OF MONSTERS AND DEVILS, ANALYSES AND ALTERNATIVES: CHANGING BLACK SOUTH AFRICAN PERCEPTIONS OF CAPITALISM AND SOCIALISM

Abstract

On 2 February 1990 the South Afriean State President, F. W. De Klerk, confirmed that his Government was ready to eommenee negotiations on the dismantling of apartheid and on some form of power-sharing with blaek South Afrieans. While there remain large, even fundamental differenees between his vision of a new soeiety and a new eonstitution and that of the main blaek organizations, South Afriea does appear, at least at the time of writing, to be moving toward a period of politieal negotiation. Attention will mainly be foeused to start with on the ending of both white politieal dominanee and all legal forms of raeial diserimination. The negotiations, however, will not be eoneerned only with the ending of a system, but with its replacement by new structures. And these coneerns about a post-apartheid society will inevitably require a debate over a new eeonomie dispensation. This artiele, whieh is based on interviews with blaek South Afrieans, will not attempt to antieipate the nature of that debate. But it will make an argument that, over the last ten or fifteen years of the struggle for blaek freedom, there has been growing blaek resentment toward the eapitalist system and an inereasingly positive interest in soeialism; and that this ideological ehange, as ill-defined as it may still be, will make itself felt in the