Thinking with Capital today: a brief introduction

ABSTRACT

This essay introduces the special issue entitled “Capital and Contemporary Critique: a Stellenbosch Seminar Series”. It situates the contributions by briefly engaging previous Marxist theorisations of South Africa and their criticisms. It argues that capitalism continues to shape contemporary social life, and requires analysis, albeit without repeating the shortcomings of older Marxist analyses.

KEYWORDS:

• Capitalism
• social theory
• South Africa
• race
• class

The remarkable recent documentary, American Factory, is about a Chinese-owned glass factory in Ohio. The plant opened in 2013, employing a number of people in a town where the American automobile industry, once the mainstay of people’s livelihoods, had downsized. The film takes us from the founding of the factory and the optimism that its presence in the town generated through a story of Chinese management and migrant workers attempting to teach American workers an improved work ethic, including the extension of their working days and the intensification of their working practices, which sometimes entailed the flouting of health and safety regulations. Presented by the participants as a tale of “American ways” and “Chinese ways,” the terms of tension between these “work cultures” include time and work discipline. This is a familiar theme to students of the history and theory of capitalism, except that, in this twenty-first-century version, the point of origin of workers and management seem reversed: the work ethic is not a Western one imposing itself on the globe as universal. Predictably, we soon see the glass factory’s management tire of the “ineptitude” of American work culture – and their desire for adequate worker representation in company decision-making – and they find ways to replace certain workers with machines as a means to break resistance to longer working hours and more intensive working practices.

I do not read this documentary as revealing a twenty-first-century “clash of cultures,” of some version of Chinese authoritarianism clashing with an American commitment to a good life balancing labour and leisure and offering its citizens freedom. While the example is evocative in part because it is not the standard tale of Euro-American perpetrators oppressing people from elsewhere on the globe, it draws attention to a kind of dynamic that decomposes and reorganises social life to produce value. The imperatives that accompany the operation of capitalism might not look identical everywhere, yet they not only regulate production, they also mediate subjectivity. The documentary resonated powerfully with some of my intentions in this special issue because it calls attention to social processes that exist somewhat independently of the biographies of individuals, their class positions, their particular cultural background and life-histories (what Dipesh Chakrabarty [2000] once called “History 2”). That is, the film portrays processes that reshape society not so much as a matter of chance or historical accident but rather as the repetition of a logic. A logic that is less about ownership and more about what capitalism must continue to do, that is, find ways to create value. Read in this way, the documentary gives us a glimpse of what the present teaches us about what capitalism is as a social system and about what Capital (Marx [1867] 1976) is as a theoretical approach aimed at grasping it. By this, I mean that even as we try and understand capitalism by engaging with categories that were developed close to its genesis, our contemporary existence may allow us to see new potential in these categories. These are categories that, for many, seemed to have little purchase on the contemporary world, especially after the end of the Cold War and the global fragmentation of the working classes.

This collection offers a series of papers presented at Stellenbosch University in response to a concern about understanding capitalism today, as well as the articulations of capitalism and race. Although many of the presenters were familiar with the interpretations of Marx that shaped South African scholarship from the mid-1970s and were especially influential during the 1980s and 1990s, the interpretations offered here differ significantly from those readings of Marxism, in the theoretical objects they foreground and in the scholarly domains they discuss. In this introduction, I will briefly recount an influential Marxist reading of South Africa from the 1970s and its criticisms. I will then pull the contributions of the papers together and point to some of the collective interventions of the special issue that begin to address the absence of an adequate analysis of contemporary capitalism in (South) African scholarship.

A premature post-capitalism?

In scholarship on South Africa, attention to capitalism has waned in the last 30 years. The major strand of South African Marxism in the academy – what become known as revisionist Marxism – revised understandings of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century South Africa, arguing that racism was not only a product of the political decision of white settlers, explicable in terms of the ideology of Afrikaner nationalism. Instead, racism needed to be understood in materialist terms. This meant showing, in the first instance, that the building of the South African economy was deeply implicated in racism and that its major pillars, in agriculture, mining, and manufacturing, profited from racism. It also meant tracing the transformations of South African’s political economy and considering distinct periods of capitalist accumulation and their attendant modes of domination.

