Apartheid South Africa was fully capitalist despite mixing unfree labor and unequal franchise

Evidence

Naturally, it has consequences, then, for political and legal structures. In such “deviant” social formations (deviant only in the sense of departing from the European paradigm case), there will be political structures which combine (or may combine) forms of parliamentary democracy with other forms of political representation—or legal structures which elaborate more than one form of citizen status. The “articulation” of “free” and “forced” labor, the combination of “equal” and “restricted” franchises, the position of the chiefs and the Bantustan “internal colonies,” and the different legal statuses of “white” and “black” citizens, in the South African social formation, perfectly represent the elements of such a “variant” case—one which is in no sense “non-capitalist”; provided, that is, we read Marx’s “laws of development and motion” as laws of tendency (and countertendency) rather than as a priori laws of necessity. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 624

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Durkheim-style questions about which societies count as ‘capitalist,’ and to colonial-postcolonial political economy debates the reader is tracking. — connects to: Capitalist labor demand contradicts South Africa’s categorical containment strategy. — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 570