D c
 UNIVERSITY OF THE WITWATERSRAND
 HISTORY WORKSHOP
 -id
 ? ?
 I
 THE MAKING OF CLASS
 9 - 14 February, 1987
 AUTHOR:
 TITLE:
 B. Freund
 Defending Capitalism; A Review of
 Merle Linton's Canitalism and Aoartheid
 i R
DEFENDING SOUTH AFRICAN CAPITALISM *
 Merle Lipton's book, Capitalism and Apartheid, has excited attention
 internationally and in South Africa essentially for two reasons. One is its ?
 engagement with the radical line of questioning about South African society that h
 been debated heatedly since the 1970s. The second is that it functions as
 an apologia for South African capitalism historically and contains a plea for
 the continued centrality of white liberals and of a middle-of-the-road politics
 that will crosscut the racial divide in which capitalists will play the major
 part. Lipton thinks that capitalism and apartheid can be disengaged and she
 herself opts for a solution in which South Africa could "get rid of apartheid,
 i.e. have multi-racial(or non-racial) capitalism" because she believes...
 "...it could be achieved with less violence than any of the other...
 ?solutionsj ; it does not rule out subsequent movement towards more
 egalitarian,welfare-oriented politics; and it is the only option
 compatible with the revival of the remnants of liberty and democracy:
 the degree of coercion required to enforce each of the other options
 seems incompatible with this." (12)
 This is a book with which critics of the South African system have to engage
 seriously; it contains substantial research in certain areas and it is full of
 insights of considerable value and originality through its 400 odd page
 length. Nonetheless it is a hard book with which to come to terms. It is divided
 into three unbalanced parts. The middle and most substantial section,which
 Lipton herself points out was finished basically by 1978, is a structural and
 historical analysis which looks sectorally at South African capitalism,taking
 agriculture,mining,secondary industry and white labour,each of which deserves
 substantial attention from historians and economists. It is followed by a long
 final section which amounts to a considered narrative discussion of events
 over the past decade evaluating state reform options. It stops in 1983 but
 an epilogue carries the discussion forward further to 1986 and to a degree
 anticipates events over the past half-year fairly well. A first introductory
 section is not very successful in welding this into a whole;there is a
 tension between historical analysis and discussion and the political polemic
 that occasionally can be found. Lipton is an author,moreover,who is eclectic;
 perceptive insights clash with strange oversights and both are not always
 contained consistently within any line of argument. Occasionally,she is
as a result contradictory and it is hard to speak conclusively about any argument
 from the book that is not at times refuted by her own rich material. There is
 also an imbalantce between her mastery of the material available to her up to 1978
 and the many omissions in her reading thereafter. Finally and perhaps inevitably
 in such a work,well-researched points are often punctuated by questionable
 assertions that lack proof; her enthusiasm has allow/Tier to make too many
 arguments. These points qualify the generalisations which will follow; Capitalism
 and Apartheid needs to be characterised but eludes easy discussion.
 In a telling chapter opening, Lipton asserts that:
 "...apartheid cannot simply be explained as the outcome of capitalism or of
 racism. Its origins lie in a complex interaction between class interests
 (of white labour as well as of sections of capital) and racism/ethnicity,
 reinforced by ideological and security factors." (365)
 Broadly speaking,she sees apartheid, loosely used in tandem with its predecessor,
 South African-style segregation, as having originally been useful to a broad
 range of capitalists. At the least,it contained costs and benefits:
 "The benefits were provided by a plentiful supply of cheap,unskilled
 black workers and by the intervention of the state apparatus to ensure
 their compliance. But losses were incurred because of the restrictions
 on black competition in the skilled labour market." (7)
 On the whole,she accepts the argument (found in both liberal and Marxist
 work) that both agricultural and mining capitalists favoured key aspects of
 the apartheid system during the floodtide of accumulation in these sectors
 from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Accumulation was
 inherently linked to the availability of huge numbers of coerced workers
 at bottom pay levels. However this is far less true,she argues,with regard
 to manufacturers and merchants who "did not need,and indeed opposed,most
 apartheid labour policies."(139) Finally she insists that those Marxists
 who have tried to use class analysis to suggest that white workers had no
 interest in pressing forward with apartheid are wrong; even on the mines,
 it is they,rather than management,that insisted on the formal colour bar
 and the many indirect discriminatory practices which were far more consequential.