This mode of approaching South African society was ambitious and generative of a range of debates that reframed understandings of colonialism, segregation, and apartheid. It critiqued and reformulated the connections drawn between racism and politics in liberal historiography as well as developing a more rigorous Marxist analysis of South Africa than the theory of “colonialism of a special type” that characterised the South African Communist Party’s doctrine in exile. Harold Wolpe’s (1972) foundational intervention attempted to show how Black rural economic production, despite its apparent backwardness, articulated with “advanced” white-owned urban capitalist industry, especially in mining but also in manufacturing. He showed that despite these two appearing as different modes of production – at least in the first half of the twentieth century – rural subsistence economies subsidised urban capitalist ones, making African labour especially cheap and made apparent the interest of mining capitalists in maintaining racial job reservation and the restrictions on the movement of Africans. Later, the Marxian notion of primitive accumulation became a concept that shaped scholars’ attempts to explain how the conquest and subjugation of black and brown people in Southern Africa was related to compelling them into wage labour. In many of these analyses, mining provided a model for “Grand Apartheid,” with the form of twentieth-century racism in South Africa considered to be an expression of class exploitation, different from earlier forms of racism. The political implication was that the racist state and capitalist production needed to be combated simultaneously if racism in South Africa was to be overcome.

These revisionist analyses were often written at a macro-scale, in which the particularities of African forms of social and cultural life were neglected in favour of showing how African life was integrated into a capitalist economy in a manner that uniformly made African into a working class. Although Wolpe argued that capitalism was initially subsidised by such rural economies, ongoing dispossession of rural land owned by Africans, meant that the Apartheid period, Africans were rendered increasingly dependent on urban wages.

Archie Mafeje (1981) pointed to the limits of imposing an analysis at such a scale when he argued that this version of Marxism was bound to “nomethic inquiry” that ignored the “idiographic insights” to be gained from ethnographic understandings of African society. He asserted the necessity of recognising the mediation of African thought and experience in understanding how capitalism worked in Southern Africa. The failure of this recognition on the part of the revisionists risked the imposition of Euro-centric categories. In a 1983 article in this journal, Deborah Posel took aim at the “reductionist” and “functionalist” character of some of the key revisionist writings. She suggested that the revisionists’ attempt not to take the existence of race for granted resulted in reducing race to an ostensibly deeper class explanation. Similarly, she argued that racism did not uniformly follow capitalism’s growth in the country, which itself was not a linear development, with moments when racist forms of capitalist accumulation were smoother and others when the system was thrown into crisis. To avoid these pitfalls, she argued that politics and ideology needed to be understood on its own terms and for the recognition of the complex interplay between economic, political, and ideological forces (Posel 1983, 63–64).

While Mafeje and Posel were by no means the only critics of the revisionists, the broad grounds of their criticisms, around the importance of empirical work in concept formation and on the autonomy of political struggles (and their irreducibility to economic interests), were exemplary in a broad shift away from Marxist understandings generally and revisionist approaches in particular. Of course, the historical moment of the democratic transition in South Africa as well as political and scholarly demands to understand race, gender, and the nature of the colonial also influenced this shift. Indeed, today Marxist readings have become more obscure, relegated by some scholars to the “pre-historical” and ignored by others more interested in the pressing politics of the day.

As I have argued at greater length elsewhere (Dubbeld 2019), contemporary intellectual foci in South Africa, even on a broader left, may well be concerned with issues of inclusion and inequality, power, and recognition but have tended to take capitalism for granted. Even when capitalism is named, it is conflated with one or another individual capitalist or groups of capitalists, with struggle and agency foregrounded. While many aspects of these analyses and the struggles they represent or attempt to inaugurate are important, they are largely unreflexive of the constraints that capitalism imposes on social life, even as they may emphasise the individual agency or the collective freedom to shape society politically. As Moishe Postone (2010, 22) noted of post-modernism, calling it a “premature post-capitalism,” such scholarship emphasises the “possibilities generated, but unrealized, in capitalism.” Yet with capitalism not considered as a context that structures social activity, such emphases on freedom and political potential “can serve as an ideology of legitimation for the new configuration of capitalism.”

