growth, he charts the transformation of the economy as a result of the discovery of diamonds and gold in the 1870s, and the rapid rise of industry in the wartime years. Finally, emphasizing the ways by which the black population was deprived of land, and induced to supply labor for white farms, mines and factories, Feinstein documents the introduction of apartheid after 1948, and its consequences for economic performance.
This book analyzes the nature of work and wore resistance in the metal industry which lies at the core of South Africa's manufacturing industry. It analyzes the interplay between the transformation of the labour process and the crisis in the system of racial capitalism as a whole to show how worker organisations , in resisting the state's incorporative strategy , have begun to develop a working class politics.
Locating his argument with reference to his own long acquaintance with Harold Wolpe, one dating from their first encounter as graduate students in Ralph Miliband's London School of Economics (LSE) seminar shortly after Wolpe's escape from prison and from South Africa itself, Saul emphasises in the remainder of his essay the extent to which the victory over apartheid has been only a very partial one. Indeed, a Fanonist picture of a ‘false decolonisation’, even a ‘recolonisation’ by a new Empire of Capital, fits – as elsewhere in southern Africa – all too comfortably the facts of the South African case. Several alternative ways of thinking about this reality are noted, as well as various alternative possible national projects, each of the latter suggesting the necessity of a ‘next’ or ‘second’ liberation struggle in South Africa. A number of key questions, arising from the analysis and inviting further discussion and exchange, are quite specifically signalled in the text.
This article focuses on the role played by both national and global finance in comparative economic performance. It critically examines financial economics, arguing that both the Efficient Markets Hypothesis and the New Financial Economics, with its emphasis on market imperfections, information asymmetries and financial systems, fail fully to explain theoretically the specific role played by finance in the economy and the emergence of specific financial systems. It cannot provide, therefore, an adequate account of variety in capitalism. Neither, however, can the Varieties of Capitalism literature which rejects excessively homogenising visions of institutional convergence but which foregrounds institutional variety without providing an adequate theory of institutions or a deeper theory of capital and capitalism. The argument is demonstrated through an examination of the changing nature of South Africa's financial system from the apartheid to the post-apartheid periods and its insertion in both national and global economies. Financialisation, it is argued, incorporates a global dynamic into the economic and social formation of class interests and national economies which is seen clearly in the South African case. The argument therefore provides a critique of both mainstream financial economics and the Varieties of Capitalism literature and sheds light on the relationship between finance and the real economy and the nature of contemporary capitalism.
The capital structure of the South African automotive industry has undergone a pronounced transformation since 1994. After seven decades of Import Substituting Industrialisation and widespread MNC disinvestment from the late 1970s, the promulgation of the MIDP in 1995 and the associated re-engagement of MNCs in South Africa, has launched the industry on an entirely new development path. The industry is now locked into a global operating environment, albeit in a peripheral manner, that limits opportunities for national capital and major foreign direct investment.
Amilcar L. Cabral (1921-1973) was an agronomist, nationalist leader, theoretician, and founder and secretary-general of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC), who helped lead Guinea-Bissau to independence. On January 20, 1973, he was assassinated outside his home in Conakry by Guinea-native agents of Portuguese authorities, where his organization had established its headquarters. In September of that year the PAIGC unilaterally declared Guinea-Bissau's independence, a status formally achieved on September 10, 1974. The following is an address was delivered to the first Tricontinental Conference of the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America in Havana, Cuba in January, 1966. If any of us came to Cuba with doubts in our mind about the solidity, strength, maturity and vitality of the Cuban Revolution, these doubts have been removed by what we have been able to see. Our hearts are now warmed by an unshakeable certainty which gives us courage in the difficult but glorious struggle against the common enemy: no power in the world will be able to destroy this Cuban Revolution, which is creating in the countryside and in the towns not only a new life but also — and even more important — a New Man, fully conscious of his national, continental and international rights and duties. In every field of activity the Cuban people have made major progress during the last seven years, particularly in 1965, Year of Agriculture. We believe that this constitutes a particular lesson for the national liberation movements, especially for those who want their national revolution to be a true revolution. Some people have not failed to note that a certain number of Cubans, albeit an insignificant minority, have not shared the joys and hopes of the celebrations for the seventh anniversary because they are against the Revolution.
