Legitimating the Illegitimate: State, Markets, and Resistance in South Africa [Reprint 2019 ed.] 9780520326651

Citation preview

ZIMBABWE MOZAMBIQUE

TRANSVAAL

Pretoria Soweto

Johannesburg .Vareeniging

ORANGE

FREE

NATAL

'ietermarit;

LESOTHO,

'Durban

HOMELANDS Transkei Bophuthatswana Venda Ciskei Gazankulu Lebowa : East London

Qwaqwa KwaZulu KaNgwane

.Port Elizabeth 200 Miles -T-J 300 Km

KwaNdebele

PERSPECTIVES ON S O U T H E R N AFRICA 1. The Autobiography of an Unknown South African, by Naboth Mokgatle (1971) 2. Modernizing Racial Domination: South Africa's Political Dynamics, by Heribert Adam (1971) 3. The Rise of African Nationalism in South Africa: The African National Congress, 1912-1952, by Peter Walshe (1971) 4. Tales from Southern Africa, by A. C. Jordan (1973 ) 5. Lesotho 1970: An African Coup Under the Microscope, by B. M. Khaketla (1972) 6. Towards an African Literature: The Emergence of Literary Form in Xhosa, by A. C. Jordan (1972) 7. Law, Order, and Liberty in South Africa, by A. S. Mathews (1972) 8. Swaziland: The Dynamics of Political Modernization, by Christian P. Potholm (1972) 9. The South West Africa/Namibia Dispute: Documents and Scholarly Writings on the Controversy Between South Africa and the United Nations, by John Dugard (1973) 10. Confrontation and Accommodation in Southern Africa: The Limits of Independence, by Kenneth W. Grundy (1973) 1 1 . The Rise of Afrikanerdom: Power, Apartheid, and the Afrikaner Civil Religion, by T. Dunbar Moodie (1975) 12. Justice in South Africa, by Albie Sachs (1973) 13. Afrikaner Politics in South Africa, 1934—1948, by Newell M. Stultz (1974)

14. Crown and Charter: The Early Years of the British South Africa Company, by John S. Galbraith (1975) 15. Politics of Zambia, edited by William Tordoff (1975) 16. Corporate Power in an African State: The Political Impact of Multinational Mining Companies in Zambia, by Richard Sklar (1975) 17. Change in Contemporary South Africa, edited by Leonard Thompson and Jeffrey Butler (1975) 18. The Tradition of Resistance in Mozambique: The Zambesi Valley, 1850—1921, by Allen E Isaacman (1976) 19. Black Power in South Africa: The Evolution of an Ideology, by Gail Gerhart (1978) 20. Black Heart: Gore-Brown and the Politics of Multiracial Zambia, by Robert I. Rotberg (1977) 21. The Black Homelands of South Africa: The Political and Economic Development of Bophuthatswana and KwaZulu, by Jeffrey Butler, Robert I. Rotberg, and John Adams (1977) 22. Afrikaner Political Thought: Analysis and Documents (3 vols.), by André du Toit and Hermann Giliomee (Volume 1:1780—1850,1983)

23- Angola Under the Portuguese: The Myth and the Reality, by Gerald Bender (1978) 24. Land and Racial Domination in Rhodesia, by Robin Palmer (1977) 25. The Roots of Rural Poverty in Central and Southern Africa, edited by Robin Palmer and Neil Parsons (1977) 26. The Soul of Mbira: Music and Traditions of the Shona People of Zimbabwe, by Paul Berliner (1978) 27. The Darker Reaches of Government: Access to Information About Public Administration in England, the United States, and South Africa, by Anthony S. Mathews (1979) 28. The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry, by Colin Bundy (1979) 29. South Africa: Time Running Out. The Report of the Study Commission on U.S. Policy Toward Southern Africa (1981) 30. The Revolt of the Hereros, by Jon M. Bridgman (1981) 31. The White Tribe of Africa: South Africa in Perspective, by David Harrison (1982) 3 2. The House of Phalo: A History of the Xhosa People in the Days of Their Independence, by J. B. Peires (1982) 33. Soldiers Without Politics: Blacks in the South African Armed Forces, by Kenneth W. Grundy (1983) 34. Education, Race, and Social Change in South Africa, by John A. Marcum (1982) 35. The Land Belongs to Us: The Pedi Polity, the Boers and the British in the Nineteenth-century Transvaal, by Peter Delius (1984) 36. Sol Plaatje, South African Nationalist, 1 8 7 6 - 1 9 3 2 , by Brian Willan (1984)

37. Peasant Consciousness and Guerrilla War in Zimbabwe: A Comparative Study, by Terence Ranger (1985) 38. Guns and Rain: Guerrillas and Spirit Mediums in Zimbabwe, by David Lan (1985) 39. South Africa without Apartheid: Dismantling Racial Domination, by Heribert Adam and Kogila Moodley (1986) 40. Hidden Struggles in Rural South Africa: Politics and Popular Movements in the Transkei and Eastern Cape, 1890-1930, by William Beinart and Colin Bundy (1986) 41. Legitimating the Illegitimate: State, Markets, and Resistance in South Africa, by Stanley B. Greenberg (1987)

Legitimating the Illegitimate

Legitimating the Illegitimate State, Markets, and Resistance in South Africa

Stanley B. Greenberg

University of California Press Berkeley / Los Angeles / London

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 1 9 8 7 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Greenberg, Stanley B., 1 9 4 5 Legitimating the illegitimate. (Perspectives on Southern Africa ; 4 1 ) Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1 . South Africa—Politics and g o v e r n m e n t — 1 9 7 8 2. Legitimacy of governments—South Africa. 3. Apartheid — S o u t h Africa. 4. South A f r i c a — R a c e relations. 5. L a b o r policy—South Africa. I. Title. II. Series. JQ1911.G74 1987 323.I'68 86-30734 I S B N 0 - 5 2 0 - 0 6 0 1 0 - 5 (alk. paper) I S B N 0 - 5 2 0 - 0 6 0 1 1 - 3 ( p b k . : alk. paper) Printed in the United States of America 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

For my parents

Contents

List of Acronyms and Abbreviations Terminology and Source Notes Preface 1.

xiii xv

The Political Economy of Illegitimacy

PART ONE.

xi

i

STATE A G A I N S T T H E M A R K E T

2.

Contradictions and State Presence

29

3.

The State Exposed

56

4.

Reconstructing the Labor F r a m e w o r k — Reconstructing the Laboring Classes

85

PART TWO.

LEGITIMATION AND CONTROL

5.

Constructing State Ideology

123

6.

Ideological Struggles within the South African State

142

PART THREE. 7.

BUILDING H E G E M O N Y : N A T I O N A L PERSPECTIVES

Resistance and Hegemony in South Africa

177

Appendix: Field Research and List of Interviews

203

Notes

207

Index

243

ix

List of Acronyms and Abbreviations

AHI ANC Assocom BENSO COSATU FCI FOSATU HSRC ISCOR NAFCOC PAC PWV SAAU SAAWU SABC SABRA SAIRR SAPA TAU TEBA UDF UNISA

Afrikaanse Handelsinstituut African National Congress Association of Chambers of Commerce Bureau for Economic Research: Cooperation and Development Congress of South African Trade Unions Federated Chamber of Industries Federation of South African Trade Unions Human Sciences Research Council Iron and Steel Corporation National African Federated Chamber of Commerce Pan Africanist Congress Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vereeniging (region) South African Agricultural Union South African Allied Workers' Union South African Broadcasting Corporation South African Bureau of Racial Affairs South African Institute of Race Relations South African Press Association Transvaal Agricultural Union The Employment Bureau of Africa United Democratic Front University of South Africa

xi

Terminology and Source Notes

To ensure the anonymity of those interviewed (see Appendix, List of Interviews), I have been purposely vague where possible. Thus I use the general abbreviation " A B " for administration board without naming the specific position (e.g., AB: Central Transvaal). The abbreviation " D L " refers to the director of labor of an administration board (e.g., DL: Northern Transvaal), though frequently I interviewed the deputy or assistant. " L B " denotes an interview with the director of a labor bureau (e.g., LB: Hammanskraal). I have not given the dates of interviews, so that the natural rotation in the bureaucracy, common at the labor bureau level, will cover my tracks. Where the speaker is indicated by the text itself (e.g., "the legislative advisor observes that. . ."), further citation of the source in parentheses or a note is obviously redundant and has been omitted. The various permutations of the old Department of Native Affairs, now the Department of Constitutional Development and Planning, are often referred to in the text and notes simply as "the department." The name changes and dates are as follows: Department of Native Affairs