Does the need to make capitalism part of an analysis of contemporary social life mean that we should return to revisionist analyses? Several scholars have suggested important insights worth revisiting. Gillian Hart’s essay (2007) discusses Wolpe’s concept of articulation, carefully looking at what the concept offered and may still offer. Reading Wolpe’s early work alongside Stuart Hall and Ernesto Laclau, she shows that the concept offers a framework for explaining relationships between different forms of domination. The way Wolpe and Hall use the concept, she concludes, is preferable to later post-Marxist readings which point only to contingent connections between forms of domination. Indeed, this use of articulation is also preferable to intersectionality because it provides a specific historical form to explain why particular forms of subjugation overlap, and the conditions of how such connections may occur. David Moore (2019) argues that even if critics were correct to point out some of the flaws in how cheap migrant labour related to capitalism at different periods of twentieth-century South Africa, Wolpe’s analysis – combined with a reading of primitive accumulation – points us towards understanding some of the features of contemporary capitalism. At an ever more global scale, Moore suggests, cheap labour continues to drive capitalism with the costs of reproduction outsourced to wherever unpaid and unremunerated work can be exploited. Yet Moore (2019, 87) does acknowledge that the revisionists speak to an industrial capitalism, what he suggests “may well be an illusion conjured from the past.” That is, we cannot assume that national boundaries are able to contain and constrain production as was the case when Wolpe wrote in 1972 or that the composition of classes have been unaltered from that time.

One aspiration of this collection, then, is to neither to ignore capitalism, confining its effects to some purely economic domain, nor to mistake the concrete forms of nineteenth- or mid-twentieth-century capitalism with capitalism as such. We know from the vantage of the present that capitalism both continues to mediate social life and yet the forms of social life it shapes do not look the same everywhere and indeed do not even follow the neat class categorisations once considered intrinsic to Marx’s analysis. How then, do we understand Capital and think with it today?

Returning to capital, racial capitalism, and political struggle

The first contribution to this special issue is from political theorist Anita Chari. Chari’s work over the last decade has concerned the possibilities of a political critique of reification. Drawing especially from Lukacs’s reading of Marx, Chari (2010, 589) understands reification as

an unengaged spectatorial stance that individuals take toward the social world and their own practices … a form of consciousness that is uniquely constitutive of capitalism … [and] the subjective stance that individuals take toward a society in which the economy exists as a separate [from their own action].

Such a form of consciousness has fundamental implications for the possibilities of transformative politics and, in her understanding, requires that critique be materialised in a manner that could enable such politics. In her article, she expands a project she first expressed in her 2015 A Political Economy of the Senses, thinking through the artist collective Claire Fontaine and the possibilities of what she calls a sensate critique of neoliberalism.

If Chari confronts head-on the subjectivity of Capital in a manner quite different from the Marxist traditions in South Africa, Hylton White takes on these traditions more directly. Reading Neville Alexander, Cedric Robinson, and Harold Wolpe, White’s aim is to further the analysis of racial capitalism. Part of what is at stake here is not a return to the terms of the race–class debate that was sparked by the revisionist analyses and was prominent in South African studies in the 1980s. White does not approach capitalism as a structure of classes in the first instance, but rather through valorisation and its attendant forms of social being and consciousness. From this vantage point, he engages Fanon’s analysis to propose a reading of antiblack racism as a “recurrent figment of global modernity.”

