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... ry. (Cell 6) It is here reasoned that because of the influence of the white proletariat given the development of the South African economy as characterized by agriculture and a slow progression towards industrialization, the white procreates, the primary constituency of the Nationalist government had great influence over the economic policies of said government. AS such capitalist policies would proceed in a manner that compromised economic growth in order to secure greater wealth for whites over blacks. Again, Onwuzurike writes that, the primary goal of apartheid is the enhancement of the white economic well-being and political stabilization through perpetual scapegoating of blacks and disorganization of their aspiration toward economic, political and psychological stability. Such capitalist policies are not only typified by land alienation of forced wage labor, examples of government institutionalization of eugenic capitalist sentiments, such policies as the 1953 Bantu Education Act and the Extensions of University Education Act of 1959 severely limited the education of blacks, supporting the color bar established in mining industries to restrict blacks from acquiring skilled or semi-skilled positions. Others such as the Population Registration Act (1949) which required that all person's races be recorded, the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1950), the Immorality Act (1950) outlawed sexual intercourse between the races the Group Areas Act (1952) created the reference or pass book policy and the Native Laws Amendment Act (1992) which tightened the control over black movement and influx of labor.
As a result of this policy, unlike in the United States South African economy started to stagnate. Likewise there developed a dearth in skilled labor. As whites were the minority in South Africa, unlike the United States, they could not fill all the labor requirements brought about by a rapidly industrializing economy. Beneath the surface, however, several important economic forces were at work. The development of Bantu education and the use of the color bar in apprenticeship were creating shortages of skills for the rapidly expanding economy. Administering and policing the apartheid system were absorbing increasing numbers of the available educated and skilled people, especially whites.
The domestic market for mass consumption goods was not expanding as rapidly as it might have been because of low and stagnant standards of living of the majority of the population. It became clear that the initial design of the homelands policy would not work. The migratory and commuter worker system was not generating the necessary jobs, and the government increasingly recognized that the homelands were not economically viable. Furthermore, pressures exerted by the international community pushed the government toward local production of goods whose supply was threatened by past or future embargoes. (Lewis 16) Economic policy underwent significant modifications as the impossibility of implementing single-minded segregation, or grand apartheid, became increasingly clear.
The main changes involved a growing recognition that economic activities had to be move to the homelands, where a large proportion of the African population lived, that sill shortages engendered by racial restrictions were hamstringing economic growth, that the economy needed greater labor mobility, and that some Africans would have to be accepted as permanent residents in South Africa. (Lewis 17). The government's vision gradually shifted toward what Hoernle had described as double-minded segregation. This involved the development of separate political and administrative institutions and viable economic units for Africans, regardless of whether this made economic sense for the country as a whole. (Lewis 17) The progressive integration of black labor into the economy driven by stagnant economy was sidetracked. When summarizing the Liberal thesis on capitalism and its understanding of South African apartheid, Lundahl comments that to liberals the consumer is color blind. Consequently, this makes the capitalists / employers color blind as such capitalists will seek to hire the cheapest labor irregardless of color.
Lundahl concludes, (I agree with this, because proletariat's took control of government, capitalist in government supported by proletarians made capitalist policies... and adhered to the spirit of capitalism) In a competitive system, the latter will hire production factors, including labor, at the lowest possible cost. Racial discrimination simply increases costs by imposing restrictions on the supply of labor. Therefore the capitalist class is opposed to apartheid. The apartheid system has instead been designed to protect white labor, especially the least qualified, from competition with Africans who are prepared to work for lower wages'... since capitalists constitute a minority in South African society, they lack the political power to put an end to apartheid (THIS I DISAGREE WITH...
