Abstract
The development of contemporary South Africa political economy occurred within the context of a global capitalist order characterized by increasingly unequal political and economic relations between and within countries. Before liberation in 1994, many people across the world actively supported the struggle against apartheid, with South Africa’s neighbouring states paying the highest price. The ‘sovereignty’ of the apartheid state was challenged by three processes: first, economic, cultural and sporting sanctions called for by Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress and other liberation movements, which from the 1960s-80s were increasingly effective in forcing change; second, solidaristic foreign governments including Sweden’s and the USSR’s provided material support to overthrowing the Pretoria Regime; and third, military defeat in Angola and the liberation of neighbouring Mozambique (1975), Zimbabwe (1980) and Namibia (1990) signalled the inevitability of change. But that state nevertheless maintained sufficient strength - e.g. defaulting on foreign debt and imposing exchange controls in 1985 - to ensure a transition to democracy that was largely determined by local forces. Since 1994, the shrinkage of sovereignty means the foreign influences of global capitalism amplify local socio-economic contradictions in a manner destructive to the vast majority of citizens. This is evident when considering economic, ecological, geopolitical and societal considerations.
Highlights
The development of contemporary South Africa political economy occurred within the context of a global capitalist order characterized by increasingly unequal political and economic relations between and within countries
Using the framework of ‘sovereignty’, we argue that sector by sector, the neoliberal developmental path chosen by the South African elite has failed
We strongly identify with what Alternative Report on Africa” (AROA) seeks, continentally: a new interpretation of Africa in order to bring out endogenous visions and struggles capable of improving the well-being of the populations
Summary
Ограничение суверенитета Южной Африки: экономические кризисы, экологический урон, субимпериализм и социальное сопротивление. By the late 1980s, the larger questions were again placed on the agenda, because it was a time when South Africa’s capitalist class demanded, for the first time, an end to formal apartheid The reasons for this are closely related to economic stagnation and financial crisis, but what was disconcerting was how dramatically this shook many political economists who, earlier, so profoundly rejected the liberal thesis that apartheid and capitalism were incompatible. The virulent form taken by its racism within the bounds of a predominantly capitalist economy has cast considerable doubt on the simple expedient of examining South Africa’s development in terms of hypotheses derived from ready-made analytical frameworks” [Fine, Rustomjee 1996: 21] Their own approach was institutionalist, by identifying the nexus of a Minerals-Energy Complex around which accumulation, state, labor relations and other economic phenomena could be understood. South Africa’s shrinking economic sovereignty, including the ability of the state to reverse the wrongs of apartheid
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