The Hand on the Tiller: the Politics of State and Class in South Africa

In: The journal of modern African studies: a quarterly survey of politics, economics & related topics in contemporary Africa, Band 31, Heft 3, S. 387-405

Abstract

Marxistscholarship on South Africa's political economy was born as a meta-theoretical critique of liberalism in the 1960s and matured into a rich tradition of its own by the 1980s. As Marxists became more focused empirically and conceptually, they presented compelling evidence for their key analytical claims and generally bettered their liberal rivals—as they saw and portrayed them—in the debate over the complicity of capitalist development in the officially mandated racism of South Africa. Whereas liberals either ignored, minimised, or denied an association, Marxists argued that capitalism and its dominant classes systematically promoted and actively underwroteapartheidin particular, and white domination in general.