Within these sectors and within the South African economy as a whole.however,
 the advantages of a racial order have gradually diminished to capitalists, *
 according to Lipton. Manufacturing has become more and more central to the
 economy and brought with it demands for a more stabilised,educated and participatory
 workforce. Even in agriculture and mining,a more democratic labour process is
 gradually becoming mooted, although they are clearly more backward than
 manufacturing. The conflicts, which reached a head in the 1960s, between the
 ?*a*e and the Nationalist-run state were thus quite real and unjustly underestimated
 by radicals with a crude determinist view of the state as a mere front for
 business interests. The state in time responded with the introduction of
 policies ("reform") more sensitive to the objections of capitalists. When
 reform began to founder in the middle 1980s,the capitalist began to look beyond
 its confines to a broader political reconstruction. If anything it was white labour
 and the entrenched bureaucracy which hindered the extension of reform,although
 Lipton's interesting discussion of SACOL and TUCSA reveals her awareness of
 ambiguity here too.
 The contrast is most striking between Lipton and the revisionist Marxists of the
 1970s Legassick,Wolpe and Johnstone and to a lesser extent with O'Meara,Kaplan,
 Morris,Davies and Bozzoli from the following generation. It is much harder to draw
 with the Marxist writing of the past five years that Lipton ignores but it must
 be conceded that the older work continues to have considerable impact. If we
 go back to Legassick, in his classic article, "South Africa:Capital Accumulation
 and Violence",he insists on the functionality of violence, of harsh forms of
 repression and a battery of forms considered as "extra-economic coercion" to
 2
 the successes of South African capitalism. These forms are not "'archaisms'
 but...the specific form which capitalism has taken." (Legassick,267) The
 "specific structures of labour control which have been developed in post-war
 South Africa are increasingly functional to capital"(269) These quotes fail
 to do justice to the the rich and subtle knowledge of South African economic
 and political history that are displayed in the texture of Legassick's writing,
 but from the vantage point of 1987 it must be conceded that he presented a
 version of capitalism in South Africa that is too lacking in contradiction and overly
 functionalist to explain more recent developments properly.
The evidence of a broad evolution along the lines Lipton suggests,given her
 many qualifications,is very strong. She is also right to query too easy a
 link between the prosperity of the 1960s and Vervoerdian apartheid at its
 most rigid.(^52-53) It is more peculiar that Lipton does not try to engage
 vith more recent writers,such as Saul & Gelb.who particularly situate the
 good years as bringing on a continuing "organic crisis" which has,in the
 past decade amongst other things, reduced profits seriously, chipped away
 under further business investment and revealed basic structural blockages
 in the prospects of successful capitalist accumulation in South Africa.
 That this shift has occurred is incontrovertible. It is no longer possible
 to assert that South African capitalism has an inherent need for compounds,
 passes,the absence of black labour unions,etc. even while stressing (and
 this Lipton concedes)that such writers as Legassick were able successfully
 to explain the historic advantages of such techniques. Capitalism is
 by its nature protean and dynamic. A problem with Lipton's critique,
 however,is that she fails to point out the hi?*-nnip significance^within
 South Africa's intellectual history^of the '70s revisionist arguments set as
 they were in turn against the crude positivist arguments put forward by
 liberals such as Horwitz,Houghton,Doxey,Hutt and O'Dowd; their work
 produced material on which Lipton and others can stand and move forward.
 The '70s revisionism in this aspect need not so much to be rejected as to
 be contextualised and used critically.