1911-57

Department of Bantu Administration and Development

1958-77

Department of Plural Relations and Development

1978

Department of Cooperation and Development

1978-84

Department of Constitutional Development and Planning 1 9 8 5 -

Preface

This book dwells on an implausible project: the concerted effort by the white political leadership in South Africa to broaden support for the state and economic order amongst the majority, African population. With racial privilege imbedded in the state and market—with African workers defined by statute, subject to controls on movement and residence, threatened by forced removals and denationalization, and denied common franchise rights—there seems little space for such ideological musings. Coercion and state violence, not legitimacy and hegemony, seem the common coinage of this illegitimate regime. Yet, it is difficult to ignore Afrikaner politicians and intellectuals and South African businessmen entangled in new constitutional conventions, a new rhetoric of pluralism and markets, and new legal structures of control. Legitimating the Illegitimate examines the political economy of illegitimacy in South Africa—the state and markets, the growing presence and resistance of African workers, and the attempts to reconstruct the dominant ideology and social order. This was hardly the book I set out to write some six years ago. Then I was near completing a previous work, Race and State in Capitalist Development, in which I sought to demonstrate that economic growth in divided societies, such as South Africa, Alabama, Israel, and Northern Ireland, would exacerbate racial and ethnic tensions, not, as conventionally supposed, supersede them. In my own mind, that work raised at least two sets of issues that it could not address, at least not without lumbering on for two or three more years and further burdening an already cumbersome argument: the first concerned the nature of the state in divided societies; the second, the unresolved relationship between capitalism and the racial order in the contemporary period. Though the term state appeared in the title, the state apparatus was treated as a curious institution, a passive object of pressures and xv

xvi

Preface

representations by dominant class actors, and, at the same time, an effective instrument shaping critical social processes—the market, peasant society, urbanization, and African proletarianization. The state, largely unexamined, nonetheless seemed internally consistent, unified, and effective, and dominant over society. In the concluding section on South Africa, I alluded to an emergent "crisis of hegem o n y " — a growing gulf between the expressed interests of dominant class actors and the state officialdom—but that observation was left unexplored, only to tantalize. In this work, I decided to look more closely at South Africa, where the state was closely identified with an ascendant ethnicity and deeply and visibly involved in shaping the incorporation of an ethnically distinct working class. This seemed like an appropriate context in which to explore the nature of the state in divided societies and the ideological discourse surrounding racial or ethnic domination. I focused in particular on the labor control framework—the administration boards and labor bureaus, which constitute critical meeting points for the state, markets, and workers where the state has attempted to exercise control over social forces. M y research setting was not the state as a w h o l e — h o w could it be?—but a defined area of state activity where ethnicity, working-class life, and the character of the state could be effectively explored. Between January 1980 and December 1985 in South Africa, with many lapses in between, I interviewed officials of the Department of Cooperation and Development (now dismembered) from chief commissioners across the country to the director general and deputy minister; administration (now development) board and labor bureau officials in the western, central, and northern Transvaal, the Vereeniging and northern Free State areas, the Western and Eastern Cape, and the Port Natal and Drakensberg districts; and officials in the rural labor bureaus and mine recruiting organizations in Lebowa, Gazankulu, KwaZulu, and Transkei. Between 1981 and 1985, again with lapses, I conducted parallel research in Israel, exploring similar questions of control and legitimation. While that work will be published separately, I learned a great deal about each setting through the eyes of the other. In the course of this work on South Africa, the issues and questions, my perspective on the state and ideology, and, indeed, my research settings themselves began to shift. I hesitate to suggest that I allowed the evidence, the "facts," to dictate my hypotheses and theo-

Preface

xvii

rizing. It is certainly the case, however, that my understanding was shaped profoundly by a reality that would not bend to accommodate the structures I wanted to impose on it. More important than the focus on South Africa was the rethinking of my conception of the state. Central to this and my earlier work was an approach to the state, situated in the mainstream of positivist and Marxist social science, that theorizes about "demands" on the state and policy "outputs," but leaves the state itself opaque or as an unexplored unity. The character of the state is, in this view, dictated by the structure of interests in civil society and how they come to wield the state as an instrument of group or class power. But as will become evident in this work, the South African state is no unity or simple instrument. It is a complex terrain shaped by the interplay of political leaders, officials, class and allied actors, and social divisions. The contemporary South African state is wracked by bitter internal struggles that detract from simplified images that suggest strength, pragmatism, and efficacy. My work in its early stages presumed that state control of markets is unproblematic: a strong intention to impose racial and class priorities, articulated by officials and realized in legislation, could readily produce new and preferred market outcomes. My research therefore focused on the machinery of control, the labor control apparatus. As it turned out, I misread the process, missing above all the tensions in market regulation and the limits of state power. I do not doubt my earlier observation that developing capitalism has brought the elaboration of the racial order—indeed, massive attempts to impose racial barriers in the market. The steady elaboration of state structures, however, is a symptom, not of effective control, but of insufficient state power, threatened by wilful African subjects who individually and collectively decline to follow state direction. State control over markets, we shall see, produces tensions and contradictions that undermine and limit the imposition of state goals.

In arguing, as I did in Race and State in Capitalist Development,

that the pattern of race domination was functional to capitalist growth, I slipped easily into a parallel argument, that the racial-state form, structuring and subordinating the African populace, was also a functional aspect of the social order. That argument guided my work at the outset as I sought to examine the machinery of labor control and how it allocated labor in ways functional to ascendant

xviii

Preface

capitalist interests. Against the tenor of liberal thought and escalating racial oppression during the 1960s and 1970s, the materialist analysis has rightly emphasized the functionality of the racial-state form for the economic order. But, ironically, the emphasis on functionality has crowded out the attention to contradictions and produced a curious conception of the South African state. In materialist hands, including my own, the state has been represented as an instrumentality, unproblematically shaped by dominant class actors, unitary and coherent, and repressive and effective in practice. The labor control framework in particular seemed an awesome apparatus, smashing the domestic working-class opposition, structuring the labor market and workplace, and taking control of African urbanization and proletarianization. That imagery, however, bears little resemblance to the state apparatus that I have come to know in South Africa. The labor control framework in particular is underfinanced and understaffed, uneven in practice; indeed, important elements of it have decayed or become corrupt or ineffectual; some now have been formally abandoned— a tacit admission of state incapacity. The system of influx control is internally contradictory, creating pressures it cannot contain and rising economic and political costs it cannot meet. This state machinery, elaborated over three decades of Nationalist rule and the centerpiece of apartheid ideology, cannot effectively manage the squatter areas that dominate the major metropolitan areas, the spreading disorders that dominate the townships, and the growing labor surpluses that characterize the rural bantustans. It was only after putting aside the imagery of state efficacy, unity, and functionality that I was able to make any sense of the present effort in South Africa to legitimate the illegitimate. This was a state characterized more by its growing limits than by its control over markets and the African majority. The attempt to fashion legitimating mechanisms is rooted, above all, in the vulnerabilities of this state in the face of the growing presence and militance of African workers. This dynamic—the breakdown of state coercive institutions and capacity and the search for a legitimacy formula—is the guiding thread that runs through this work. The dynamic contains two theoretical and empirical assumptions that the analysis will have to support. First, the present discourse on legitimacy derives largely from a domestic process centered on the failures of state control and

Preface

xix

the spread of African resistance. Although international actors, particularly the bankers and the Reagan administration in the United States, provide an important audience for the new rhetoric (e.g., "the death of apartheid"), their role is secondary to the fundamental struggle unfolding within South Africa itself over the character of the state and society. Second, the discourse surrounding the legitimacy question is not simply a new set of terms, a new jargon—pluralism, participation, common citizenship, freedom, and so forth—that will mask conventional apartheid. There are no doubt some actors in this struggle who are simply playing with words; there are many more who have no idea what the words mean or imply. Nonetheless, one should not underestimate the philosophic shifts involved and their importance for the form of the state and the struggle for an African political future. The emphasis here on dysfunctionality, the insufficiencies of control efforts, and legitimating ideologies has been wrongly interpreted as a return to a liberal perspective, one emphasizing the incompatibilities of racial privilege and market societies. There is no necessary incompatibility, as I indicated in Race and State in Capitalist Development. Dominant class actors, including mining and farming capitalists, helped make the South African racial order; "progressive" businessmen have stumbled on the incompatibilities only when confronted by challenges from below and by rising threats to public order. Indeed, the racial and capitalist orders in South Africa are so intertwined that it is difficult at this point to posit a simple opposition between them. Market processes have always introduced tensions for this economic and political construction, however, not just for the ideologues of apartheid but for the mining houses, which have sought to monopolize labor recruitment, fix African wages, and prevent labor desertion. In the present period, those tensions, more evident than ever, challenge the capacities of the apartheid state and make evident the capacities of an increasingly mobilized and emboldened African majority. In this period and under these circumstances, some white political leaders and many economic ones have sought an alternative to apartheid. In September 1983 I testified before the Africa Subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs. M y observations about South Africa proved surprisingly conten-

XX

Preface

tious amongst South Africa's strongest congressional critics. Incautiously, and with some innocence, I stated that "South Africa is changing. We are witnessing basic change in the structures of racial domination. . . . There is a movement away from 'apartheid,' as w e have k n o w n it and black South Africans have experienced it." I emphasized that South Africa's present policy is two-edged, that "privilege has been accompanied by new exclusions; freedom has been accompanied by new forms of repression," that the "positive and negative are intricately interconnected and necessary to each other," and that the whole process lacks a progressive character. In a desperate effort to cope with rising resistance and costs, the government has reached out to " c o o p t leaders in the African, Asian and coloured communities, and to build South Africa's international legitimacy and, specifically, its ties with the United States." Committee members and colleagues retorted effectively that "changes" were taking place in South Africa "within the context of apartheid," and that "South Africa is moving toward an entrenchment of this apartheid vision of Dr. Verwoerd." Moreover, some felt that whatever the course of change, one should avoid an academic discourse in public forums that only confounds the anti-apartheid forces and that detracts from the clarity with which apartheid is perceived as an immoral state practice with "enormous emotional and significant political value." Perhaps they were right, and indeed, if that were the ultimate consequence of my testimony, I would frame the argument very differently. I emphasize the reconstruction of apartheid and the attempt to fashion a new hegemony because these developments reflect the state's vulnerabilities to market and political forces. Emphasis on an unchanging apartheid suggests a continuing unity and state capacity, whereas the reality is very different—contradictions and struggle, limits, rising costs, and political challenges. T h e "State of Emerg e n c y " declared in 1985 was less an instance of effective coercive regulation than a sign of the state's weakening grip on events in the African areas. By emphasizing these processes and the state's vulnerabilities, I hope to demystify both the state and the notion of reform. A t the same time, I hope to encourage and reinforce the w o r k of those w h o would challenge this illegitimate order. Writing is an indulgence that makes extraordinary demands on other people and institutions, asking that they disrupt their routines

