Marxist scholars read apartheid as serving capitalist class interests
Evidence
“Cheap black labor,” argued Rick Johnstone (1970), Harold Wolpe (1972), and Martin Legassick (1974), was the lynchpin of apartheid, the point of effective fusion of political and economic interests. Where liberals saw a “contradiction” between apartheid and capitalism, these Marxist scholars saw an essential complementarity, a unity of purpose. The mechanisms of racial discrimination then, were to be understood as instruments of class domination - designed, promulgated, and monitored with that basic purpose. Wolpe thus characterized apartheid’s distinguishing and defining feature as the fact that it “provides the specific mechanism for maintaining labour power cheap through the elaboration of the entire system of domination and control and the transformation of the function of pre-capitalist society” (Wolpe, 1972:425). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 564
Categorization
Category: Definitional Content
- XREF: Wolpe’s ‘cheap labour power’ thesis connects to the wider cheap-labor literature on settler colonial economies and to debates about racial capitalism (Cedric Robinson).