ABSTRACT
The striking degree of compatibility between economic growth and political repression in South Africa during the 1960s provided the historical backdrop and vindication for the early stages of the 'race-class debate'. John Saul and Stephen Gelb's discussion of purported "crises" during the 1940s and 1970s in South Africa, involuntarily inherited the functionalist legacy of the 'race-class debate', which finally disabled their conception of "crisis" itself. The history of the South African state post-1910 is cast interms of a functional alliance between segregation, then apartheid policy, and capitalist growth, which was disturbed only by the eruption of two major "crises", in the 1940s and 1970s respectively. The idea of a "structural crisis" developed from a functionalist perspective on the last decade in South Africa gives the misleading impression that irresistible structural pressures will do the work of exacting fundamental change in the country.
