The origins, development and ideology of local manufacturing in South Africa

Abstract

Through the use and with the assistance of legitimating ideologies, dominant groups have attained and entrenched their dominance, and subordinate ones have attempted to mobilize against them in South Africa. The most powerful capitalist groups-mineowners, commerce and manufacturing-have been the instigators and masters of change in the society, and have developed and used ideologies to assist them in making alliances with each other, pacifying, absorbing, dominating, or changing subordinate groups in the society, and in gaining legitimate access to the State whose power they have needed throughout. In this study of the development of early manufacturing it is argued that the processes of the development of group cohesion in the face of a hostile and dominating imperial capitalism, the counteracting of the already present imperial ideology, the gaining of access to State power, and the public legitimation of their cause, were made possible by the development by manufacturing leaders and ideologists, of a specific, petit-bourgeois, ideology. By showing how this occurred, the study attempts to go some way towards refining the tools of analysis which Southern Africanists have so far used in their examination of the making of contemporary South Africa; in particular, it is concerned to show how significant in the understanding of power and domination in the society is the development of a theory of the relationship between capital and state which goes beyond (but does not ignore) the examination of economic determinants. How exactly capitalists of one sort or another relate to, manipulate and/or control the State is a subject of great complexity; the examination of their ideologies is one approach towards the understanding of the means they use to do so.