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At the base of the South African and American systems of racial discrimination is an understanding and internalization of the structural implications of capitalism and its accompanying spirit. Applying Karl Marx's and Adam Smith's definition of capitalism in conjunction with Max Weber's understanding of the "spirit of capitalism", it is here affirmed that a golden thread of capitalist thought serves both as initiator and sustainer of ideals necessary for the systematic oppression of "black people" in both South Africa and the United States. This oppression adheres to a cult of philosophy that is grounded in a doctrine of class determinacy characterized by racial particularization. Thus, parallel to the thread of capitalism evolves a sociological internalization of black inferiority that resides in the radicalization of class.
This categorization of race is created and is constantly being reformed by the temporal adaptations of the capitalist. The adaptations and eugenic biases of South African and American capitalist's are institutionalized within government and government comes to function as the apparatus through which the capitalist conditions societal economic relations in order to secure profits. A socio-historical argument will be developed based on the analysis of historical developments in both South Africa and the United States. Capitalism, in accordance to Marxian theory is an economy or social structure in which a minority of society owns the means of production. Where capital is explained as the raw materials or machinery used in the production of "new instruments of labor, " the minority, termed the capitalists and identified as the bourgeois, utilize capital, the means of production, to create wealth. In this economy, the Proletariat, the trades people, shopkeepers, and peasants; those who because of lack of capital are not able to compete in the capitalist economy, are forced to sell their labor as a commodity to the capitalists in order to survive.
As far as capitalism is marked by the accumulation of wealth, Weberian doctrine in conjunction with Marxian classifications of the capitalist society provides a complete understanding of a uniquely western type of capitalism. Proceeding from Weber's understanding of profit and accumulation of wealth and consequently the "spirit of capitalism" money becomes, "of [a] prolific, generating nature. Money can beget money, and its offspring can beget more, and so on. " Weber expands upon his definition of the Spirit of Capitalism when he writes: It is though of so purely as an end in itself, that from the point of view of the happiness of, or utility to, the single individual, it appears entirely transcendental and absolutely irrational. Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life. Economic acquisition is no longer subordinated to man as the means for the satisfaction of his material needs. What is of particular interest about the western capitalist and serves as foundation for this thesis is the event of "spirit of capitalism" as it is described above, coming to supplant traditional ethics of wealth.
The development of wealth as an end in and of itself is intrinsic to understanding the complexities of the American slave establishment and consequently American segregation and South African apartheid. The unconscionable pursuit of wealth by individuals has been a markedly Western capitalist tradition. Marx maintains that, the discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. The development of an attitude of avarice that directs the capitalist class into the perpetual pursuit of profit became an intrinsic defining characteristic of the capitalist ethos. Wealth became an end in and of itself; diversion from this pursuit was considered irrational and socially aberrant behavior. Smith takes this further and co-opts this understanding of the accumulation of wealth with the capitalist understanding of labor.
Smith explains that, every man is rich or poor according to the degree in which he can afford to enjoy the necessaries, conveniences, and amusements of human life. But after the division of labor has once thoroughly taken place, it is but a very small part of these with which mans' own labor can supply him. The far greater part of them he must derive from the labor of other people, and he must be rich or poor according to the quantity of that labor which he can command, or which he can afford to purchase. As wealth is created out of man, and the tool man utilizes to create wealth is labor, applying the principles of capitalism, the proclivity for this system to be one of exploitation is readily perceivable. Mats Lundahl in Apartheid in Theory and Practice, maintains that the South African progression towards a system of apartheid can be divided into three phases.
The first of which began in 1652 typified by mineral discoveries towards the latter half of the nineteenth century. He comments that during this phase land was the primary capital interest of the Afrikaners. The Second phase, which Lundahl explains to have ended around World War I was characterized by development of the South African labor market which involved the destruction of indigenous African lives, the monopolization of African lands by whites, and the forced entry of black Africans into the labor market. The Third and Final stage saw the introduction of the color bar and lasted until the mid- 1920 s. However, though all these processes are intrinsic to the development of a system of subjugation in South Africa, The apartheid economic structure of South Africa is a residual of the discovery of diamonds in 1867 and Gold in 1886.