Preface

xxi

to worry about my questions and chapters. I continue to be awed by the number of people who, without question or need of persuasion or explanation, led me through library holdings or took a pencil to my drafts. Those who purchase this book should find it relatively free of warts, but they should appreciate that others before them were subject to much worse. I want to thank my colleagues who allowed me to present my work at their seminars and conferences and to develop and clarify my thinking. Various chapters were presented to the African Studies Program, Harvard University (1986), the Queen Elizabeth House and the Middle East Centre, St. Anthony's College, Oxford University (1985), the Truman Institute for the Advancement of International Peace, Hebrew University (1985), the Department of Politics, University of Cape Town (1985), the seminar and New England Workshop of the Southern African Research Program, Yale University (1985 and 1984), the African Studies Association (1985 and 1983), the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London (1984), the Economic History Society of Southern Africa (1984), the Conference on Economic Development and Racial Domination, University of the Western Cape (1984), the African Studies Seminar and Comparative History Project, Columbia University (1984), the African Studies Institute, University of the Witwatersrand (1983), the Brodigan Memorial Lecture and University Lecture, Wesleyan University (1982/83), the Sociology Department, Birzeit University (1982), the Conference on South Africa and the West, University of Natal (1982), the Sociology Department, Haifa University (1981), and the Study Commission on U.S. Policy toward Southern Africa, Rockefeller Foundation (1980). My own students, who could not escape reading these materials, nonetheless provided me with valuable criticisms. I wish to thank my students at Wesleyan University (Politics of Divided Societies, State and Society, and Israeli Politics and Society) and at Yale University (Racial and Ethnic Conflict in Southern Africa). A great number of people agreed to be interviewed, to direct me to materials, or simply proved gracious and accommodating. In both South Africa and England, I have some very special friends who have provided their homes and continuing support—Charles van Onselen, Belinda Bozzoli, Hermann and Annette Giliomee, Michael and Mary Savage, and Barbara and Stanley Trapido. This book benefited immensely from early and extended conver-

xxii

Preface

sations with Harold Wolpe, Michael Burawoy, Douglas Hindson, Eric Lane, and John Saul. A great many colleagues agreed to read individual chapters and offer comments, including Heribert Adam, Belinda Bozzoli, Michael Burawoy, Jeffrey Butler, Timothy Couzens, Leonard Doob, André du Toit, William Foltz, Hermann Giliomee, Joost Hilterman, Wilmot James, Joseph LaPalombara, Neil Lazarus, Charles Lindblom, Chris Lowe, Ian Lustick, Shula Marks, Bill Munro, William Nasson, Nic Olivier, Charles van Onselen, Michael Savage, Jose Stevens, Leonard Thompson, Stanley Trapido, and Leroy Vail. The story in this book—the portrayal of labor control practices and political struggles within state institutions—could not have been pieced together without the active cooperation of state officials themselves. Few that I interviewed will have much good to say about this book. Nonetheless, officials at virtually every level gave freely of their time and thoughts when in many instances their world was under siege. I was able to take advantage of the extensive South African holdings at the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale and the untiring efforts of Moore Crossey; the library of the Truman Institute, Hebrew University; the Gubbins Library at the University of the Witwatersrand; the Albany Museum, 1820 Settlers' Memorial Museum at Grahamstown; the library of the University of South Africa; the incomparable news clippings files at the Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, University of Cape Town; and the Library of Congress. Though I labored with some of the translations, more often I depended upon the expert assistance of Maretha du Toit, Jeffrey Lever, Neil Lazarus, and Bill Munro. Bill, in addition, prepared the index and, aided by Jennifer Sosin, proofed the printer's pages. I would not have gotten to any of those libraries or conducted the field research without the support of a number of foundations: the American Philosophical Society at two critical junctures ( 1 9 8 1 , 1 9 8 4 - 8 5 ) ; the Rockefeller Foundation, which supported the Study Commission on U.S. Policy toward South Africa (1980) and provided space at the Study Center in Bellagio, Italy (1985); and the Ford and Open Societies Foundations, which have continued to support the Southern African Research Program at Yale University. Despite the word processor, real people intervened regularly to keep this project going, including Pam Baldwin at the Southern Af-

Preface

xxiii

rican Research Program, the whole staff of the Truman Institute, Lee Messina and Jane Tozer at Wesleyan University, and everyone at my consulting company, the Analysis Group, who managed to work around my erratic schedules. Rosa DeLauro, my wife, has maintained her record, typing and proofing none of this, while doing more important things for both of us. This book is dedicated to my parents, who started me on this course, although they are still trying to figure out how I ended up taking this particular political detour. For better or worse, this book is theirs.

i. The Political Economy of Illegitimacy OPERATION PALMIET The words "1 am your friend" on the stickers handed out to blacks in unrest plagued Sebokeng during the night of action by the South African police, with support from troops, must have had a calming and reassuring effect on most of the town's 120,000 inhabitants. The many friendly adults and children who waved to policemen and troops created the impression that the keepers of peace and order were welcomed like a big, strong brother. Many of the undesirable elements were driven from their dens and taken away. The successful Operation Palmiet. . . [is] in keeping with two traditional approaches in South Africa: the Afrikaner's republican tradition of a civilian army will not dodge its responsibility to protect its property and the property of law-abiding citizens; and the Blacks who respect a winner. Die Volksblad (trans. 5.A. Digest), October 2.6,1984

Perhaps more than any other state and social order, South Africa stands illegitimate and repressive before its own people. This is not the illegitimacy of a capricious or brutal regime, indifferent to popular needs and indulgent of privilege and police violence. For South Africa, illegitimacy—the lack of "validity," in Weber's terms—is a defining characteristic of the social order. 1 The state is formally and fully associated with the needs and dominance of a privileged racial minority; indeed, to all appearances, the state's racial character provides its raison d'être. The racial-state identity takes a legal and publicly sanctioned form that pervades the national symbols and governing ideology, as well as the practical activity of state agencies. Even if economically integrated, the African majority stand outside the established order as legal "aliens" who may not associate with the nation. 2 The apartheid state is repressive; indeed, it seems necessarily repressive. There are no doubt more murderous regimes. Few states, i

z

The Political Economy of Illegitimacy

however, operate within a legal and ideological framework that appears to mandate dependence on direct coercion and to preclude the search for more consensual methods. The formal exclusions inscribed in the state have been accompanied by a complex of racial laws and sprawling bureaucratic and police agencies, and, in the end, have been confirmed by the courts and prison system. There is a perverse and necessary logic to the resulting repression: 3.5 million Africans forcibly cleared from "black spots" between i960 and 1 9 8 2 and "resettled" in designated African rural areas; at least 250,000 Africans prosecuted annually under the pass laws, at one point rising to 650,000, or 10 percent of the working-age population; an annual African prison population in 1982—83 of 450,000, or 1 out of every 44 persons, a ratio exceeded by almost no other country in the world. 3 There is a completeness to a repressive order that, at the top, leaves the African majority without any legal political representation or national identity and, at the bottom, subjects them to "group areas," "removals," "tribal authorities," and police raids of various sorts. The African majority, formally outside the dominant political arrangements and the subject of such repressive policies, have affirmed in practice what seems necessary in theory—the illegitimacy of the South African state. A 1980 survey conducted among Africans from the Ciskei region found that 90 percent rejected apartheid's separate political institutions, favoring instead universal adult suffrage within a unitary nonracial framework. Three years later, this time amongst Africans in KwaZulu, Natal, and on the Witwatersrand, a similar survey found that between 75 and 85 percent of all groups wanted "one South African Parliament" where the largest bloc, including a black majority, could govern.4 Measured on the margins by such surveys, those feelings have been expressed concretely and violently as the apartheid order has been developed and imposed on the African majority. Over the past decade, the African areas have been swept by waves of school, bus, and local election boycotts, marches and civil disorders, work stoppages and general community strikes, attacks on schools, police stations, pass offices, and local collaborators, and direct confrontations with the police and army. That resistance to the state, like the resort to coercive methods, seems a necessary product of the social order. The banned and now jailed leader of the African National Congress, Nelson Mandela, told a Johannesburg court in 1962:

The Political Economy of Illegitimacy

3

Your Worship, I would say that the whole life of any thinking African in this country drives him continuously to a conflict between his conscience on the one hand and the law on the other. . . . The law as it is applied, the law as it has been developed over a long period of history, and especially the law as it is written and designed by the Nationalist Government, is a law which in our view, is immoral, unjust, and intolerable. Our consciences dictate that we must protest against it, that we must oppose it, and that we must attempt to alter it.5 "Operation Palmiet" seems curious, therefore. (Palmiet means "bulrush"; an ironical subtext is provided by the Afrikaans synonym kafferakuil—literally, "kaffir shelter.") Army units in October 1984 cordoned off Sebokeng, an African township south of Johannesburg where African protests, strikes, and assassinations of local collaborating officials had assumed an unusual intensity (now a much more familiar pattern). Protests proved immune to conventional police action and continued resistance seemed to fuel spreading disorder across the Witwatersrand, South Africa's industrial heartland. The army supervised South African Police counterinsurgency units that conducted house-to-house searches looking for weapons and protest leaders. Yet even as it visibly represented the state's reliance on direct coercion, the army sought to cultivate other images. The armed troops kicked around soccer balls, played with the children—presumably after they had laid down their stones—and passed out pamphlets to the detained residents announcing, incongruously, " I am your friend." The pamphlets echoed an appeal from the minister of law and order to the "majority of law-abiding citizens in the affected areas" to support the "return to normal." 6 Reflective of "Operation Palmiet," the present regime in South Africa is preoccupied with the state's illegitimacy and with eliciting even faint glimmers of African support. The formal backdrop remains in place, as the African majority still lies outside the nation and the repressive apparatus still weighs heavily on African communities. Yet the regime is intent on legitimating what to all appearances seems necessarily and irretrievably illegitimate. Officials now speak forcefully of enlisting the "entire population, the nation and every population group" in the "national strategy," including support for both the political order of control and the economic order founded upon "free enterprise." 7 What leads a regime so narrowly based in society, and so dependent on direct coercion, to attempt to broaden support for the state

4

The Political Economy of Illegitimacy

and economy? What does this say about the nature of illegitimacy and the nature of the state in this racially divided market society? More generally, what does this search for legitimacy tell us about illegitimate states and the problems of social order, coercion, and consent? T h e T w o Faces of Illegitimacy Illegitimacy in South Africa derives from two aspects of state and society: first, the identification of the state and nation with an ascendant racial minority; and second, the particular way that ascendance has been articulated with developing capitalist relations in South Africa—that is, the deep interpenetration of state and markets. The first aspect of illegitimacy follows easily out of the formal positioning set out earlier. A partial state, informed by a limited and rigid conception of the nation, will have little to say to groups—in this case, the African majority—that fall outside the boundaries of the ascendant ethnicity. Here, illegitimacy reflects the narrow identity of successive precursor states in southern Africa that have identified citizenship with the European community. In 1858 the constitution of the new South African Republic declared that "the people desire to permit no equality between coloured people and the white inhabitants, either in church or state." 8 Britain acceded to the exclusive white franchise provisions in the Transvaal and Orange River Colonies in the immediate pre-Union period and, later, to the South Africa Act that created a lily-white parliament and a whites-only franchise in all the provinces, excepting the Cape. 9 In the four decades since 1948, the National party has governed uninterrupted under a party program and banner that affirm the Afrikaner ascendancy. 10 There is a common sense and plausibility to this aspect of the state's illegitimacy, and, indeed, it captures the conventional portrayal of South Africa that emphasizes the legal formalization of racial categories. As we shall see below, however, the emphasis on the state's racial identity alone is at the same time too absolute and, paradoxically, too simple. On the one hand, there is a rigidity to the racial state that seems to preclude any legitimating project. The present "reform" effort consequently seems wholly inexplicable. On the other hand, the formality of the state's legal racial institutions has

The Political Economy of Illegitimacy

5

a definitional quality that lends itself to tinkering—"reforms" that do not substantially modify the informal (political and economic) structures helping sustain the racial order. It is not too farfetched to imagine that white leaders, under siege from below, could concede a common citizenship and universal franchise, though circumscribed by South Africa's material reality and new fragmenting political structures. Majority rule and one-person-one-vote cannot be considered alone, abstracted from the relationship of state and society. The second aspect of illegitimacy centers on the problem of labor control—the specific material context in which African workers have come to experience South African state and society. Developing labor markets have been accompanied by the steady elaboration of the labor-repressive order—the institution of pass laws and urban influx control; the regulation of employment contracts, mine compounds, and housing; the allocation of labor between sectors; and the management of labor migrancy. For Africans, incorporation into South African society has meant a complex entanglement of state and markets. Their passbooks—crammed with stamps certifying tax payments, rights to urban residence, employment, and approved accommodation—have provided an immediate and powerful representation and reminder of this process. This visible interpénétration of politics and economics has potentially profound consequences for legitimating processes in a developing capitalist order such as South Africa. With state agencies actively regulating emergent markets and the African working class, the development of the economic realm has been retarded. Markets and private entrepreneurs have not readily emerged as distinctive, self-regulating, productive, equitable, and public-spirited. The economic realm has in fact been visibly state-directed. The state, for its part, mired in increasingly complex market processes and acting to advantage a particular racial group, has seemed partial—fully identified with the inequalities in society and the economy. Lacking autonomy, the state has not emerged as a universal institution mediating between conflicting parties and identified with the public and national interest, broadly conceived. This entanglement of state and economy in South Africa has left both state and economic institutions in disrepute, without claims to universal purpose. The entanglement has at the same time proved politicizing. It has invited conflict and claims on the state without there being evident mediations or limiting processes, save coercion.

The Political Economy of Illegitimacy

6

The illegitimacy of this social order is, however, rooted in a process of state control that is itself contradictory and problematic. The state has sought to manage (socialize) labor markets while leaving the crux of the economic order—investment and location decisions—in private hands. The scale and complexity of markets, the development of urban capitalist centers, and the resistance of African workers have all conspired to challenge this order of control. Confronted by their own limits, their illegitimacy, and their dependence on coercive means, state and party officials have in recent years sought to lessen their exposure. They have attempted, we shall see later, to disentangle the state and economy—to allow the private sphere to gain prestige as a distinct area of activity and to enable the state to extricate itself from the market and assume a broader purpose. Coercion and the Racial State When applied to South Africa or other divided societies, most variations on modern social theory leave the legitimacy issue prejudged: attempts to build compliant arrangements, requiring some form of regime support, seem precluded by the racial-exclusive character of the state; the resort to coercive means seems inescapable. Officials may purchase cooperation of selected leaders, buttressed perhaps by feeble ideological overtures to excluded groups, but even this strategy depends on the immediate availability of coercive methods. The South African state emerges, accordingly, as single-dimensional and ahistorical, pressed by social definitions to coercive regulation of its African population. Perspectives that emphasize a "normative integration" or "common belief system" as a prerequisite to social order choke on the South African example and any associated legitimating project. In Talcott Parsons, for example, the need for a singular coercive authority falls away as the general citizenry come to subscribe to common beliefs that suggest "an obligation of collectivity membership role(s)" and a shared understanding of "truth" and "moral conviction." This rendering of common values resonates in the work of David Easton, who politicizes the process: " N o system could endure for very long if it did not seek to build up a reservoir of support— frequently described as patriotism, love of country, loyalty, and the like."" In the absence of such shared sentiments, as in South Africa, there

The Political Economy of Illegitimacy

7

looms an ominous brutishness—coercion exercised on a large scale and the threat of social disintegration. Indeed, as developing markets bring a greater emphasis on the private—on private property and appropriation, on acquisitiveness and egoism—there arises a yet greater need to cement the public order with shared identifications. South Africa, absent the most rudimentary unifying symbols, seems destined for a brutal future. Such multinational settings with divided loyalties, J o h n Stuart Mill wrote, would likely breed all sorts of evil consequences, undermining opportunities for participation and "practical discipline," and in the end producing a form of despotism. T h e various national groups would develop separate sentiments, sets of leaders, and their own newspapers, books, and pamphlets; " t h e same incidents, the same acts, the same system of government" would "affect them in different ways." The state, on the other hand, would be "interested in keeping up and envenoming their antipathies" and would likely use some groups to accomplish the "enslavement of others." T h e army, identified with the dominant national community, would emerge as a brutal element: "Soldiers to whose feelings half or threefourths of the subjects of the same government are foreigners will have no more scruple in mowing them down, and no more desire to ask the reason why, than they would have in doing the same thing against declared enemies.'" 2 The literature on pluralism and plural societies was fashioned to consider nonconsensual societies, such as South Africa, where distinct ethnic communities are brought together, though "systematically disassociated." Here, conflict rather than consensus is ascendant. What constitutes and ultimately holds these societies together is not a common "social will" but domination by a distinct section of the population. " T h e binding mechanism," Leo Kuper writes, "is government regulation, and ultimately force." 1 3 A: the center of plural societies is an enormous state presence that seems to preclude any legitimating project. T h e state, " t h e representative political organ of the ruling section," is the " p r i m a r y " organizing element that "precedes and constitutes society." T h e state, in e f f e c , completely absorbs and is fully identified with civil s o c i e t y — the ultimate entangling of politics and economics. Rather than expressing broad national aspirations, distinct from the needs of particular groups, the state becomes, M . G. Smith writes, "merely the external political form of the dominant corporate group, the in-