Ulrike Kistner takes the race–class debate in another direction in her article, using it as inspiration to inquire into the genealogies of the category of class in Marx’s own early writings, and in turn to rethink some of the ambivalences in understandings of liberation in South Africa. In relation to Marx, she thinks explicitly about the tension between class being located in a historically specific mode of production and its positing as a universal, trans-historical category, and how these name a dissonance between a kind of programmatic history that desires a liberation through the state, and a “anti-narrativist counter-history” that names an “original injustice.” Moving from Marx’s reading of French and English historiography to contestations over the nature of liberation between the ANC and the PAC during the 1950s, she notes that

we can note a close parallel here in the divergences in historical understanding, depending on whether the socially definitive antagonism is located between a form of political unity and its outside … or between ‘classes’ within the nationally bounded State.

Bongani Nyoka’s article intervenes in the discussion of race and class with an account of Archie Majefe’s theory of revolution. In a discussion that traces Mafeje’s writings over more than 20 years, from the late 1970s to the late 1990s, Nyoka presents in detail how Mafeje approached key South African Communist Party concepts, as well as his thoughts on the Soviet and Chinese adaptions of Marxist revolution. Nyoka shows how Mafeje critiqued revisionist Marxism and the South African Communist Party’s use of Marxism to understand South Africa for its imposition of theoretical concepts, which, Mafeje suggests, risks Eurocentrism, as its categories universalise the European historical experience. Instead, Nyoka points to Mafeje’s goal as an “organic Marxism” that takes African forms of social and cultural life seriously in the development of its concepts.

Re-readings, applications, and futures

In other writings, Mafeje (1991, 9) suggested that there can be no texts in the social sciences “without a historical context.” In my contribution, I consider how context has been used as a means of arguing against Marxian analyses, especially by historians of South Africa. Beginning with an analysis of influential English historian E.P. Thompson’s Marxian approach, I suggest that Thompson offers the possibility of developing empirically informed concepts. While Thompson is clear that his critique is of an imposition of concepts as logical truths onto empirical reality, the article also suggests that his approach maintains a commitment to a Marxism and does not collapse into an empiricism that embraces contingency and refuses structural explanation. I then consider one part of the “translation” of this approach in African studies, in the work of Jean and John Comaroff, and how context has been deployed in subsequent debates over their work. I suggests that context has become a way of denying the mediation of social life by capitalism and then turns this charge on its head, by asking what it means to think of capitalism as a context and suggesting its implications for contemporary discussions of reflexivity.

Claire-Anne Lester’s article considers how we might approach the law in general and Commissions of Inquiry in particular from a materialist perspective. Departing from older Marxist interpretations that draw a distinction between economic base and cultural or social superstructure or consider law to be a tool in the hands of the ruling elite, she discusses a range of different commissions and their fact-finding mechanisms in Britain, Jamaica, and South Africa. While showing how such commissions appear to promise justice and do not act mechanically in favour of ruling classes, she argues that there are limits to the possibilities of such commissions enacting the justice that they promise. This allows her to return to the Althusserian idea of the relative autonomy of the political, in which the economy is determining only the last instance, and she suggests that her consideration of commissions prompts an understanding of determination, following Raymond Williams, as the setting of limits. That is, while commissions may not be straightforwardly agents of capitalist power, and they can be and have been the basis to contain some of the most brutal injustices of capitalist production, their capacity to enact justice is constrained by the very limits of their existence in capitalist society itself.

LaShandra Sullivan’s contribution also addresses the mechanisms of the state and their promise of improved future after colonialism. Describing Gabon’s post-independence state through its modernist building projects as a part of its attempt to counter colonial forms, like Lester she suggests that we should not simply reduce these to expressions of the elites or of monopoly capitalism. Instead, she attends to the “aesthetics of governance” of the Rénovation period: beginning in the late 1960s, the state refashioned Gabon’s architecture in modernist form, seeking “to have Gabon see this global order in its buildings, and in turn see Gabon as part of that order.” While this expressed the interests of postcolonial elites as international subjects, it also presents a version of Afro-modernity not fully containable within elite discourse. She argues that, despite the contradictions between the prosperity such architecture promised and the patronage networks that dominated developmental schemes intended to uplift the majority of Gabon’s population, the architectural projects suggest a kind of hope in the possibility of a collective politics in Africa. An aspiration, in other words, for a state revolutionary project committed to building and sustaining an African aesthetics that is not merely in the image of the West.

