Amin on the effect of colonialism on SA’s political culture
This is an edited excerpt from Samir Amin’s book From Capitalism to Civilization: Reconstructing the Socialist Perspective (2010):
In South Africa, the first settlercolonisation — the one of the Boers — led to the creation of a “purely white” state involving expulsion or extermination of Africans. In contrast, the initial objective of the British conquest was to forcibly submit Africans to the requirements of the metropolis’ imperialist expansion primarily for the exploitation of the minerals.
Neither the first colonisers (the Boers) nor the new ones (the British) were capable of standing as autonomous centres. The apartheid state of the post-war period attempted to do so, basing its power on its internal colony — black for the essential part — but did not reach its ends owing to an unfavourable numerical balance and to the growing resistance of the dominated populations who will finally be victorious. The powers in place after the end of apartheid have inherited that issue of internal colonisation without having, up to now, brought in its radical solution.
The case of South Africa is especially interesting from the point of view of the effects of colonialism on political culture. It is not only that here, internal colonisation was bluntly visible, even to blind people. It is also because communists in that country had been able to draw from the situation a lucid analysis of actually existing capitalism.
The South African Communist Party (SACP) was, in the 1920s, the promoter of the theory of internal colonialism, a theory adopted in the 1930s by a black leader of the Communist Party of the United States — Harry Haywood — though it was not followed by his “white” comrades. He drew from that theory the consequences that high profits for the “white” minority and incredibly low wages for the “black” majority, constitute the front and back faces of the same issue.
South Africa is a microcosm of the global capitalist system. It gathers on its territory the three components of that system: a minority that benefits from the rent of situation of the imperialist centres, two majority components of more or less equal importance distributed into an industrialised “Third World” (the emerging nations of today), and a marginalised “Fourth World” (in the former Bantustans), similar to the non-industrialised regions of contemporary Africa.
What is more, the proportions between those three components’ populations are more or less the same as those that characterise the current global system.
That fact certainly contributed to giving South African communists the clairvoyance that was theirs. That political culture has died out today, not only in South Africa, with the (belated) adhesion of the SACP to the commonplace thesis of “racism” (which gives the status of a cause to what is a mere effect); but also at global level, with the adhesion of the majority of communists to social democracy.