8

The Political Economy of Illegitimacy

strumental framework of its domination." For the excluded ethnic groups, political life is empty—without rights, citizenship, or organization. 14 The regime weighs heavily on its subjects, without room for any other dynamic or process. The political forces that constitute these societies are ultimately institutionalized as a particularistic and coercive mechanism, seemingly indifferent to broader regime support outside the dominant ethnicity. For the excluded groups, compliance represents little more than a dulled necessity, without trace of supportive sentiments. There is no passage to collaboration, paternalism, shared ideas, or any process that would detract from the centrality of coercion. Consociational democratic theorists such as Arend Lijphart have tried to extract the semblance of a stable and legitimate order out of this social wreckage. Their building blocks are the very "disassociated" groupings that in other contexts have produced violence and repression. But here theorists have constructed a Rube Goldbergtype political framework, carefully balancing contending forces using elaborate constitutional devices—grand coalitions and mutual vetoes, proportionality, and group autonomy. The result, it is hoped, is a reasonably stable order that respects the integrity of groups and that permits generally respected, centralized political processes. 15 Such arrangements have little relevance for South Africa, though Lijphart has personally participated in constitution-making there. 16 Consociational democracy, the literature suggests, is a precious phenomenon. To survive, Lijphart writes, consociational arrangements require cooperative elites who "feel at least some commitment to the maintenance of the unity of the country" and who are themselves free to act, inasmuch as mass publics are depoliticized; they depend upon a "multiple balance of power among groups" and "crosscutting cleavages" that diminish the polarity in ethnic group differences; and, finally, they depend upon "overarching loyalties," such as nationalism, that might moderate ethnic conflict. 17 Such mutuality, unity, and apathy, however, may not easily be imposed on a reality that is structurally divided and conflictual. The problem of consociational theorists is therefore the problem of plural society theorists generally. The state stands by itself—illegitimate outside the boundaries of the dominant ethnicity and necessarily coercive. The shift from a particular and exclusive state to a more universal one, no matter how desirable from the point of view of

The Political Economy of Illegitimacy

9

achieving communal peace, is theoretically inexplicable. The state in plural societies is a constant whose character is given definitionally.18 Politics, Markets, and the Problem of Legitimacy The alternative perspective on illegitimacy emphasizes labor control—the material entanglement of politics and markets in South Africa. Here it will become evident that the explanation for this social order's profound illegitimacy is situated in a more general discourse in political theory. How do state and economy in market or capitalist societies emerge as theoretically distinct and autonomous spheres of activity? How does the economy—the realm of private accumulation, property, and inequality—emerge as properly independent and a positive source of social values? How does the state rise above the particularism of society and come to embody universal principles, including the nation itself? This theoretical moment of differentiation, so central to the legitimating discourse in capitalist societies, has never arrived in South Africa. The labor control framework has visibly entangled these spheres as markets have spread and as the African majority has metamorphosed into an African working class. In this section, we shall consider two strands of this discourse, Hegelian and Marxist, that make evident the delegitimating consequences of such an embroiled path to the modern world." THE HEGELIAN D I S C O U R S E : UNIVERSALIZING THE STATE AND C I V I L S O C I E T Y

The backdrop for Hegel's concern with the universal was a German nation left in disarray by war, a madhouse of petty states and competing interests. Germany offered the worst of the modern and premodern: antiquated states that seemed no more than private patrimonies, where "the subjective end simply coincided with the state's will," where "the state's power and the power and free will of individuals was one and the same"; a crude form of market society where individuals acted to fulfill their particular needs, unrestricted by the whole. 20 There was no "universal centre," no authority "in opposition to individuals." 2 ' Out of this wreckage, Hegel fashioned the concept of a differen-

10

The Political Economy of Illegitimacy

tiated modern society, comprised of a distinct civil society—encompassing work, private accumulation, inequality, and class—and a distinct public authority over it that embodied and advanced universal principles. Freeing the state from the particularism of civil society was a requisite step to the universalizing of the state, and, ultimately, to the universalizing of civil society as well. That, in fact, is the crux of the legitimating project in the Hegelian discourse. The creation of a state over and above society was reasonably straightforward, accomplished by contrast with civil society, where caprice reigned, by association with the "ethical Idea," and by functional necessity. The state emerged distinctive and universal out of the nature of work and of war. The industrial division of labor in civil society created mutual dependence and "reciprocal" relations among persons; thus, "by a dialectical advance, subjective, selfseeking," it creates something more universal that civil society cannot itself actualize. 22 In war Hegel found the ultimate domain where only the state, only a universalizing institution, could take individuals beyond their narrow positions in civil society to organize for a common purpose. 23 To create a civil society that has positive character would be more difficult, as Hegel considered civil society a domain that "affords a spectacle of extravagance." The "concrete person" here is a bundle of "particular aims," a "totality of wants and a mixture of caprice and physical necessity." 24 When considered in relation to the state, there is a striking contrast: "Government is the universal overseer; the individual is buried in the particular." 2 5 Having clearly differentiated state and civil society and associated the former with universality and the latter with particularity, Hegel is then, and only then, able to rejoin them. A universal state, no instrument of private power, can bring out what is universal in civil society. Indeed the primary purpose of public authority, Hegel writes, is to "actualize and maintain the universal" that is "immanent in the interests of particularity itself."2® Hence the state grants property legal recognition, thus imbedding these private rights in universal principles. 27 The business class, engaged essentially in its own particular pursuits, transcends "mere self-seeking" and gains a universal purpose when its actions are framed by an "authorized" corporation. 2 8 In the end, Hegel has created a mutuality of the particular and universal. Out of interest and reciprocal necessity, individuals "pass

The Political Economy of

Illegitimacy

ii

over of their own accord into the interest of the universal." 2 ' T h e universal and particular are therefore realized together: " T h e state consists in the fact that its end is the universal interest as such and the conservation therein of particular interests since the universal is the substance of these." 3 0 Hegel therefore separated the state from civil society, including markets, and freed the state to become universal—that is, above the particularism that infused the premodern world. But by creating this autonomous state, Hegel was then able to return to civil society and find universal principles in its very particularism. T h e original disentangling of state and civil society thus made possible the universalizing of both. THE MARXIST DISCOURSE: TOWARD HEGEMONY

In the Middle Ages, there was serf, feudal property, trade corporations, corporations of scholars, etc., that is, in the Middle Ages property, trade, society, man was political;. . . every private sphere had a political character or was a political sphere, or again, politics was also the character of the private spheres. In the Middle Ages, the political constitution was the constitution of private property, but only because the constitution of private property was a political one. In the Middle Ages popular life and state [i.e., political] life were identical. Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's "Philosophy of Right"" For M a r x , as for Hegel, the premodern offered an undifferentiated state and economy where economic power and political power were one and the same. In the feudal period, state power was fragmented, and, most important, privatized. T h e lord exercised political authority—judicial, administrative, and military—but these public functions were combined simultaneously with private o n e s — organizing production and extracting an economic surplus. 3 2 Capitalism brought, above all, a pulling a p a r t — a disentangling or uncoupling—of those functions. With the worker wholly dependent on labor markets, stripped completely of access t o the means of production, there was no longer further need for a coercive power

IZ

The Political Economy of Illegitimacy

over and above the market to set things in motion. Commodity exchange (and property) was now distinct, a "purely economic form" no longer weighted down by political and social bonds. 33 In the realm of the economic, Marx wrote, the market and exchange assume a "fantastic form"—an exchange of equivalent things that embodies the equivalent labor and mutual interests of seemingly free and equal individuals. 34 The capitalist organizes production on a private basis, without evident political direction, and emerges accordingly as the primary source of public wealth. 35 The state in capitalist society, now detached from the economic, can appear anonymous and objective; indeed, it can take on a universal-national cast. The state is no longer identified with the divisive private interests that merged economic and political power in the premodern period. The state can now "belong to everyone." The legitimacy of the modern state, Nicos Poulantzas writes, lies in its presentation "as the unity of the people-nation." 36 Antonio Gramsci took this differentiation of state and economy, expanded upon it, and fashioned an encompassing view of capitalist legitimacy, or hegemony. The capacity of Western capitalism to resist crisis, Gramsci wrote, lay with the complex development of structures in civil society—the private organizations (church, courts, schools, organs of public opinion, trade unions, etc.) that form the "trenches" surrounding and protecting the exercise of political power. In the East, as in tsarist Russia, civil society was undeveloped, "primordial and gelatinous" and, consequently, the "state was everything." 37 But in the West, the exercise of "force" was balanced by "consent" organized in civil society, or "hegemony protected by the armour of coercion." 38 The bourgeoisie emerges as hegemonic, not in a political sense alone—that is, able to call upon the coercive power of the state— and not in the economic realm alone, through the appropriation of surplus; the bourgeoisie organizes its hegemony through a pervasive dominance of civil society and its structures. Here, the bourgeoisie appears, not as a conservative elite and "closed caste" dependent on the state, but as a dynamic force, based on its "decisive function" in the realm of "economic activity" and as an agent for something more universal—"an organism in continuous movement, capable of absorbing the entire society, assimilating it to its own cultural and economic level." 39 In its strongest sense, hegemony means that the bourgeoisie will have "nationalized itself," successfully associated

The Political Economy of Illegitimacy

13

itself with a "collective national-popular will," and persuaded the great mass of people that its interests and those of the bourgeoisie are convergent. 40 In advanced capitalist nations, it is evident that the state has come to play a larger and larger role in economic matters, in effect, re-entangling politics and the market. That growing intervention, Claus Offe and Jiirgen Habermas suggest, calls into question the decisive role played by the bourgeoisie and the logic of the market— that market outcomes and private decision making produce the best imaginable results for society as a whole. The re-entanglement also opens up the state as an arena of choice and control with the result that both the economy and the state are "re-politicized." 4 1 This central role for the state appears to reopen the issue of legitimacy in capitalist societies, yet the original discourse still provides the terms of debate. The theoretical separation of politics and economics created values in civil society—private accumulation, entrepreneurship, rationality, technocratic competence, and a universalnational state—that continue to constitute the ingredients of a legitimacy formula. 4 2 Even in a re-entangled social order, those ingredients may allow for the moderation of social conflict and appeals to loyalty and nation. State and M a r k e t s in S o u t h A f r i c a South Africa, though by now fully a market and capitalist society, has taken little part in these theoretical traditions. There has been no moment of separation—historical, theoretical, or otherwise— when the state and market have emerged as distinct and legitimate. The African experience of modern South Africa is an entangled web of work and labor markets, state labor bureaus, passes, and police. Africans have been incorporated into the South African political economy, not simply as part of a racial grouping, but as squatters and labor tenants on white farms, as wage laborers and migrantcontract workers on the mines and in industry, as impoverished peasants, as barely employed illegals on the margins of the cities, and as fully urbanized industrial workers. At the same time, their incorporation has occasioned a growing stare presence in the market. The earliest pre-twentieth-century servile labor forms—slavery, indenture, apprenticing of "orphans," and forced labor and residence—brought rudimentary controls, issued and administered by

