ABSTRACT
What has this study of the racial and occupational division of labour contributed to our understanding of the relationship between capitalist expansion and apartheid? I believe that the findings of this research suggest that the effects of capitalist expansion and apartheid policies have been rather more contradictory than scholars anticipated. Liberal scholars, for example, argued that economic growth would erode racial inequality both by increasing unskilled African wage rates and by drawing Africans into more skilled work. The former would result from employment growth in the capitalist sector which would eventually deplete the supply of cheap labour from the African reserves, thus forcing wages upward.1 The latter would result from capital intensification which would increase demand for more sophisticated, semiskilled, machine operative labour. In the face of a shortage of white labour, this demand for semi-skilled labour would erode the colour bar as more and more African workers were employed in jobs traditionally filled by whites.2