 There ought to be debate about the many particular points with reference to
 particular sectors of capital that punctuate the middle section of the book
 but I propose here only to consider a few,of which one element is the
 relation of white labour to capital. It must be said that Lipton,throughout the
 study and with somewhat grievous results as she reaches contemporary issues,
 is overly generous to the capitalists and keeps stacking the cards in their
 favour in ways that are not going to stand easily. I do not disagree with
 Lipton's view of white workers' historic situation as expressed minimally;
 a serious examination of their history does reveal a committed tradition
 and a material interest in drawing racial boundaries. Such boundaries were
 in South Africa as elsewhere a potentially powerful and effective means of
 cultural and economic defense against the bosses. She is moreover right
to emphasize that this,rather than an argument based on the historic eccentricity
 of Afrikaners,is what explains their racism. Although there does exist a
 political and scholarly literature which assumes that class-conscious white
 workers should necessarily be committed to class unity across racial or
 ethnic lines,there are numerous scholars on the left who have come to grips
 effectively with reality not operating this way and this Lipton chooses to
 ignore. An important comparative study which considers the problem is Stan
 Greenberg's Race and Class in Capitalist Development; Greenberg uses the
 idea of a bounded working class which adopts different strategies in the
 South African case depending on skill and organisational conditions. The
 approach Eddie Webster adopts in Cast in a Racial Mould is similiar,while
 focussing on a particular industry.
 Accepting then that white labour plays an important autonomous role in the
 forging of apartheid,it is another thing to accept Lipton's arguments that
 capital was indifferent to the colour of its workers. There is a great
 deal of evidence to suggest that mining capital did not want an all-African
 labour force on the Witwatersrand any more than it wanted a ruinously expensive
 all-white one. If the question of where to draw the racial boundary line
 was hazy and contentious,this hardly means that there was no understanding of the
 effectiveness of a racially exclusive supervisory class or of a broader white
 "community" that internalised and defended capitalist values. She could read wit
 profit the work that Rob Turrell and Alan Mabin have produced on the
 history of the diamond diggings at Kimberley and the way that management came
 to sort out white and black workers very deliberately from early pre-Rand
 days. In the opinion of Alan Mabin,
 "...control of the labour force had extended to the social and spatial
 separation of black and white workers...in the conflict between labour
 and capital,the latter had asserted its dominance in part through
 compounding and the manipulation pf a hierarchical, racial and
 geographical division of labour."
 The effectiveness of racial hierarchies as a managerial tool comes out clearly
 in Michael Burawoy's comparison of the labour process on the Zambian copper
 mines before and after their disappearance in the contemporary era. The
 Copperbelt mines of Northern Rhodesia depended on the existence of what Ke.
 calls "colonial despotism" for their smooth running. "An overt and explicit
 racism was the organizing proinciple behind...production apparatuses." The
"company state",as he calls it, only began to disintegrate when
 challenges came from industrial strikes and political nationalism. The
 industrial order then weakened and required the direct intervention of the
 Zambian state at (frequent)moments of crisis. From this,one can derive
 two points. One is that that intervention was not always so successful and
 the non-racist control system far less effective from the crucial perspective
 of productivity. The other is that the history shows that the true colours
 of mining capital were most clearly unfurled in the era of racist colonial
 practice and only taken down under duress.
 Had South African managers been uninterested in using ethnic and racial
 divisions to control workers,they would have been curiously indifferent to
 techniques well-documented for bosses in many parts of the world. She
 reminds us of Marx's understanding of the capitalist mode of production as
 one that overrides ancient distinctions of nation and caste (4) but she
 conveniently forgets his opinions on the significance of the division between
 Irish and English workers in keeping capitalist hegemony in British factories.
 To reiterate,from a well-known 1870 letter:
 "Every industrial and commercial centre in England now possesses a
 working class divided into two hostile camps,English proletarians
 and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the
 Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life...
 His attitude towards him is much the same as that of the "poor whites"
 to the "niggers" in the former slave states of the U.S.A. The.
 Irishman pays him back with interest in his own money. He sees in
 the English worker at once the accomplice and the stupid tool of the
 English rule in Ireland. This antagonism is artificially kept alive
 and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short,
 by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This
 antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class
 despite its organisation. It is the secret by which the capitalist,,
 class maintains its power. And that class is fully aware of it."