M

The Political Economy of Illegitimacy

rudimentary colonial and frontier states. Still, legal constraints on mobility in the shape of passes, vagrancy laws, and masters and servants laws provided strong coercive traditions that would inform the future evolution of state and markets in South Africa. Settlers in the early nineteenth century were little reserved in demanding that the authorities create "legally established classes"—those "serving the Farmers," for example—and that, for the rest, "all wanderers and vagabonds ought immediately to be apprehended and placed either to the public works, or on Robben Island, there to labor for their bread." 43 The growth of commercial and capitalist agriculture in the early twentieth century brought state restrictions on African landholding, squatting, and sharecropping; it also brought hut taxes to induce wage employment, laws regulating the numbers and distribution of African farm laborers, regulations for labor tenants establishing the required number of days of labor service, and special pass and farm contract provisions impelling the return of labor tenants and their children and blocking their flight to the cities. With the National party ascendancy after 1948, commercial agriculture brought a massive legal and bureaucratic overlay that sought to limit the market's penetration into white farming. These areas were legally demarcated and African farm laborers legally barred from crossing the boundaries to take up work in the cities.44 The growth of diamond and then gold mining in the late nineteenth century, the core of South Africa's industrial capitalist economy, created new areas for labor market growth. It also created new scope for state initiatives to control market processes. Here, the rudimentary state structures and sometimes haphazard enforcement in the rural areas gave way to systematic regulation. Pass laws took on a new meaning as the compulsory registration of contracts, vagrancy laws, convict labor stations, and mine compounds took root in the mining districts. In the African rural areas, labor recruiting was organized by collusive employer agencies, frequently governed by treaties and state regulations, that created fixed wage scales and standard contracts and that severely constrained market competition. In the mining areas, this managed system produced constant African real wages between 1 9 1 1 and 1969; when it also produced African worker organization and strikes, the system was able to depend on police cordons and pass laws. 45 The growth of a manufacturing and commercial economy, ac-

The Political Economy of Illegitimacy

15

companied by large-scale African urbanization, brought yet more elaborate state measures. The initial halting efforts to create separate African locations and to remove the "redundant" African populations to the rural areas yielded by the end of World War II to a comprehensive framework for labor control. The pass and influx control laws were refined, extended to women, and given a new reality by steadily intensified police activity. Market involvement was bureaucratized: compulsory labor bureaus were established in the urban and tribal areas and Africans found themselves imbedded in legally established market categories—above all, as contract laborers barred from permanent residence in the white areas. The workplace itself was infested by spreading controls: laws and statutory agreements that reserved work for specific race groups and set racial employment quotas; statutes that denied African trade unions legal recognition and that allowed the jailing or "endorsing out" of African strikers.46 The National party, which has fashioned and overseen this entanglement in the contemporary period, has also applauded it. This greatly elaborated state presence was no coincidental or reluctant accompaniment of developing capitalist relations. The party's ideological mandate included the specific goal that "influx to the cities must be subject to every possible restriction" and the general principle that would foster the expansion of the political realm: "We propose state interference and state control on a large scale." 47 The elaboration of the state labor control framework has been shaped and driven during this century by a chorus of specific demands originating with the various economic sectors: from the commercial agricultural unions attempting to maintain rural labor supplies and intensify demands on farm laborers; from the mining houses attempting to structure and maintain a migrant labor system; from white workers looking to secure their jobs and living standards. For the National party government in the post-World War II period, however, labor control has meant something more general and theoretical—state control over the whole process of African proletarianization. In its most extreme and rhetorical variation, this control has emerged as an absolute intention to bar the development of an African working class. An upper-level official in the Department of Bantu Administration during the 1960s, one who later would chair a major government committee that urged tighter influx controls,

i6

The Political Economy of Illegitimacy

proposed "the elimination of Bantu labor" in the white areas. If "the white community cannot continue without Bantu labor," he warned, "then it must also be assumed that the Western lifestyle has an uncertain future in South Africa.'"' 8 More often, officials and politicians have redefined this absolutist position to mean, "keeping the numbers down"—that is, preventing the market and employers from attracting more African workers into the European-controlled industrial economy than are absolutely required and, indeed, reducing those requirements. "It must be remembered," the same Bantu Administration official pointed out, "that many employers are inclined to hire more laborers than are necessary" and that, accordingly, "wholesale pruning is possible.'"" The official's position reflected that of the department secretary who, at the outset of National party rule, urged the white community to "adjust the economy to function with a progressively decreasing supply of cheap [African] labour." A decade later, he was still urging whites "to limit the use of manpower to the absolute minimum," urging employers in particular to turn increasingly to mechanization. 50 When free from the simple rhetoric of exclusion and numbers, officials have concentrated on three themes in state control over the emergent African working class: efficiency, dependence and migrancy, and stratification. Efficiency, to begin with, should not be confused with conventional economic definitions that emphasize the maximization of outputs from a given set of inputs. The government wanted to overcome the "present chaotic distribution of labour," which was, of course, "politically defined": the failure of the system to channel labor to preferred sectors (agriculture and mining) and the failure of the market to clear out the "superfluous," unemployed labor that squatted indiscriminately in the urban areas. The latter, in particular, threatened "general disorder." 51 The deputy minister in 1964 spoke about a labor framework where, if the Bantu administration is good, "the numbers of Africans in the cities would be contained"; the remainder would need not fear the state, "as long as they are not there illegally, as long as they are not undesirable, and as long as they are not superfluous." 52 More demanding yet was the thematic effort to shape African industrial workers into a "complementary," migratory working class. Verwoerd, in particular, declared that apartheid was not meant to stop capitalist growth, to expel African workers, or to create a sep-

The Political Economy of Illegitimacy

17

arate white economy. 53 Africans would become part of the industrial economy, but only as needed, and only in labor-intensive occupations where migrant labor was the dominant form. The state would prevent "occupational infiltration" by Africans into more skilled and central positions, channeling labor instead into mining and agriculture, where "the pattern of labor is kept to its traditional form." 54 The founding president of the organization of labor control officials underlined this state purpose with a clarion call about African workers: "They must uproot themselves from the proverbial meat dishes of Egypt and go to their Homelands from where the breadwinners may still sell their labour in the white areas." 55 Finally, labor control was "protective," aimed at securing the position of a core group of settled African industrial workers and differentiating them from the larger mass that pressed against the gates to the cities. While apartheid legislation attempted to limit the size of the fully proletarianized population severely, the legal framework at the same time formalized its rights and granted these workers legal priority in the state-managed labor market. Officials and politicians have come to speak of African "insiders" and the need to protect their position. If state labor controls were relaxed, officials warn, "everybody will be running in the street. . . . You would frustrate the local people and you will get riots." S6 It is this complex entanglement of state and markets, the concerted effort to manage African proletarianization, that has shaped the discourse on legitimacy in South Africa. The exercise of political power has never been divorced from the exercise of economic power. If anything, state practice and state ideology have joined them and celebrated the result. At least two centuries of emergent racial, ethnic, and class dominance have been deeply inscribed in the state. Such particularism has no doubt crowded out any pretense to broad public or national purpose and any capacity to elicit expressions of "loyalty" or "patriotism" beyond a narrow stratum. The strong state presence in South Africa has, at the same time, narrowed the ideological scope of the market, private entrepreneurs, and the aspiration toward bourgeois hegemony. The realm of markets has, in effect, failed to "shed its political form": the pursuit of private ends, joined in the market, is not likely to be governed by "fair exchange" or "equivalence"; it seems neither self-directed nor likely to maximize social values. The market, as a result, has devel-

i8

The Political Economy of Illegitimacy

oped little capacity to "legitimate itself." 57 The South African business classes for their part have not easily emerged as a dynamic and expansive force. Situated firmly in the dominant racial community, and aided by the state, the bourgeoisie has fashioned ideas that are necessarily more castelike than "bourgeois": there is no "organic passage" that connects "other classes into their own, i.e., to enlarge their class sphere"; there is no broadly understood idea, a "common sense," that brings unity to the top and bottom of society.58 The South African business classes, no less than the state, have become mired in an entangled political-economic order that highlights their particularity. Not surprisingly, the combination is deeply politicizing. The private realm is compromised in the eyes of the African majority. It requires great imagination to view the affairs of business or communal groups as genuinely or legitimately private. The state's presence in the market and workplace turns narrow "economic issues'' such as wages and benefits into questions of broad public importance, implicating the whole structure of power, race, and inequality. The racial state can do little itself to temporize such heated processes in the private and political realms: the evident partiality of the state disqualifies it as an effective arbiter between labor and capital. Indeed, the centrality of the state, with its expansive posture in the market, invites a generalized politicization of society; it invites African claimants to state power. T h e Limits of State Power There seems little sense to the army presenting itself as "your friend" and kicking soccer balls in Sebokeng except as a public relations exercise for audiences abroad, "moral" justification for the white community, and perhaps a modest concession to the small coterie of African collaborators. 59 Rifles, not soccer balls, seem the necessary foundation of this coercive order. The question of legitimacy can only be set aside, howeTer, if one assumes, as does most of the literature on South Africa, chat state control over labor markets is unproblematic, and that the South African state is effectively repressive. That, after all, is the posture of South Africa's ruling elite during its more confident moments. As State President P. W. Botha put it, "I am going to keep ordtr and nobody is going to stop me.'" 0

