Cultural economy in post-transitional South Africa

Abstract

... the dominance of a culture in a society does not require all members to be able to participate in that culture on the same terms. Indeed, a culture may be dominant even if most people can only aspire to participate in it: its dominance is felt to the extent that people's aspirations, their hopes and fears, vocabulary of motives and sense of self are defined in its terms ... While it is important to recognize that the terms of participation in consumer culture are profoundly unequal, these terms are not directly tied (though they might be indirectly related) to economic equality, but are peculiar to the culture itself. (Lury 1996: 7) What then is money? It is a universal measure of value, but its specific form is not yet as universal as the method that humanity has devised to measure time all round the world. It is purchasing power, a means of buying and selling in markets. It counts wealth and status. It is a store of memory linking individuals to their various communities, a kind of memory bank and thus a source of identity. As a symbolic medium, it conveys information through a system of signs that relies more on numbers than words. A lot more circulates with money than the goods and services it buys. (Hart 2007:15) Why political economy no longer tells the whole story The uneven and contradictory interconnections between apartheid and capitalism in South Africa have long been critically debated in political economy terms from both liberal and Marxist perspectives. Recent critical analyses of transformation in South Africa and attempts to describe South Africa's reintegration into the global economy underscore, to varying degrees and from a range of different viewpoints, the growing and troubling 'limits of liberation' (Robins 2005). These studies continue to probe and problematise, within political economy frameworks, the nature of state power and national polities both in Africa and beyond, typically critiquing the domination of state politics, law and institutions, issues of ownership and control, describing how subsequent struggles for power are enacted among various political players, and between these and market actors. These critical inquiries include, but are by no means limited to, Bond 2005, 2006; Chidester, Dexter and James 2003; Daniel, Habib and Southall 2004; Daniel, Southall and Lutchman 2005; Habib and Bentley 2008; Robins 2005; Seekings and Nattrass 2006; Southall and Melber 2009, to name but a handful. Today, post-transitional South Africa comprises a contradictory network of socio-cultural and economic forms of reorganisation, broadly attesting to an accommodation of neoliberal corporate capitalism. This corporate neoliberal environment is marked concurrently by continuing uneven development, ongoing poverty and rising structural unemployment, transforming accumulations of capital, more or less successful procedures of racial redress, elitist and ethnic mechanisms of socio-economic inclusion and exclusion, manifestations of non-racialism and re-racialisation, local mobilisations of social movements and NGOs, refashioned affiliations to traditionally African social practices and hierarchies, and more. During the apartheid regime, crucial in this regard were the ways political and economic factors converged and intersected primarily through strategies of racial discrimination as a means of controlling 'cheap' black labour. However, in post-apartheid South Africa, convergences between economic, ethnic, national and other socio-cultural determinants, and the state-initiated agenda of redress, have generated new socio-economic complexities. Alongside attempts to attain sustainable economic growth and rejoin the global economy, and a desire--however implicit--to forge a sense of national identity, government has also made a point of prioritising an initiative of redress, whereby transformation has been conceptualised in terms of wealth and income redistribution to previously disenfranchised groups (see Habib & Bentley 2008: 24, passim; Innes 2007: 67). …