[Marxism] (Fwd) Marxist poli-econ in SA

[Patrick Bond]

(Michael Perelman has a great article in this journal, which we're just 
now putting up on our website for free download. Comments warmly 
welcome, comrades.)


AFRICANUS Journal of Development Studies
Vol 37 No 2 2007
ISSN 0304-615x

Transcending two economies – renewed debates in South African political 
economy

Special issue of the University of South Africa Development Studies 
journal Africanus, November 2007


CONTENTS

Introduction: Two economies – or one system of superexploitation
Patrick Bond 1

PART ONE: HISTORICAL, THEORETICAL AND EMPIRICAL DIAGNOSTICS

Articulation from feudalism to neoliberalism
Michael Perelman 22

Wolpe’s legacy of articulating political economy
Ari Sitas 39

Changing concepts of articulation
Gillian Hart 46

Capitalism and racist forms of political domination
David Masondo 66

‘Rational ignorance’ and South African poverty statistics
Charles Meth 81

Flaws in South Africa’s ‘first’ economy
Martin Legassick 111

In search of South Africa’s ‘second economy’
Andries du Toit and David Neves 145

PART TWO: POLICY AND POLITICAL CHOICES

The ‘second economy’ as intellectual sleight of hand
Isobel Frye 175

South Africa as developmental state?
Bill Freund 191

The stunted growth of South Africa’s developmental state discourse
Devan Pillay 198

Two economies, microcredit and the Accelerated and Shared Growth 
Initiative for South Africa
Patrick Bond 216

Crises in social reproduction and home-based care
Nina Hunter 231

When public works programmes create ‘second economy’ conditions
Melanie Samson 244

Ubuntu/botho, the workplace and ‘two economies’
Mokong Simon Mapadimeng 257

Taylorism and Mbekism
Ashwin Desai 272

With compliments, from a recovered economist
Margaret Legum 288

© Unisa Press 1ISSN 0304-615X
Africanus 37 (2) 2007



pp1–21


[The first economy] is the modern industrial, mining, agricultural, 
financial,
and services sector of our economy that, everyday, becomes ever more
integrated in the global economy. Many of the major interventions made
by our government over the years have sought to address this ‘first world
economy’, to ensure that it develops in the right direction, at the 
right pace.
It is clear that this sector of our economy has responded and continues
to respond very well to all these interventions … The successes we have
scored with regard to the ‘first world economy’ also give us the possibility
to attend to the problems posed by the ‘third world economy’, which exists
side by side with the modern ‘first world economy’ … Of central and 
strategic
importance is the fact that they are structurally disconnected from our
country’s ‘first world economy’.
Thabo Mbeki, ANC Today, 2003.

 From day to day it ... becomes clearer that the relations of production in
which the bourgeoisie moves do not have a simple, uniform character but
rather a dual one; that in the same relations in which wealth is produced,
poverty is produced also; that in the same relations in which there is a 
development
of the forces of production, there is also the development of a repressive
force; that these relations produce bourgeois wealth, i.e. the wealth
of the bourgeois class, only by continually annihilating the wealth of 
the individual
members of this class and by producing an ever growing proletariat.
Karl Marx, Capital, 1867.


Introduction:

Two economies – or one system of superexploitation

Patrick Bond
University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society, Durban


1 INTRODUCTION

In the pages that follow, a group of South Africa’s leading political 
economists

tackle President Thabo Mbeki’s ‘two economies’ thesis, the framework 
most popularly

invoked for contemporary poverty policy in South Africa. In short, 
poverty can

be beat if sturdy (market-focused) ladders are found between the second 
and first

economy, which unfortunately at present are ‘structurally disconnected’.

On at least two earlier occasions, a critical mass of university-based 
intellectuals

gathered in various publications to contest ideas of this sort: the 
mid-1970s when

radicals fought liberals over the relationship between race and class; 
and the early

1990s when the South African version of the Regulation School was 
established.

Both contributions were flawed, we will see. Since then, there has been 
a growing

sense of the need to revisit and reconstruct old frameworks, in part because

of the tremendous upsurge in popular social struggles associated with 
new types

of exploitation. Political economists are late in responding to the 
challenge, but

may now have established the necessary historical, theoretical and 
applied framework.


To work this out properly, our contributors are all aware, requires a 
renewed commitment

to the underlying intellectual challenge posed systematically in Harold

Wolpe’s (1972, 1980) early work, on the way modes of production were 
‘articulated’

so as to link cities, mines, plantations and Bantustans. That challenge is

now amplified by President Thabo Mbeki’s neomodernisation argumentation and

practice, dressed up as it often is in egalitarian, redistributive garb, 
reminding us

of Wolpe’s own political commitments – but then departing fundamentally from

those. Hence, if the idea of ‘talk left, walk right’ (Bond 2006) 
accurately describes

the way South African elites challenge what they term ‘global 
apartheid’, in the following

pages we ask whether the same process is evident domestically in the very

conceptualisation of political economy.