The Political Economy of Illegitimacy

19

Across a broad range of perspectives on South Africa, there is a presumption that the South African state is in reality an awesome combination of repressive structures, lording it over society and the African majority: the state is seen as repressive, unified of purpose, internally coherent, effective in pursuit of its ideological goals, and efficient in embodying and representing constituent interests. This imagery is reproduced in standard textbooks, where the legal order is presented as totally subjugating—"over Africans, the legal powers of the government are virtually unlimited"—and where the state structures, "formidable instruments," exercise complete control over the lives of Africans—"an African may only stay in a white area at the government's pleasure." 61 While African opposition is on the rise, it is itself internally divided and faces "a determined and cohesive white population which controls the commanding heights of the economy as well as the state apparatus." 62 This conception of a cohesive and effective state, exercising overriding coercive power, is evident across a broad range of commentaries on South Africa: Ben Magubane describes a "slave-labor system" where the government, at will, directs Africans to the mines and farms or to places in the division of labor, and in an earlier work, I describe influx control after World War II as a veritable "Berlin Wall"; Howard Simson presents the state as a unity, "effectively 'Nationalized'" by an Afrikaner "fascist" party that has achieved "complete domination of the bureaucracy" and "seized control of all branches of the state"; a "Poulantzian fractionalist" school describes an undifferentiated cohesive state, its ends determined directly by the "power bloc" and "hegemonic fractions" outside. 63 Though the liberation literature is replete with references to class struggle and contradictions, the state is in fact seen as unified—overwhelmingly powerful on its own terrain and dominant over society. "All political and economic power" is wielded by an upper class of whites whose position depends, "for its continued existence," on the "army and security forces." Only "by means of the gun," by armed struggle, can the majority smash this racial state, "maintained by the gun." M State against the Market One may be indifferent to questions of consent and loyalty when the guns are sufficient, when the bureaucratic-repressive structures

20

The Political Economy of Illegitimacy

effectively dictate market outcomes, or when, as is the wish of South Africa's officialdom, the labor control framework effectively displaces urbanization and limits dependence on an African proletariat. State control over labor markets in general, however, and the specific form of managed proletarianization in South Africa, contain inherent tensions, indeed contradictions, that challenge such portrayals of assured dominance. In that context, it is hard to avoid the search for a legitimacy formula. The original tension between state and markets is given, in the first instance, in the concept of control and the vagaries of the human spirit. Mineowners and farmers, politicians and state functionaries have demanded labor control measures because of an elementary reality: African peasants and workers have not chosen to live and work where these various white actors would choose to have them spend their time and labor power. Had some natural or market process produced an acceptable distribution and price for African laborers, these state impositions would undoubtedly have proved superfluous and, in time, have fallen away." This tension is an intrinsic and unchanging feature of labor control. The state has shaped the labor market in important ways, imposing severe restrictions on mobility and uprooting millions of "redundant" workers. Yet control measures, whenever applied, have had to cope with human material that resists state intentions—individuals who risk illegality, who abrogate contracts and desert their work, who prove work-shy and recalcitrant in the face of the constricted opportunities made available to them. A state control machinery, having suppressed or taken into account such independent preferences, must also cope with the constraints on any state-directed system for authoritatively allocating resources. As Charles Lindblom puts it, "the organization of a political-economic system through authority rather than markets is on certain points clumsy." There are problems of scant information and information overload, of establishing priorities in allocations and maintaining them as circumstances change, of control and direction, and of accountability as decisions diffuse down through control agencies.66 As development in South Africa has brought an increasing scale of economic activity and a growing labor force, the demands on the state control structures have clearly grown, reflected in an increasing scale of state activity: the number of pass law arrests

The Political Economy of ¡¡legitimacy

21

increased f r o m 2 6 5 , 0 0 0 in 1 9 5 0 to 6 4 4 , 0 0 0 in 1 9 7 0 ; the number of labor bureau offices increased f r o m 2 3 4 to 1 , 2 6 4 between 1 9 5 7 and 1 9 7 7 ; the older Department of N a t i v e A f f a i r s registered 1 5 0 , 0 0 0 employment contracts in 1 9 5 0 , whereas the Department of C o o p eration and Development registered 3.5 million in 1 9 7 7 . 6 7 But the increasing scale of state direction does not overcome its inherent "clumsiness"; it exacerbates it. T h e problems of individual will and the clumsiness of authorities are important limiting conditions; they are not, however, necessarily debilitating. State repressive agencies, sufficiently determined and financed, can displace and relocate people and can overcome the state's o w n incapacities. The more central problem is the contradictory entanglement of a state-directed labor system and a system of capitalist ownership contained within a single South A f r i c a n social order. This is n o ordinary " m i x e d e c o n o m y " where the state creates market incentives o r disincentives, finances technology and builds infrastructure, fixes selected prices o r taxes incomes, creates state industries and subsidizes others, though there are elements of this in the South A f r i c a n system. 6 8 T h e state is, in effect, " p r o d u c i n g " and supplying labor to private entrepreneurs through state labor bureaus where price and demand have some market properties. Yet investment and location decisions remain largely in private hands. T h e primary contradiction lies in the state management of proletarianization and the private organization of capitalist production. T h e state has sought, through massive intervention, to allocate labor to white agriculture and to clear "superfluous populations" from the urban areas; it has sought to limit dependence on A f r i c a n labor, mandating migrant forms and constraining the growth of an urban proletariat. A t the same time, investment, production, and employment decisions have been left within a fully capitalist f r a m e w o r k , in the hands of private entrepreneurs. Despite years of cajoling and escalating incentives, business enterprises have expanded largely within the established urban-industrial complexes and have sought to organize their production and labor force there. 69 M o r e o v e r , the growth of a capitalist economy at the core and the private entrepreneurs' continuing control over investment and employment have left the labor control officialdom in an increasingly anomalous position. Officials must exert control over labor markets, yet capitalists retain

22

The Political Economy of Illegitimacy

a privileged position and a special claim that, as we shall see, undermines bureaucratic practice and state control. In part i of this work, "State against the Market," it will become evident that these tensions and contradictions have seriously complicated and limited state performance in South Africa. The difficulties of imposing state control over this unruly process were evident early, as state efforts seemed incapable of slowing urbanization or restructuring the African working class. The elaboration of the state labor control framework came, not as the result of some totalizing ideology, but as a repeated response to the insufficiency of state control efforts and contradictions in state management of developing labor markets. Despite their scope, repressive efforts failed to keep up with the spreading labor markets and the inventiveness of workers seeking work. At the same time, paradoxically, the system's "successes," the creation of destitute "surplus" populations held back on the margins of the industrial economy, simply created growing incentives for such workseekers to take to illegal flight and circumvent the order of control. After more than three decades of National party rule and growing state presence, there is no semblance of the coherent and effective state suggested in the earlier literature. The ordeal of taking control of the market has left the state exposed. The bureaucracy itself is uneven in practice: it is underfinanced and understaffed; its tribal labor bureaucracies in the African rural areas have disintegrated; its urban control machinery has proved erratic, shaped by local employer demands, often powerless to block the rising tide of illegals and squatters. Political struggles reverberate inside the state as officials and politicians consider the rising costs of repressive measures, the waning support amongst the traditional supporters of control, particularly farmers and mineowners, and the growing concern with order and consent expressed by a now ascendant business class. Ringing white society now are millions of African workers: some displaced, but comprising a rising surplus in the bantustans; others joining the sprawling illegal squatter communities that now dominate the major metropolitan centers; and yet others constituting a fully developed urban proletariat that is a permanent feature of South Africa's industrial economy. Over the past decade, that African working mass has produced seemingly endless waves of strikes, boycotts, and civil disorders.

The Political Economy of Illegitimacy It should not be hard to imagine why the problem of legitimacy has come to preoccupy the discourse within the state and business community in South Africa. The problems of faltering control, the entangled state and market, and illegitimacy are closely interlinked.

