Class and Race Domination and Transformation in South Africa

Abstract

South African neo-Marxist scholarship gave class analytic primacy in explaining both material inequality and race domination. I review neo-Marxist theories of class and race domination and transformation and find class necessary but secondary to race in explaining the emergence and demise of the racial order. Specifically, classes created a racialized labor repressive system. More recently, working classes have struggled for social democracy. But class theories inadequately explain the comprehensiveness and resilience of race domination. This ensued from ethnic mobilizations to create a white ethnocracy and cleanse South Africa of other ethnic groups. The apartheid era systematized ethnic cleansing, but cleansing was limited by whites' dependence on cheap black labor. Thus racialized capitalist growth favored white social mobility and black proletarianization. The primacy of race over class is also indicated by the anti-apartheid movements' historic demands for inclusive nationalism and the new regimes' search for justice through policies of deracialization.