The contributors to this particular volume come together as part of a 
wide-ranging

effort to reinvigorate South African political economic theory and 
analysis. They

gathered at the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Centre for Civil Society 
on 28 February

2006 for a Colloquium on Economy, Society and Nature which included a

tribute to Harold Wolpe on the tenth anniversary of his passing.1 In 
addition to

Wolpe, two other great political economists active until 2005 in 
regional debates

– Guy Mhone and Jose Negrao – were also feted on 1 March at the Colloquium,

as recorded in The Review of African Political Economy (March 2007) by 
Thandika

Mkandawire (for his cousin Mhone) and by Negrao’s widow Sabina Asselle and

Joe Hanlon. (Other articles in that Roape drawn from the Colloquium are 
Gillian

Hart’s work on articulations reprinted below – for which we are grateful 
to the

Roape editors for permission – and analysis of resistance strategies by 
CCS masters

student Prishani Naidoo and by one of our Wits University associates, Salim

Vally.) Mhone and Negrao offered original critiques of systemic uneven 
development

in other Southern African settings, a necessary task we have therefore not

attempted to replicate in this volume.


Mhone’s critique of what he called capitalist ‘enclavity’ received 
special treatment

in a recent booklet devoted to his memory, launched in Nairobi at the 
January 2007

Mhone Memorial Seminar of the International Development Economics Associates

(with which Guy was closely associated) by Mkandawire and Indian economist

Jayati Ghosh (Bond 2007b). Of extraordinary merit is the inspiring review

of Mhone’s ideas by Adebayo Olukoshi, contextualised within broader economic

development theory. Most important, perhaps, a summary of the prolific 
contributions

by Mhone and Negrao would have to stress the way their own praxis – the

often frictional rubbing of radical ideas against establishment power 
politics – contributed

enormously to the production of knowledge (Bond 2007a). Their deaths

in 2005 represented a tragic loss to political economy and to all who 
knew and

worked with them.


Wolpe, Mhone and Negrao taught us to assess the way social challenges are

reflected in the system’s actions and reactions. Hence a further rubbing 
of ideas

occurred at the Colloquium when from 2–4 March, CCS joined the Rosa 
Luxemburg

Foundation in celebrating her masterpiece of political economy, The 
accumulation

of capital. For Luxemburg, writing in 1913, the problem of imperialism 
itself

followed the very logic of capital ‘superexploiting’ the non-capitalist 
terrain of the

Third World, and South Africa was a classic case. In the edited 
collection that resulted,

The accumulation of capital in Southern Africa, several chapters addressed

the historical and contemporary South African economy, including Jeff 
Guy’s treatment

of Luxemburg’s source material; a debunking of two economies by Caroline

Skinner and Imraan Valodia; critiques of commodified state services by 
Greg Ruiters

and the Black Economic Empowerment strategy by Leonard Gentle; and activist

responses by S’bu Zikode, Salim Vally and Trevor Ngwane (Bond, Chitonge

and Hopfmann 2007).


What sets this volume apart are the specifically South African 
analytical focus,

the orientation to practical problems, and the varieties of overlapping 
critiques of

Mbeki’s new dualist analysis and strategy. The pages that follow are 
grouped into

two sets of essays – first, diagnosis and then, policy/politics – which 
help us to

consider economic development in terms of either ‘two economies’ or instead,

‘superexploitation’.


For Marxists, the idea of superexploitation is often captured by 
‘permanent primitive

accumulation’, in which the initial capitalist strategy of dispossessing 
non-capitalist

spheres – most famously in land enclosures which forced peasants into a 
proletarianisation

process – becomes permanent. Superexploitation is a way to understand

South Africa’s history of extremely biased accumulation, combining 
capitalism and

non-capitalist sites of work, of life and of nature. This process of 
‘uneven and combined

development’ can be identified in history as integral to the ‘original’ 
moment of

capital accumulation considered by Marx as ‘primitive’, i.e., in the 
initial stages when

the new mode of production was gathering momentum not on the basis of 
exploitation

at the point of production – the main point of Das Kapital – but rather 
in the

superexploitative relations between market and non-market activities.



David Harvey has termed this broader process ‘accumulation by dispossession’

(in contrast to accumulation by exploitation at the point of 
production), and locates

it as the dynamic behind the ‘new imperialism’, in the spirit of 
Luxemburg’s early

20th century argument. The capitalist system’s recourse to systematic 
looting has,

argues Harvey, emerged time and again during accumulation crises, 
including at

present. He traces the most substantial economic problems in 
‘overaccumulation’

which set in at the global scale during the 1970s, and which has only 
been displaced,

not resolved, since (Harvey 2003).


That was also the point at which Wolpe himself located modern South Africa’s

historically high profitability in an articulation of two modes of 
production, capitalist

and pre-capitalist. But the argument arose within a vibrant intellectual 
context that

meant it was neither the first nor last word in understanding social 
relations. We

can consider, next, some other key strands in political-economic 
analysis prior to

the 1970s revival of neo-Marxist political economy.


(continued at: http://www.nu.ac.za/ccs/files/africanus_1.pdf )