Mohammed Shabangu picks up the discussion of aesthetics and politics in a discussion that juxtaposes an account of the “Fallist” student protests in South Africa in 2015–2016 and institutional struggles for genuine transformation with a theoretical reading of the promises of education under neoliberal capitalism. He suggests that we view the latter as a kind of “cruel optimism” where the university serves as a site of the reproduction of historical inequalities and the inability to achieve the future it sells. In outlining a possible alternative pedagogy that could offer a qualitatively different future, Shabangu draws inspirations from the Communist Manifesto and from Paulo Freire. He then analyses W.E.B. du Bois’s educational philosophy which he reads as offering a remedy to the crisis of the imagination that accompanies education in the service of capitalism. With Du Bois, Shabangu recognises an education that can be “a practice of freedom,” an aesthetic education that works towards decolonising individual and collective desire, towards nurturing the self, its capacity for democratic judgement, and simultaneously instantiates the commons. This vision leads him back, in conclusion, to suggest that curriculum reform in the humanities might enable us to apprehend a revolutionary moment to come, enabling a transformed university to be more than a site for the reproduction of domination.

Collective contribution

Together, the articles presented here require us to think with Capital, a Marxian category that has been subject to much debate, political experiment, and even tragedy over the course of a little over 150 years, since the publication of Marx’s first volume. These contributions invite us to consider its forms of the domination of social life, both at the level of practice and of knowledge. They suggest the impasses and failures of politics but also suggest ways in which theory and aesthetics might prompt a different kind of educational and political practice. Some return more explicitly to Marx than others, even as all seem inspired by his aspiration to consider the conditions under which a break with Capital might become possible. And all seem motivated by the sense that traditional forms of understanding, whether in South Africa and elsewhere, are inadequate, perhaps at an implicit level returning to Horkheimer’s ([1937] 1972) urging of a critical theory that departs from forms of knowledge that reinforce the status quo, drawing its verification from the hope for a future, more just, world.

Perhaps it is at moments like these – the moment in which capitalism seems to return in new clothes, such as in the documentary American Factory I described at the outset or, in this time when the world seems suspended in Covid-19 lockdown and certain global corporations take advantage of people’s inability to move freely to extract more value than ever – that we may recognise the relevance and importance of analyses of capitalism and that that attempts to bracket to bracket the way that capital structures social life are premature. At the same time, such analyses cannot repeat, farcically almost, the formulas of the past. Capital has to be thought and rethought in relation to the moment in which it presents itself, which these articles strive towards, individually and collectively.

In closing, I should note that three other pieces are published together with the special issue. The first two, an article and an essay, bear some resonance with its main themes, especially from the vantage point of subjectivities, not content with the spectatorial positions encouraged by capitalist reification. Fiona Moolla’s article considers how recent biographical work on women activists disturbs the genre of political autobiography, calling attention to the composition of radical subjectivity and how it addresses the intimate in portraying politics. Michael Neocosmos’ essay responds to Mamdani’s critique of his Thinking Freedom in Africa, published in the last issue (45.3) of Social Dynamics, summarising his theorisation of political subjectivity in Africa and defending its contribution. The final piece is a tribute to a long-standing board member, supporter, and contributor to Social Dynamics, the late poet and literary scholar Harry Garuba, written by fellow editor Christopher Ouma.

Acknowledgements

The papers presented here came out of an Indexing Transformation Seminar series at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology in the first semester of 2018. In addition to the papers presented here, it included presentations by Andrew Nash, Kate Alexander, Kelly Gillespie, and Louise Green. Some of the papers published were presented at the Stellenbosch seminar although in a different semester. I do wish to thank all the participants, as well as co-organisers of various events, including Steven Robins, Rob Pattman, Shaheed Tayob, and Anne Wiltshire. Finally, I thank the Mellon Foundation for generously sponsoring the seminar series.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bernard Dubbeld

Bernard Dubbeld lectures in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Stellenbosch University, where he teaches social theory. He has written about social grants, housing and the experience of political transformation after apartheid.