 From these strictures there is nothing to exclude the manufacturers. They
 were very slow to move from assuming a world of white workers and affluent
 consumers to thinking, first of blacks even as purchasers of industrial
 commodities and then with time as operatives. The assumption of white control and
 supervision and of racially defined jobs was unquestioned until quite
 recently just as women workers were as a matter of course to be paid
less than,and subordinated to male supervisors. Lipton appreciates that
 resentment of rigid state requirements on how employers could choose their workers had
 mostly to do with the relative wages different categories of labour could
 earn but she does not like to take the obvious point that the existence of
 differentials was in and of itself most desirable to management. That manufacturers
 worried,for instance under the Pact government, that the state would force
 them to hire too many whites is certainly the case but it hardly means that they
 opposed "apartheid" unless one reduces apartheid to the single issue of labour
 rigidity. The whole point of the antagonism to state policy was hardly that
 of defending a colour-blind employment programme. It was to combat dreams of
 turning urban or industrial South Africa into an Australian model white Utopia
 and to defend the right of employers to hire relatively poorly-paid and
 disorganised black operatives. Black industrial workers may have earned more
 than their counterparts in mining or agriculture but that only displays the
 relative imperatives and labour market conditions that governed the circumstances
 of different capitalists and the problems that ensued in their coming together
 in a politically effective manner.
 Lipton conveniently chooses to forget the virulent fear of Indian business
 wK-.Tf
 competition that was so typical of the-'petty bourgeoisie of the Transvaal and
 Natal, the tendency to switbh conveniently between different racial groups
 on the part of employers when militant activity threatened or the support of
 business for social segregation in the cities. Part of apartheid may involve
 attempts at absolute exclusion of blacks from urban communities and it is
 undoubtedly true that manufacturing capital found such attempts inconvenient
 and opposed them. However, it must be said that they equally favoured the
 isolation of black workers into separate townships even if they were generally
 too mealy-mouthed to want to pay for the facilities. Even in the 1980s,
 it is simply untrue that all manufacturers disapproved of "extra-economic"
 controls over their workers or that they supported the right of all to come and
 live where they liked. In such an advanced sector as the metal industry on
 the East Rand, many companies have preferred and retained a migrant labour-force
 when workers with Section Ten rights would have been available. Thus in a poll
 summarized by Webster from a 1980 publication, the majority of foundry managers
 "indicated a cljar preference for 'homeland labour1 rather than local labour,"
 and in general took the view that rural migrants were more compliant,reliable and
harder-working. A study of management attitudes by Ann Bernstein of the
 Urban Foundation made even later records a large minority (45%)who preferred
 the retention of all or some influx control legislation. Such controls
 retain considerable charms for capitalists even in advanced industrial societies
 today,as witness the use of migrant third world labour in America or Western
 Europe.
 A number of historians before Lipton have remarked on the period of the 1940s as
 one fed that represents a hiatus in the general trend towards the intensification
 of segregation: the creation of a racial state. Lipton puts particular emphasis
 on it as the first sign of the pre-eminence of liberalising industrial capital.
 She writes that "in 1948 South Africa was an oligarchic democracy which seemed
 on the verge of gradually incorporating the black vanguard into its ranks."
 (cf 274ff) Lipton is correct in pointing to significant reform proposals in
 response to the new context of industrialisation and unprecedented urbanisation
 and to the particular and short-lived circumstances that brought on the
 reforming wave. Nonetheless her view is decidedly too cheerful in its own
 terms. It is not only that the more far-reaching reform proposals date
 almost entirely to the war period and were generally withdrawn or suspended
 thereafter but that they were almost entirely administrative with few political
 concessions envisioned(as she elsewhere grants,22). They are in short very
 remniscent of the reform proposals renewed by the Nationalist government in
 the 1970s and the deterioration of relations between the increasingly
 nationalistic and militant ANC and the Smuts government.by 1948 suggests that
 the conflicts that would follow were inevitable whatever the outcome of the
 1948 election. It is thus not so""/1 that there is a danger in overestimating
 the prospects for major reform in the 1940s,which Lipton does not really do
 but that she shifts too easily into a narrow definition of apartheid as a
 particular form of rigid labour control to emphasize the anti-apartheid
 spirit of the reforms. She is right to see that the existing controls were
 beginning to be questioned but wrong to see them as the heart of the
 entire South African problematic.
