Capitalism and Cheap Labour Power in South Africa

There is undoubtedly a high degree of continuity in the racist ideological foundations of apartheid ² and of the policy of segregation which prevailed in the Union of South Africa prior to the election of the Nationalist Party to power in 1948. It is, perhaps, this continuity which accounts for the widely held view that fundamentally apartheid is little more than segregation under a new name. As Legassick expresses it: ‘after the Second World War segregation was continued, its premises unchanged, as apartheid or “separate development”’. ³ According to this view, such differences as emerged between segregation and apartheid are largely differences of degree relating to their common concerns—political domination, the African reserves and African migrant labour. More particularly, the argument continues, in the political sphere, apartheid entails a considerable increase in White domination through the extension of the repressive powers of the state; the Bantustan ^a policy involves the development of limited local government which, while falling far short of political independence and leaving unchanged the economic and political functions of the reserves, nevertheless, in some ways, goes beyond the previous system in practice as well as in theory; and, in the economic sphere apartheid ‘modernizes’ the system of cheap migrant labour and perfects the instruments of labour coercion:

Apartheid, or separate development, has meant merely tightening the loopholes, ironing out the informalities, eliminating the evasions, modernizing and rationalizing the inter-war structures of ‘segregationist’ labour control. ⁴