Stephen Lewis comments that diamonds and gold transformed the country from an agricultural and trading backwater to an economic resource of great value. They also set in motion the basic forces - economic. Legal, demographic and political - that have governed the development of South Africa. " Afrikaners before they entered South Africa in 1652. Robert Scott Jasper writes that, although racial segregation was not a feature of frontier life, the settlers assumed and insisted upon white supremacy from the beginning. By the 1940 s the Afrikaners, who were known as the Boers or volk's, developed a philosophy, grounded in Afrikaner nationalism, that proclaimed the Afrikaners to have been given a "unique and divinely inspired civilizing mission." Much like in the United States the civilizing techniques used by Afrikaners were those of exploitation designed to capitalize on black labor. The capitalist greed of the Afrikaners did not begin to take form until the middle of the nineteenth century.
The case of South African apartheid is unique and differentiated from the United State's systems of black oppression in that its capitalist ideals came to be grounded in a deep sense of nationalism that transcended class division. This is unique, not because it is a result of nationalism, as the United State's system of slavery is also resultant from a sense of national preservation, however, it is unique because capitalist doctrine provided a venue for the accumulation of wealth for not only the capitalists but for white proletarians as well. In the United States, white proletarians though elevated vis -- vis the position of black proletarians were nevertheless exploited by the American capitalist class. As a matter of fact, often the situation of the white proletarian and black proletarian would be manipulated so as to produce a competition in wage labor that would decrease wages and produce greater capital for capitalist wealth. This is the primary point of divergence from the capitalist experience of both countries.
The early experience of South African apartheid more or less reflected that of the United States, except with the ever present conflict of providing for Afrikaner economic interest. Capitalism in its nascent years in South Africa saw a pursuit of wealth that not only severely transgressed the rights of the black population but also exploited poor white labor. However with the election of the Nationalist Party and the sanctioning of apartheid this type of capitalism, that of pursuit of wealth with disregard to the white proletariat transformed into one that white capitalist pursuit of wealth that sought to elevate all whites to the position of capitalists and to create a permanent white proletariat. The National Party representing militant Afrikaner Dom, unexpectedly won the election of 1948 and has remained in power ever since. Relying on the support of Afrikaner farmers and urban semiskilled workers, the Nationalists promised to make whites secure and prosperous by separating the races and maintaining power in Afrikaner hands. Modest wartime reforms of racial policy were to be abolished.
The new government assured white farmers that they would continue to have access to low-cost black labor and that white workers in the towns would be protected from black competition. Since Afrikaner ownership in mining, finance, banking, and manufacturing was minimal, the government decided to expand its control over the economy and use its influence and patronage to direct resources to Afrikaner business. When the Nationalists took over in 1948, English speaking whites had nearly twice the income per capita of Afrikaners, while even as late as 1960 English-speakers were three times as likely as Afrikaners to hold top jobs in commerce and industry. (Lewis 14) Originally having an economy based on pastoral activities the evolving South African government had to create measures that would force blacks into the wage economy, two of these mechanisms were taxes and more powerful than taxes was land alienation. Lundahl writes that As their land shrank, the Africans developed new livelihoods. Those who could avoid it did not accept going to the mines or becoming laborers on white farms. Between 1830 and 1870, a black peasantry emerged in South Africa.
The response to imposition of taxes and to the development of new wants requiring cash incomes... The land alienation process involved forcibly taking lands from Africans and relocating them into Native reserves which, having no internal economic structure or resources provided no other mode of survival except wage labor in Afrikaner and white European labor market. Africans were to exercise their political rights in their homelands but would have no such rights outside of their homelands. Originally the native reserves were established so that whites would have access to the commodity land, as that was the tool to produce capital, however as labor became of greater importance, the Native Reserves system which had existed since 1913 would be reformed to become a labor reserve for white employers. In 1985, 75 % of the population was Africans, and all were allocated to one of ten homelands. Stephen Lewis records that, Of South Africa's 21. 4 million Africans, 14 million were permanently living in the homelands.
