ABSTRACT
Bundy originally emphasized a basic discontinuity in the history of a peasantry. Peasants rose in response to the market and fell before the onslaught of the state, which in turn was pushed by the forces of industrial and agricultural capital. If the capitalist-peasant dichotomy is too simple to get at the changing forms of agricultural production in South Africa, it also oversimplifies - in common with much current writing on capitalism in Africa – the relationship of production and reproduction. In the colonial nucleus, the class which Clarence-Smith labels 'capitalist' was not very capitalistic: it had little capital, no great reliance on wage labour, and little dynamism. Where neither capitalist farmers nor state officials controlled directly what and how much was to be grown, the question of how peasant production could be manipulated was central. When the contradictions and costs of migratory labour mounted in the late 1940s, mining capital in Zambia moved toward 'stabilization' of labour.