The power, vulnerability and destructiveness of financial markets are out of control in South Africa, now among the most unequal, economically volatile and protest-intensive countries worldwide. While debt made itself felt in many sites, of interest in both criticising and promoting solutions is the ‘scale jumping’ required from South Africa’s national insertion into the world financial system, entailing the Reserve Bank setting very high interest rates, in turn leading to unpayable levels of consumer debt, and at a time when microfinance is suddenly discredited as a development strategy. Macro- and micro-financial problems fused in the course of the Marikana Massacre of August 2012, reflecting the local and global powers of the Moody’s rating agency and ‘mashonisa’ loan sharks. The over-indebted Marikana mineworkers, who led a strike which catalysed many wildcat strikes elsewhere, confronted the local crisis by displacing it into the national economy. This only heightened the contradictions that Moody’s punished with its September 2012 credit-rating downgrade. Without a genuine ‘debt relief’ solution at both scales, society will continue to unravel, as financialisation reaches its limits within one of the world’s most extreme cases of uneven and combined development.
International solidarity is frequently presented as an asymmetrical flow of assistance travelling from one place to another. In contrast, we theorise the more complex, entangled and reciprocal flows of solidarity that serve to enact social change in more than one place simultaneously. The international campaign against apartheid was one of the most widespread, sustained social movements of the last century. This paper examines the spatial practices of the Non-Stop Picket of the South African Embassy in London (1986-1990). Drawing on archival and interview material, we examine how the Picket produced solidarity with those resisting apartheid in South(ern) Africa. We argue that how the need for anti-apartheid solidarity was framed politically cannot be understood in isolation from how it was performed in practice. The study of solidarity is enriched by paying attention to the micropolitics of the practices through which it is enacted and articulated through key sites.
This article seeks to give an outline of the key events in the unfolding struggle in Mandela Park, Cape Town, South Africa, against evictions and disconnections from water and electricity. It also seeks to situate this sketch of the emergence and trajectory of these struggles in a broader narrative about the Post-Apartheid State’s turn to neo-liberalism. We argue that, in certain instances, the increased political legitimacy of the State, consequent to the elite transition from apartheid to neo-liberalism, has enabled it to step-up attacks on the poor. Furthermore, we also argue that some of the new movements that have emerged to oppose neo-liberalism mark a new stage in the South African struggles: against the elitism of the ANC tradition, they believe that, in Fanon’s famous phrase, ‘the only magic hands are the hands of the people’. However we caution that, largely as a result of the strains and difficulties of organizing under growing state repression, there is a danger that new forms of authoritarianism could emerge and pose a serious risk to the growth and development of the rebellion begun by these new movements.
When it appeared in 1983, Black Politics in South Africa offered a revised interpretation of developments in black South African politics in the 1950s and early 1960s. In comparison to existing academic and popular writing on this topic, Black Politics proposed that ANC-led resistance had much less organisational coherence than represented conventionally and that through the decade political opposition to apartheid would be shaped mainly by local dynamics and opportunities. This argument led to the exploration of different data sets and allowed new insights, in particular in showing how political organisations recruited among very specific social groups and in indicating the ways in which they were shaped by ‘inherent’ ideas or folk beliefs. A second section of the paper considers ways in which, if Black Politics were to be written afresh, the methodology and emphases might change in the light of fresh evidence and as a consequence of ANC's subsequent development up to the present.
Conventionally, Apartheid is regarded as no more than an intensification of the earlier policy of Segregation and is ascribed simplistically to the particular racial ideology of the ruling Nationalist Party. In this article substantial differences between Apartheid and Segregation are identified and explained by reference to the changing relations of capitalist and African pre-capitalist modes of production. The supply of African migrant labour-power, at a wage below its cost of reproduction, is a function of the existence of the pre-capitalist mode. The dominant capitalist mode of production tends to dissolve the pre-capitalist mode thus threatening the conditions of reproduction of cheap migrant labour-power and thereby generating intense conflict against the system of Segregation. In these conditions Segregation gives way to Apartheid which provides the specific mechanism for maintaining labour-power cheap through the elaboration of the entire system of domination and control and the transformation of the function of the pre-capitalist societies.