 In the same way,she exaggerates the importance of conflict over black labour
 policies after 1948 betwen capital and the state (with relation to colour bars
 and to the physical movements of Africans). In italics,she emphasizes that
businessmen were"not converted to support for apartheid labour policies."(304)
 She considers this period as one of a "surly working relationship-rather than
 a state of war-between capital and government"(285) Lipton suffers here
 from a weak conceptualisation of the idea of a capitalist state,although she
 is right enough to point to the equally mechanical and economistic notions
 of some Marxists on the question. In fact,wherever capitalist societies have
 stabilised and working classes are "incorporated" in the political order,
 the state has had to absorb pressures and respond to needs that are not in
 the narrowest sense those of the ruling class^repeatedly and systematically.
 This is why, following Gramsci and others, the idea of hegemony has generally
 replaced a simple view of ruling politicians as front-men for monopoly
 capital among Marxists even in assessing thoroughgoing capitalist societies
 such as the USA or Japan. ^
 The tension between capitalist and state in post-1948 South Africa has
 strong ethnic undertones but that is not very unusual either in capitalist
 societies,especially given the convulsions that have swept such parts of the
 world as ex-colonial Asia or eastern Europe. The English-Afrikaner split and
 the attempt by an Afrikaner-dominated state to intrude into the domain of
 big business in South Africa^ with its ensuing strains, finds many parallels.
 Rather than exaggerate their importance.it might be more useful to
 suggest that the issues that divided capitalists from the state were perhaps
 less important than many others where the Malan government and its
 successors,never anti-capitalist, were basically sympathetic to business
 needs. As she concedes grudgingly in the remark about a state of war,
 business retained a fundamental loyalty to the state and its characteristic
 institutions and could not have been more remote from an alliance with any
 forces that might seek to bring it down (and such forces were beginning
 to gather by the 1950s). Moreover the Nationalists were totally committed
 to creating favourable conditions for capitalist accumulation. Lipton's claims
 that the business slowdown of the late 1950s reflected hostility to apartheid
 founders on the international recession o? the period which actually explains
 the local conjuncture most effectively. After 1960,Lipton asserts that
 "while businessmen were relieved by the restoration of political stability and the
 expansionary economic policies,they were not concerted to apartheid labour policies.1
 (304). She italicises these words but one is inclined to respond,so what?
10
 Much business "opposition" here had more to do with getting cheaper workers than
 a commitment to a more open society.
 The reason why this point needs dissection is because it leads Lipton astray in
 assessing the more recent period. "Reform" has meant that business views on the
 economy received increasing cooperation from the state; the post-1976 era is in many
 respects a reprise of the pre-1948 era and the state is now fulfilling some of what
 was then envisioned. Similarly,the reform programme is thin politically and
 directed strictly from the top. Until 1985,this meant that virtually all South
 African capitalists backed the Botha government,which seemed to offer them what
 they require, like they had no other government in forty years. While many
 have since become deeply upset by black (and international) rejection of
 reform,Lipton enormously exaggerates their potential to move beyond this
 position. Such recent documents as the Business Charter, which she approvingly
 cites, reveal the political barrenness of business circles, their fear of
 mass democratisation, their resentment of state "interference" that doesn't
 boost their profits and their emphasis on privatisation of national resources as the
 answer to the country's problems.
 Lipton claims that "the trend is towards increasing opposition and it has been
 accelerating." In 1986,one is rather struck by a)the willingness of most Afrikaner
 businessmen (who now constitute a very significant group) to rally around the
 state; b)the equivocal attitude by business towards the state of emergency and
 the repressive activities of the state and c)the obvious reluctance of any but
 a handful of businessmen to think much beyond the existing political order. Even
 the much-heralded visit of Gavin Relly and others to the AHC reflects at most an
 interest in negotiation and perhaps incorporation rather than a potential
 political alliance,as both sides recognise. Capitalists envision substantial
 political change "majoritarianism"?-with trepidation to say the least,
 to take Lipton's own phrase.
 Lipton exaggerates the appeal of trade unions to South African capitalists.
 My latest Financial Maiycontains,among it6 1986 prizes and brickbats,high
 praise to General Motors for crushing union resistance to its "disinvestment"
 plans. Lipton cannot explain this through her insistence on the generalised
 preference of efficient firms for strong trade unions with which to negotiate.