ALL CAPITALISTS< QUESTION IS WHICH CAPITALISTS ARE WINNING). Against this, the radicals have emphasized the complementarily between racial labor policies and white supremacy. In particular, it is argued that the capitalists benefit from production relations based on the repression of Africans. Racial discrimination in the labor market has persisted over time simply because it serves the economic interests of the white employers to preserve it, because it is cost reducing. The economic development, fueled apartheid policies, that has taken place in South Africa has simply reinforced white supremacy. (Lundahl 156) "before the 1976 Soweto insurrection - apartheid and capitalism co-existed compatibly. The state maintained a highly regulated and cheap African labour supply on the one hand, and private enterprises adapted to racially organized labour markets and a divided political society on the other.
But in the late 1970 s, the implications of Soweto slowly became apparent, exposing the failure of the dual policy of repression and co-option, and forcing a reassessment of strategies of control." Marx understands competition between laborers as the mechanism that determines wages. However, he conjectured that the same competition that sustains capitalism would be the downfall of the capitalist economy. Marx explains that, the essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage labor. Wage labor rests exclusively on competition between the laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to competition, by their involuntary combination, due to association. The development of modern industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products.
What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own gravediggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable. " However, Marx's prediction that the association of laborers due to wage competition resulting in proletarian insurrection is offset in the American landscape by the prevalence of race antagonism. As blacks and whites became two separate proletarian classes, one of the sub-proletariat nature, the threat to American capitalism lessened as the sort of competition between the races was not of a unity producing quality. Jill Quadagno maintains, I agree that the character of working-class politics has shaped the American welfare state. But I contend that the core issue is how working-class politics have been weakened by racial divisions, both in the workplace and in the community. In the work-place, trade union discrimination has been a barrier to labor organizing, while in the community, neighborhood segregation has impeded class solidarity.
Race discrimination has been a barrier to labor resistance and organization as well as to class solidarity. However, this has more greatly affected the circumstances of the African American than the white American proletarian. "The growing agricultural needs of the towns, cities, and mining centres called forth an African peasantry, which in time was suppressed by white commercial farmers (in alliance with the mining houses) seeking to eliminated competition and dislodge labour from villages for their own uses. By the 1920 s, the owners of large estates had uprooted the black peasantry and superseded white subsistence farmers, assuming control over food production. With their dominance assured, capitalist farmers acquired labor through tenancy and squatting rather than wages until the 1960 s, when tenancy was displaced by wage-labour markets. " (James 390) The mining industries also launched the manufacturing and service sectors, wherein white workers were protected by customary and legal color bars from African competition. Fear of 'swamping' intensified during World War II, when the rapid expansion of the manufacturing sector attracted a flow of Africans to the cities and assisted the victory of the NP and its infamous policy of apartheid. This, the argument runs, sought simultaneously to maximize the exploitation of black labour, and to contain and reverse the political and economic implications of the growing importance of African workers by harassing them in cities, regulating their access to labour markets, disrupting their trade unions, and removing them to their 'homelands'. (James 390) The Color bar was established from the beginning of the twentieth century and was cemented by the 1920 s.
Africans were prohibited from acquiring skilled and semi-skilled job positions. "Afrikaner and English supporters with legislation and administrative rulings. Its "civilized labor policy" involved paying whites at a higher rate than blacks for doing unskilled and semiskilled jobs. The policy was adopted in the Civil service and complimented the color bar in the mines (Lewis 11) They system of migrant labor and controls on the movements of black south Africans, an economic and sociopolitical mechanism over the black population that is more than a century old, has had a fundamental effect on all aspects of South Africa's society and economy. The system depends on the combination of a lack of economic alternatives for black workers, especially those domiciled homelands, and control of movement of blacks to and within white areas of the country.
Its effects also depend on other factors, especially the policies on job reservation, education and training, and settlement by black workers. As a result, rather than a free markets, sustained by a full range of segregation instruments. (Lewis 51) In the early years of the diamond and gold booms, the demand for labor was so great that, to avoid competitive bidding for African labor, the mining companies decided to combine forces in join recruiting efforts. As in other parts of Africa during the colonial period, taxes were imposed on the indigenous population; the need to pay taxes required them to work in the wage economy, this inducing a supply of labor. A major cooperative effort was made to recruit for the gold mines from outside South Africa and to recruit widely enough throughout southern Africa that demand would not bid up the wage rate. (Lewis 52) The formation of the 1924 Pact government constituted a victory for white labor and Afrikaner farmers. Its programs skewed the demand for labor toward whites and limited the flow of black labor into all sectors except agriculture - thus assuring cheap labor to the farmers. The principal capitalist interests at the time were mining, and the share holding in the mines were substantially in foreign lands.
