Capital accumulation and capital controls in South Africa: a class perspective

ABSTRACT

The article analyses capital controls (CC) in South Africa in light of the historically and geographically specific social relations of production. It highlights the role that CC have historically played in reproducing particular forms of capital accumulation, and sheds light on the CC currently implemented by the state. The analysis draws upon quantitative data from the national accounts, descriptive data on CC from policy documents, and interviews conducted during a period of extensive fieldwork. The article makes three main arguments. First, CC have played a key role in facilitating the reproduction of essential capitalist social forms, namely the state and money, and have been instrumental in the management of class relations. Second, the concrete forms that CC have taken are inseparable from the historical-geographical specificity of accumulation and the uneven unfolding of crises and social class struggles. Third, working classes have had an active (though indirect) role in shaping CC policies.

RÉSUMÉ

Cet article développe une analyse des politiques de contrôle de capitaux (CC) en Afrique du Sud, à la lumière du caractère historiquement et géographiquement spécifique des rapports de production. L’article souligne le rôle que les CC ont historiquement joué dans la reproduction de formes particulières d’accumulation du capital, et fournit une interprétation des CC actuellement mis en œuvre par l’État sud-africain. L’analyse est fondée sur des données quantitatives puisées dans les comptes nationaux, des données descriptives fournies par les documents de politique générale du Trésor National et de la banque centrale, ainsi que des entretiens effectués pendant une période de recherche sur le terrain. Trois arguments principaux sont avancés. Premièrement, les CC ont joué un rôle majeur dans la reproduction de formes sociales capitalistes essentielles (l’État et la monnaie), et ont contribué de façon cruciale à la gestion des rapports de classe. Deuxièmement, les formes concrètes assumées par les CC en Afrique du Sud sont intimement liées à la spécificité historique et géographique de l’accumulation et du déroulement des crises et des luttes sociales. Troisièmement, les classes ouvrières ont joué un rôle actif (bien qu’indirect) dans la définition des politiques de CC.

KEYWORDS:

• Capital controls
• capital flows
• finance
• class analysis
• state theory
• South Africa

MOTS-CLÉS:

• Contrôle de capitaux
• flux de capitaux
• finance
• analyse de classe
• théorie de l’État
• Afrique du Sud

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to Adrienne Roberts, Stuart Shields, Sam Ashman, Vishnu Padayachee, Patrick Bond, Carl Death and three anonymous reviewers for reading earlier versions of this article and making extensive comments. All errors remain mine.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Note on contributor

Ilias Alami is a PhD researcher in Politics at the University of Manchester. His research and teaching interests are in the areas of the political economy of money and finance, development and international capital flows, the geographies of global finance, materialist state theory and race/class/coloniality.

ORCID

Ilias Alami http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8737-3306

Notes

1. See, for instance, the compelling case for ‘locking capital down’ in Bond (2003).

2. I thank the Editors, Reviewer 1 and particularly Reviewer 3 for this crucial point.

3. I conducted 42 interviews with diverse social actors from government and the Reserve Bank, different sectors of capital, organised labour, international financial institutions and researchers. Only those cited appear in the references.

4. This section does not provide an extensive review of the literature. Rather, the purpose is to identify three broad types of contributions, and to position the present article within those.

5. For a general characterisation of such a form of accumulation, see Caligaris (2016).

6. The Union of South Africa was part of the British colonial Sterling Area.

7. Interviewees 5 and 10 have called this ‘Afro-pessimism’.

8. Particularly towards countries of the South African Development Community.

9. Carry trade operations: i.e. investment strategies which consist in borrowing in low-interest-rate currencies in order to invest in currencies that yield higher interest rates.

10. ‘Taper tantrum’: the reaction of the markets following the US Federal Reserve’s announcement in 2013 that it would gradually wind down its programme of unconventional monetary policy (quantitative easing).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Manchester University President Doctoral Scholar Award, by the School of Social Sciences [grant number AA1088], and by the generous funding of the Union for Radical Political Economics fellowship.