 Recent court revelations indicate that the peaceful co-existence of SAAWU and
11
 business in East London hailed by Lipton (173) in reality masked the close
 cooperation between business and the security police. Too much political
 disruption brings capitalists to the point of trying to hire fewer black
 workers as their top priority. In Port Elizabeth, a number of firms have
 replaced African with Coloured or white workers, an increasingly important
 strategy. This is a feasible strategy in many cases because of rising
 unemployment and because industrial expansion,if it again takes off,
 would involve saving,not hiring labour,in accordance with international
 trends. Trade unions,in short,are tolerable to big business when the
 alternative is disruption and crisis but their appeal diminishes with
 bad times and low profits.
 Merle Lipton deserves praise in her insistence on the desirability of liberal,
 tolerant values, of autonomous social institutions and of peaceful change
 over massive bloodshed in South Africa. However, and despite some excellent
 and sobering observations that she makes on the current situation, she comes
 across as naive in her optimism about the growing strength of middle ground
 opinion,powered by the ever more enlightened view of big business. The
 surveys on which she relies,very dubious with regard to black views,may be
 essentially correct in revealing a gradual relaxation of the racist views of
 white South Africans over time. These give good evidence of support for
 the kind of cautious change that does not challenge power relations in the
 society over which the Botha government presides. Few South African capitalists
 after all support the HNP or CP:many would be only too pleased with a PFP
 government. Most could adjust to the kind of deracialised capitalist
 ideology dominant now in the West i_{ the result would be societies effectively
 and stably capitalist on the model of the USA, West Germany,France,etc.
 To derive from this an assumption that one could move readily to a convergence
 of white and black around a politics of compromise and a common acceptance of
 many existing structures, particularly those sustaining the economy, is
 quite a jump, from this. One must put aside the polarising developments she
 herself explicates in her final epilogue and dismiss the power and extent
 of township militancy which she routinely underestimates.
 In general, capitalists are poised uncomfortably in South Africa (and not
 only the white ones)between a past, which,even if it departed from an
12
 idealised Friedmanesque "free to choose" model, has been one with which they could
 live,breathe and grow but which seems no longer politically viable (and is abhorred
 internationally) and a most dubious future towards which they are not very eager
 to leap. They do not really care to lift up the anchor of "white securityy"(82)
 and sail off. This is to some extent captured in the concept of racial
 capitalism,with its inherent definition of capitalism in South Africa as part of a
 particular political and social order and a particular history. The term "racial
 capitalism" is perhaps unfortunate because it implies a rigid commitment to
 racial hierarchy over all business practices, assumes the South African power structure
 and "apartheid" are identical and as such underestimates flexibility and adaptability
 which are also there. No doubt,for instance,the Anglos management would welcome a
 consortium of Indian or even African businessmen into the world of gold mining
 just as they once did Afrikaners. Much of Lipton's assessment therefore of the
 "modernisation" of the economy is valuable.
 However,if we reconsider the question of the state and capital, it is indubitable
 that business is frightened of a shift, a fundamental shift, in the nature of the
 state. The likelihood that black majority rule or ANC rule would bring to bear
 forces that are overtly anti-capitalist and a leadership with little taste or
 capacity for the running of a capitalist society is much greater than the shift
 that 1948 brought. The corruption and incompetence of capitalist African countries
 must be almost as feared by analogy as the revolutionary moves of socialist
 ones. To repeat the Burawoy argument,post-colonial African countries such as
 Zambia have generally been marked,with the decline of authoritarian,racially-
 defined authority patterns at work,by declines in productivity and an increase
 in 'theft and indiscipline that plagues capital. The state is much less suited
 given its power base to assist business in many respects. The result is a
 decline in production,in overall trade and in investment. Why should South Africa
 be different without reliable guarantees of continuity after apartheid goes?
 What stake could Africans have in a capitalism characterised by intense concentration
 of power and wealth and at the same time unemployment and poverty even if no formal
 racial rules existed? Already South Africa is plagued by the reluctance of
 capitalists to invest and their efforts to bring capital out of the country.
