Explaining racial structure requires economic plus political-legal factors, not economics alone.
Evidence
Taking as the central feature of his analysis this quite atypical “central labour institution,” Rex is able to delineate more precisely the specific economic mechanisms which have served to “incorporate” the African working class into the capitalist system in ways which preserve rather than liquidate its segmentary racial character. The racial structure of the South African social formation is, thereby, given concrete economic conditions of existence—the link being traceable, precisely, through its “peculiarity,” its deviation from the “classical” capitalist path. Rex traces historically the various economic forms of this “unfreedom”: the rural reserves, the labor compound, the emergence of the third element of the migrant labor system, the “urban native location.” … The economic relations are thus the necessary, but not the sufficient condition of the racial structure of the South African social formation. For this is also preserved by a “non-normative” element—for example, political and legal factors—which stems from the political domination of the state by the white settler capitalist class, and the “workable compromise” between this class and the white working class, which leads both to reap the advantages of confining native labor to its subordinate status in the labor market. In the context of the “classical” line of capitalist development, a capitalism which preserves rather than abolishes such “irrational” features must be, to say the least, a “deviant” case. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 590
Categorization
- DEFINE: Sets up the key analytic move: a non-classical capitalism’s ‘peculiarity’ is the site where economic and racial structure articulate, not an anomaly to be explained away.
- QUESTION: Worth chasing: how Rex’s ‘workable compromise’ between settler capitalists and white workers compares to later theories of racialized class coalitions (e.g., Hall’s own work on Thatcherism).