Another 1. 5 million were living as migrant laborers, without their families, elsewhere in the country, but were permanently "domiciled" in the homelands. The remaining 5. 9 million were more or less permanently resident in the white areas of South Africa, on farms or in segregated townships around the urban areas. When in 1950 a government commission discovered that the homelands would need more land in order to become economically viable, instead of providing this commodity the government introduced a policy that allowed Africans to be "commuters or temporary residents in white South Africa. Black South Africans were to be regarded as "temporary sojourners, " on their own land.
After the election of the National Party, they would extend the Native Reserves policy in order to lay the ground works for apartheid. Sales to British owned lands were prohibited in 1904 (law passed to increase labor supply). As is evidenced above the South African capitalist experience with apartheid was at first driven by the desire for capital in the form of land and subsequently transformed to the desire for commodities in the form of cheap labor. Whereas in the United States at one point black labor was the embodiment of a commodity as the capitalist owned the laborer, in South Africa blacks were always proletariat's in that they sold their labor to capitalist.
However nevertheless in both systems extreme levels of exploitation occurred. In order to facilitate the end of securing capital wealth, capitalist used institutions and propaganda to secure power. This later will not only be shown to have divided the white and black proletariat in the United States and Africa, but it will also be shown how the process of indoctrination occurs. Onwuzurike writes that, apartheid policy can be said to have been built upon the eugenicist concept that emphasizes the superiority of the white race and the inferiority of a subordinate black race. This conception dictates the nature of association and relationship between white and black people the world over. The definition of apartheid and its implications suggest that white economic political, and social existence must have priority over black socioeconomic, political, and psychological aspirations.
As such, combined with Afrikaner nationalism, the capitalist greed and the psychological racial understood superiority of white South Africans became enmeshed. Stanley Uys writes that, Apartheid, then, is the unique creation of Afrikaner Nationalism, which is the oldest nationalism on the African continent, reared under British imperialism. Afrikaner nationalism, according to its own historians, was firmly established 100 years ago, although its main impetus was derived from the South African War, 1899 - 1901, when the two Boer republics, the Transvaal and Orange Free State, fell to the superior forces of imperial Britain. The Nationalist Party's general election victory over the late General Smuts in 1948 was Afrikaner Nationalism's vengeance for the South African War. It was not apartheid that brought the Afrikaners to power, but their own nationalism. (Uys 14) Though many capitalist desired to further capital interest by the integration of blacks into the economy which progressively began to happen with the Smuts government in the early twentieth century, Afrikaner nationalism won out, and capitalist policy would be tied with racial policy. For Liberal historians the most significant fact, and the central problem, of South African history was the remarkable persistence of the Afrikaner mentality and national character.
In accounting for it they weighed inheritance and environment. They stressed the rigid Calvinism that the Dutch and French Huguenot settlers had brought with them in the seventeenth century; their almost total isolation from the liberalizing currents of European thought in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; their development of the habit of dominance over colored slaves; their defiant rejection of British liberal humanitarianism in their Great Trek of the 1830 s; their constitutions in the Orange Free State and the Transvaal Republic, bluntly specifying "no equality in church and state"; their long struggle against both the harsh physical environment and the fierce resistance of Bantu-Speaking Africans; the unification of all these strands into nationalism under the pressure of the British "imperial factor"; and the final hardening of Afrikaner reaction in the crucible of the Boer War. The history of the Afrikaner people was thus a succession of powerfully formative experiences. None of them, perhaps, was inevitable. But each made the outcome of the next more predictable. As Afrikaner nationalism gained impetus, so South Africa's native population became more extreme.
Segregation was thus the logical conclusion of the Afrikaner people's peculiar histo...
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