The Marxist-led race-class debate reframed apartheid analysis around class while sidestepping race itself

Evidence

Students of apartheid are typically introduced to the academic literature on this subject by way of the so-called “race-class debate,” which dominated the historiography of apartheid throughout the 1970s and 1980s. It seems a promising route to go: the way the debate was construed suggests a head-on critical encounter with “race.” Yet one of the most striking features of this debate is the way in which it deflected attention from “race.” … The debate was constructed by Marxist historians and sociologists, as a critical rejection of the then dominant approach to apartheid, which they named as “liberal.” The immediate focus of contention was an empirical issue, about the relationship between apartheid and capitalism; but this was theoretically overlaid with a debate about the relative analytical salience of “race” or “class” in making sense of apartheid’s origins, character, and future. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 556

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sharpens what the ‘race-class debate’ actually was — a Marxist framing that displaced rather than engaged race as an analytic.
• XREF: Connects to the vault’s critical-race-theory origin material on Marxism’s handling of race versus class, a recurring theme in the Omi & Winant and CRT readings. — connects to: Marxists read apartheid’s racism as instruments of class domination — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 564; Marxist scholars read apartheid as serving capitalist class interests; Apartheid historiography sidestepped the theoretical question of what race actually is (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Apartheid historiography sidestepped the theoretical question of what race actually is #expands (0.82)
• Marxists read apartheid’s racism as instruments of class domination #corroborates (0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 564
• Marxist scholars read apartheid as serving capitalist class interests #corroborates (0.80)
• The race-class paradigm treated apartheid’s legal machinery as backdrop rather than research object #expands (0.78) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 571
• Class-focused analysis of apartheid neglected racist institutions outside the capitalist nexus #complicates (0.75)
• Race and class are interdependent formations, each lived through the other #complicates (0.72) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 1113