Intellectual Traditions in South Africa

Marxisms past and present

Kirk Helliker, Rhodes University, South Africa

Peter Vale, University of Johannesburg, South Africa

Abstract

Marxism was central to the understanding of South Africa’s struggle for freedom. This article provides a critical analysis of Marxist literature on South Africa since the 1970s, drawing out its relevance for contemporary analyses of the post-apartheid state and for radical politics today. It suggests that while the literature offered important insights into the character of the apartheid state, it failed to provide a critical appraisal of the state per se. Moreover, the capturing of state power by the liberation movement was not grounded in an understanding of the oppressive character of the state-form. The undermining of mainstream Marxism under neo-liberalizing conditions in post-apartheid South Africa has opened up the prospects for anti-statist radical libertarian thinking (including autonomist Marxism), and this thinking is consistent with the practices of certain autonomist popular politics currently emerging. Social theorizing on South Africa has had a complex relationship with Marxism. This article is interested in drawing on this experience in an effort to understand its implications for the ‘new’ South Africa where, 20 years after apartheid’s formal ending, social transformation remains caught in the logic not of Marxism but neo-liberalizing capitalism.

Re-reading Rick Turner in the New South Africa

Tony Fluxman and Peter Vale, 2004

Using the writings of the assassinated South African political philosopher Rick Turner, this article provides a critique of South Africa ten years after the end of apartheid. Influenced by both Western Marxism and utopian thinking, Turner developed a model of democratic socialism which offered a vision of a ‘new South Africa’. This was countered by the ideology of the market and, later, by the force of the ‘end of history’ thesis. The article argues that inequalities continue in South Africa because the promise of Western Marxism was squeezed out by the convergence of communist political ideology and capitalist modernization.

Fanon’s Curse: Re-imagining Marxism in South Africa’s Age of Retreat

by Kirk Helliker & Peter Vale, Paper presented at XII Annual Conference of the International Association of Critical Realism Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 23rd-25th July 2009

Although increasingly hidden by the incarnation of capital and the national project, South Africa has a long and deep-seated association with Marxism. This intellectual project, including the critical moments in its rise and demise, is the central focus of this article. The argument is simple, almost linear: South Africa’s interest in Marxism – especially Western Marxism – was abruptly truncated. There has been an unravelling of interest in Marxism since the end of apartheid: this we regard as a retreat. The generalised condition of retreat has stunted the possibility of an engagement with building a socialist alternative that once appeared to be ingrained in the struggles which raged during apartheid’s endgame.