The combination of wage policies, tariff protection, job reservation, and restrictions on movement of black workers effectively subsidized white agriculture and labor at the expense of mining interests and of the black population generally. (Lewis 53) Both the government and parastatals retained various forms of job preference for whites. Major parts of the influx control system were eliminated, making it possible for Africans who were not citizens of the homeland to move to urban areas, although not to white neighborhoods, since the Group Areas Act remained law. (Lewis 55) An important part of the background to the erection of the legally founded color bar may be found in the 'poor white problem' and its connection with increasing urbanization. For different reasons, a push was exerted on approximately one out of eight of the white population to leave the countryside. Rural life had difficulties in adapting to increased population pressure. Agricultural methods were poor. Not only the Africans but the European farmers as well were facing a serious erosion problem.
The system of inheritance as given by Roman-Dutch law made for an uneconomic subdivision of farms. Many failed to adapt to the changed requirements imposed by the increasing commercialization of agriculture following the mineral discoveries. (Lundahl 110) The poor whites (Afrikaners in their majority) were forced to leave the countryside to seek work in town. There, however, lacking the education and training necessary for holding skilled positions, they had to face the stern competition of other racial groups, mainly the Africans, who were prepared to work at comparatively low wages - in a situation where labor costs were the dominating consideration in the mines and on the farms. As could be expected, this soon led to industrial unrest. The first trade unions (craft unions) had been founded by the British immigrants in the late nineteenth century, and white trade unionism soon spread into the Rand mines. The mine owners strongly resisted, and the two parties clashed. (Lundahl 110) The white workers won a victory in 1911, when the Mines and Works Regulation Act established the color bar in mining, reserving the best jobs for Europeans, but the mine owners continued to oppose trade unionism, and a series of strikes in 1913 - 14 ended with military intervention and defeat for the unions.
In spire of this setback, attempts by the mine owners to minimize labor costs by substituting black labor for white in skilled positions was thwarted by the unions. A court decision had declared the color bar in the Mines Act ultra view, but in 1918 a status quo agreement was concluded between the Chamber of Mines and the South African Industrial Federation whereby the color bar was to be maintained. (Lundahl 110) The strike failed, and a Mining Industry Board concluded that the abolition of the status quo agreement was justified. Many whites lost their jobs, and a majority had to see their wages lowered. Africans were promoted to higher levels and wage costs were cut in the mining industry.
These effects were only short-run, however. The white miners had not lost the battle. All of them had votes and used them, in 1924, to bring in a joint Labour/Nationalist government into power. The Pact Government immediately passed three laws which definitely re-established to color bar. From 1924 on, the basic cleavage of the labor market was ensured. (Lundahl 111) The most important act was the 1926 Mines and Works Amendment Act which restored and reinforced the 1911 Act so as to legalize the color bar in mining.
The second one was the Industrial Conciliation act arbitration for industries with organized (white) labor. The definition of employees used in this act was such as to exclude the majority of Africans from the right to bargaining. The third and last act was the 1925 Wage Act whereby a Wage Board was established to recommend minimum wages and working conditions (to be approved by the Minister of Labour) for unorganized labor. In practice, the Wage Board turned into a mechanism to prevent wage increases for Africans. (Lundahl 111) Between 1973 and 1976 white rule suffered several serious blows.
In the Durban strikes of 1973, black workers for the first time flexed their muscles in a massive illegal strike. In 1974 the Portuguese buffer states of Mozambique and Ang...
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Research essay sample on Capitalism And African American History