This article analyses the conditions of capital accumulation in South Africa, and seeks to explain the authoritarian and racially discriminatory features of the South African social structure in terms of (a) the specific historical processes of change (mercantile colonial conquest, primitive accumulation in mining and farming) and (b) the specific features of contemporary capitalism, notably the capital-intensive structure of industry. The authoritarianism embodied, for example, in the extra-economic coercion of black labour is seen as reflecting the circumstances of the struggle between capital and labour under conditions where capital-labour contradictions exist alongside the contradiction between South African capitalism and the ‘dependent’ societies it has preserved/recreated. The implications of this situation for strategies of socialist change are briefly evaluated.
In their recent book Fine & Rustomjee argue that the minerals-energy complex (MEC) as a system of accumulation had a determining and retarding effect on South African industrialisation. The evidence on the share of the MEC sectors in the GDP does not support the contention that the MEC as a system of accumulation has effectively increased the economy's dependence on these sectors. Statistical evidence contradicts Fine & Rustomjee s view that South Africa's import-substituting industrialisation did not move from consumption goods to intermediate and then to capital goods, but in the opposite direction. There is no historical evidence to support the contention that the MEC as a system of accumulation prevented diversification of manufacturing industry and thus retarded industrialisation. Manufacturing industry did diversify both between the wars and in the postwar period. It is suggested that state-promoted developments in MEC manufacturing sectors represented important and necessary steps towards full-scale industrialisation, which began in South Africa between the wars.
The main theme of this 1972 book, the determination of wages, is introduced by a historical analysis of the labour market in the mines and an examination of the economics and financial structure of the gold mining industry. Dr Wilson believes that successive South African governments used the gold mining industry when planning labour policies, so that the mines’ labour strategy exerted a profound influence on the social and economic structure of South Africa. The author shows how collusion between the mining groups enabled them to hold down black wages so effectively that in real terms African miners’ wages were likely lower at the time of this book’s publication than they were in 1911. The strong bargaining position occupied by white miners allowed them to be the sole beneficiaries of increases in productivity, so that the distribution of income would become more unequal over time.
Rosa Luxemburg was a revolutionary socialist who fought and died for her beliefs. In January 1919, after being arrested for her involvement in a workers' uprising in Berlin, she was brutally murdered by a group of right-wing soldiers. Her body was recovered days later from a canal. Six years earlier she had published what was undoubtedly her finest achievement, The Accumulation of Capital - a book which remains one of the masterpieces of socialist literature. Taking Marx as her starting point, she offers an independent and fiercely critical explanation of the economic and political consequences of capitalism in the context of the turbulent times in which she lived, reinterpreting events in the United States, Europe, China, Russia and the British Empire. Many today believe there is no alternative to global capitalism. This book is a timely and forceful statement of an opposing view.
http://www.sunypress.edu/p-5165-precarious-liberation.aspx
Abstract not available.
South Africa's leading anti-apartheid organization, the African National Congress (ANC) entered the period of transition in the early 1990s with only an impressionist economic vision. But for all its limitations it was a (state-led) program of development directed at alleviating the legacy of poverty and inequality. The ANC was forced to begin to fashion a set of modeled economic proposals around which it could at some level "negotiate" with other organizations and social groups and contest an election. As in the case of the negotiations around a post-apartheid constitution, the economic program ultimately adopted differed significantly from the organization's original vision. The new economic program was a fairly orthodox neoliberal one. The shift in economic policy, we would contend, was the result of the ANC's perception of the balance of economic and political power at both the global and local level. This article critically examines these political and economic interactions in the South Africa of the 1990s; attempts to explain the reasons underlying the shift in economic policy; and ends with some reflections on the ways in which the South African experience in economic policy reform either elaborates or revises existing theories of transitional societies.
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