Marxists read apartheid’s racism as instruments of class domination

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

• XREF: This functional-class reading is the foil against which Omi & Winant define racial formation as irreducible to class; helps sharpen that definition for the vault. — connects to: The Marxist-led race-class debate reframed apartheid analysis around class while sidestepping race itself — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 556; Liberal apartheid scholarship treated racism chiefly as instrumental to Afrikaner nationalist power — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 558; Marxist scholars read apartheid as serving capitalist class interests (+3 more)
• QUESTION: The Wolpe functionalist claim that apartheid was designed with a class purpose is exactly the kind of ‘race reduced to class instrument’ position later race theorists criticize; worth tracing how Posel adjudicates.

Broader Connections

• Marxist scholars read apartheid as serving capitalist class interests #corroborates (0.95)
• Conquest and unfree labor, not universal Marxist laws, explain South African racial class structure #contradicts (0.85) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 592
• Class-focused analysis of apartheid neglected racist institutions outside the capitalist nexus #qualifies (0.80)
• Marxism must be supplemented to account for racial oppression #expands (0.80) — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 307