Ideology and capitalism in South Africa

Abstract

This paper attempts to assess the role of liberal Ideology in capitalist development in South Africa. In Part I we argue that liberal ideology developed historically in a different context and its transplantation from the centre to the periphery obscures the dynamics of development by focusing on the irrationality of race prejudice without really understanding its role in the political economy. Barrington Moore (1966) suggests that it is possible to identify three different paths to industrialisation the "bourgeois democratic" path of England, France and the United States, the "fascist" part of Germany and Japan and the "socialist" part of Russia and China. We would like to suggest a fourth, the path of peripheral capitalism, with its form being determined by the settler origins of South Africa's development?