 If a revolutionary bssak could bring capital advantages, particularly given the
 brakes which Lipton convincingly shows apartheid has increasingly come to apply
 in the strictly economic sphere (by analogy with the anti-feudal revolutions
13
 of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries).business would certainly
 support it. The South African case is however a far slipperier one and as a result
 Lipton's line of argument is finally no more convincing or related to the actual
 prospects awaiting South Africa than those she claims for the radicals of the 1970s
 on the rigidity and functionality of South African capitalism that she is eager to
 dismiss and displace. The problem is not that South African capitalists converge
 in a secret conspiracy to retain apartheid; it is that apartheid is the Tar Baby
 from which they find no escape. The reader will need to give time and attention
 to the valuable aspects of Lipton's critique but in so doing her own economism,
 always anxious to reduce South African social problems to the issue of labour
 movement controls and the legal colour bar, and her softness towards South African
 business"liberalism" must be laid bare.
 These would include studies of South African business: Renfrew Christie,Electricity,
 Industry and Class in South Africa(Macmillan,198A): Duncan Innes, Anglo;Anglo~
 American and the Rise of Modern South Africa (Ravan,1984); of business ideology,
 Belinda Bozzoli.The Political Nature of a Ruling Class(RKP,1981);of race and the
 labour process in industry, Jon Lewis, Industrialisation and Trade Union Organisation
 in South Africa 1924-55,(Cambridge University Press,1984); Eddie Webster, Cast in a
 Racial Mould,(Ravan,1985); critiqueing the main thrust of early '70s revisionism,
 D.C.Hindson,"The Pass System and the Formation of an Urban African Proletariat in
 !>6uth Africa; A Critique of the Cheap Labour-Power Thesis,"D.Phil,1983,Sussex (forth-
 coming in book form, Ravan); re-examining the Verwoerdian period, D.Posel,
 "Rethinking the Race-Class Debate in South African Historiography",Social Dynamics,
 IX(1),1983 and posing alternative syntheses: Stanley Creenberg.Race and Class in
 Capitalist DeveIopment(Yale University Press,1980) ; David Yudelman.The Emergence
 of Modern South Africa,(Greenwood Press,1983) or John Cell,The Highest Stage of
 White Supremacy(Cambridge University Press,1983). Yudelman particularly anticipates
 some of her strongest lines of argument.
 2
 Martin Legassick,"South Africa:Capital Accumulation and Violence",Economy and Society,
 111(3),1974.
 I have elaborated on these issues with regard to works of history in reviewing the
 collections by Atmore 4 Marks,ed..Economy and Society j^i Pre-industrial South Africa
 and Marks & Rathbone.ed.,Industrialisation and Social Change in South Africa in
 Review of African Political Economy,29(1984). The crucial question of class which
 remains a major legacy of the revisionists is untouched by Lipton although she
 often seems to acknowledge its terminology and its insights.
 For an approach very different to Lipton,see John Saul & Stephen Gelb.The Crisis in
 South Africa,(Monthly Review Press,1981 but recently re-edited and released). It i~
 an odd feature of Lipton that she gives enormous weight to economic factors but fails
 to make an assessment of the situation and prospects of the current economy.
14
 4
 Webster and Greenberg. See ?n 1.
 On this see Bozzoli.fn 1. Also Bill Freund,"The Social Character of Secondary
 Industry in South Africa 1915-45",ASI seminar paper,University of the Witwatersrand
 1985. Lipton does not easily see that classes are not purely reduceable to
 forces of production.
 Alan Mabin,"Labour,Capital,Class Struggle and the Origins of Residential
 Segregation in Kimberley 1880-1920",Journal of Historical Geography,XII(l),
 1986,16-18. See also R.V. Turrell,"Kimberley:Labour and Compounds 1871-88" in
 Marks & Rathbone.op.cit.
 7Michael Burawoy.The Politics of Production,(New Left Books,1985),226.
 o
 Karl Marx to ?.Meyer & A.Vogt,9 April 1970,in Marx and Engels on Colonialism
 (Progress Publishers,1959,337)
 9webster,204-05.
 Ann Bernstein,"Influx Control in Urban South Africa:An International and
 Empirical View" in Hermann Giliomee & Lawrence Schlemmer.eds. ,l)p Against the
 Fences,(David Philip,1986)
 Bill Freund
 January 1987
 Department of Economic History,Durban