The Search for a Legitimacy

Formula

To confront the problem of illegitimacy—specifically, to legitimate the illegitimate—the South African regime must address a central issue in South Africa's political economy: the historic and ideological interpénétration of state and markets. 7 0 In their articulation together, the market has been politicized, not "privatized"; it has failed to emerge as a distinct source of social values such as employment and wealth; it has failed to generalize its operating principles, such as "equivalence" and "fair exchange," or to establish private actors, the bourgeoisie, as the dynamic element in society. The state, mired in the private exercise of power and identified with the ascendant racism, has been denied a public universal character. Under the umbrella of apartheid, this entanglement, the politicization and partiality of the state, has been raised to a point of principle. The task now before South Africa's ruling politicians, officials, intellectuals, and businessmen is how to move away from the conventional statist ideology and how to reconstruct the order of control. A necessary step in this process is the creation—in ideology to be sure, but perhaps also in practice—of a distinct private sphere capable of leading society and producing social values. Markets and entrepreneurs should accordingly be seen to be operative and effective and should be associated with the creation of a generalized economic bounty. The promise of capitalism, Irving Kristol writes, is above all an unparalleled "improvement in the material conditions of all its citizens," the assurance of a more general opulence than by any imagined alternative. 71 Though markets advance private appropriation in principle, they also generalize the concept of equality: personal equality, "fair exchange," and "equivalence." 7 2 To establish their role in society, private entrepreneurs should be seen to be responsible for this growth in material welfare. M a r x and market theorists alike have believed that the productive power and contribution of labor are, as appearance, transferred to capital under developing capitalism: "Capital thus becomes a very mystic

The Political Economy of

Illegitimacy

being"; social production seems " t o issue from the womb of capital itself." 7 3 T h e market, under the guidance of private decision makers, is thought to be both "self-directing" and wealth producing. 7 4 At a more collective level, an emergent bourgeois hegemony associates itself with popular and national forces that generalize and solidify the businessman's position in society. Rather than relying solely on its own narrow market position, the bourgeoisie "nationalizes itself." It incorporates nonclass elements into its own discourse and presents itself as the embodiment of all the national energies. 75 T h e other side of the bourgeois ascendancy and the disentangling of politics and markets is the ideological, and perhaps practical, diminution of the state role. T h a t process has already been substantially advanced in this discussion as responsibility for the creation of public values has in part been devolved to private actors. However, this devolution is simply one aspect of yet broader possibilities for depoliticizing the state, including denying the state a sense of public purpose, removing the appearance of public choice, and undermining the state's capacity to deliver important goods. Unlike the massive state presence so central to apartheid ideology, this neutered state diffuses broad claims by an increasingly self-conscious working class, deflects attention from the state's historic racial character, and allows the emergence of broader, though possibly less intense, loyalties. Expansive or Utopian thinking about the state was a necessary aspect of apartheid ideology and the labor control framework, yet such thinking at the same time invited critical examination by excluded groups of the state's character, future makeup, and role. To avoid such a discourse, James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock write, the state should be governed by an "individualistic" logic that takes " n o position . . . concerning ultimate goals." Under a wholly "individualist (and instrumental) conception of the collectivity," the framework for discussion may be constricted, avoiding the kind of expansive thinking that invites state subordination of the economy and markets. 7 6 T h e scope of politics may be narrowed further by limiting the realm of public choice, achieved by expanding the role of technocratic-scientific standards. T h e market, controlled by the rational mechanisms of exchange, may emerge as "self-propelling"; at that point, the state itself is objectified. Political decision making, Haber-

The Political Economy of Illegitimacy

mas observes, gives way "in favor of an efficient way of applying available techniques in the framework of strategies that are objectively called for." Now, "objective necessity disclosed by the specialists seems to assert itself over the leaders' decisions." 77 Finally, the state may be further depoliticized where its capacity to make decisions or to carry out policy effectively in defined and important areas has been undermined. A state that carries out broad social welfare functions and regularly and visibly intercedes in property relations is at the same time a likely terrain for political struggle. 78 For that reason, Buchanan and Tullock suggest decentralization, fragmentation of power, dispersal of functions, and minority veto rights; in effect, the removal of important areas such as "the creation and confiscation of human property rights" from the sphere of collective action. 79 T h e L a b o r Control F r a m e w o r k The labor control framework in South Africa consists of the Department of Cooperation and Development, the fragmented labor sections in the Department of Constitutional Development and Planning and the Department of Manpower, and the administration (development) boards and labor bureaus that have assumed responsibility for the management of the African working class.80 These state structures embody our problem, as they represent the state's historic presence in the market. They have administered the pass and influx control laws; their officials inspect workplaces, lodgings, and squatter areas; they administer the African townships and state housing policies in both white areas and bantustans; they clear and resettle "black spot" populations; they are responsible for requisitioning, recruiting, authorizing, and allocating labor. In the most recent period, as we shall see in chapters 4 and 7, a few of these functions have been abolished; many have been fragmented and parceled out to diverse state departments; some have been transmuted and retained through use of "color-blind" restrictive laws; and some have been delegated to collaborative African officials and institutions, which operate unevenly at best. The crude language of "influx control" has given way to a less offensive terminology—"orderly urbanization"—and an uncertain future course. This fragmentation and the search for new terminologies and directions are a reaction to the processes described in this book. They

The Political Economy of Illegitimacy

represent efforts by officialdom and politicians to obscure labor control processes and manage African proletarianization, yet reduce the state's presence in the lives of African workers. The "reforms" of the 1980s are consequently as much a part of our story as the elevated repression of the 1960s. Our story encompasses core state institutions that hold responsibility for a goodly portion of the lives of the majority population in South Africa. The failure of these institutions to cope effectively with African urbanization and unrest and the struggle within these institutions and others over new forms of control help us understand the limits of state power; they also make explicable the dissolution of apartheid structures and the search for broader support in society. Labor control institutions are not the whole of the state. Indeed, the military and police, financial institutions, and others are examined only peripherally here. A fuller view of the state and the present crisis in South Africa demands a fuller account. The limits of this inquiry, however, should not detract from the centrality of our subject. At the bottom end of these structures, the boards and labor bureaus—the "pass offices," in African eyes— form a nexus that is a point of contact between the state and African workers. The labor control officials, in particular, appreciate the centrality and theoretical sensitivity of their position: "How can the administration board apply and satisfy the black man coming to this country when it is expected that the administration board will apply the less popular aspects of policy—this is, influx control? How can you give the man satisfaction, when you have to tell the man he cannot work in this area?" asked one labor control official. He concluded, with some trepidation, "It is the poor man in the field who has to face the black man." 81 Juan Linz observes that "only the praetorian guards or the lowest ranks of a police force" do not ask questions about the state violence and lack of national meaning. 82 In South Africa, the strong state presence, the limits of state capacity, and the evident disaffection generalize the preoccupation, even at this critical nexus where state officials and African workers face each other most directly.

2. Contradictions and State Presence

The state labor control framework in South Africa seems an Orwellian creation: laws that grant or limit residence "rights" in the white cities, that set aside land for specific racial groups, and that restrict rights of occupancy and "squatting"; administrative practices that rigidly contain African farming in the white rural areas and African landholding in the African ones; laws that force workers into a migrant status or that place them in some intermediate limbo as "frontier commuters"; laws and administrative practice that effectively bar women from gaining new employment outside impoverished "bantustans"; laws on citizenship and "independent national states" that artificially create "alien" workers with uncertain access to employment and residence within "the Republic"; and laws on "approved accommodation" that make illegal or impractical the job search of millions w h o have not been officially requisitioned or lawfully lodged. 1 The African worker is confronted with an elaborate bureaucratic apparatus: the local and district labor bureaus that sanction urban employment and approve requisitions to bring in migrant laborers; the various labor officials and commissioners that authorize employment and allocate job requisitions to the scattered African rural areas; the district and tribal labor bureaus in the black rural areas that fill "bulk requisitions" for laborers, "attest" contracts, and receive attestation fees that "legalize" or facilitate entry into the white areas; and administration (development) boards that are responsible f o r land and housing provision, whose officials clear squatter areas and implement removals. Behind every black worker stand the institutions of enforcement. The pass courts and "aid centres" annually jail or "endorse o u t " hundreds of thousands of Africans illegally present in the white

19

30

State against the Market

areas. In advance of these institutions are the waves of enforcement officials: the police who clear the streets of illegal workers and homes of illegal lodgers; the administration board inspectors who search out unregistered workers; and the bantustan security officials who police the black dormitory towns on the black periphery and who police the camps for displaced and redundant black labor. For most observers of South Africa, the labor control framework is what it purports to be: an effective state abrogation of the labor market. The array of laws, bureaus, courts, and police is evidence, in itself, of effective state control. The "effect" of the Bantu Labour Act of 1964, one critic observes, "is to provide the Executive with total control over where Africans may work, and what work they may do." 2 That emphasis on effective control recurs throughout the critical social commentary on South Africa. Ben Magubane depicts the state, poised behind its labor control console, directing labor to sectors as required: Thus, various statutes regulating African life in the urban areas operate as nonmarket techniques for creating a vast floating labor pool from which the government can detach individual units as needed, much as in a slave-labor system. . . . If such labor proves not to be forthcoming, the police simply tighten the enforcement of the pass system; if this does not work, emergency labor for the farms and mines can be met from prison rosters. 1

In Race and State in Capitalist Development, I depict a smoothly functioning and effective labor control system: "The Native Laws Amendment Act of 1952. developed the sometimes haphazard barrier between country and town into a veritable Berlin Wall"; this legislation "provided for a system of labor bureaus that, in the absence of market mechanisms, allocated African labor in both urban and rural areas."4 The Nationalist government's own imagery has included a smoothly operating labor control system. With the passage of labor bureau legislation in 195 2, the Department of Native Affairs looked forward to new allocative efficiencies: "It is now possible, thanks to the existence of a network of labour bureaux which have particulars regarding the demand for and supply of labour at any place in the Union readily available, to find immediate employment for workseekers who otherwise sometimes had to wander about looking for work for days on end."5 W. W. M. Eiselen, the secretary of the de-

Contradictions and State Presence

31

partment, although noting delays in implementation, observed that "with the efficient functioning of all sections of the system, there should be little difficulty in securing an equitable distribution of all the labour available in the Union." 6 In the texts of "native administration" courses, the system emerged as complete and balanced: "the control of labour is effected in very close cooperation with the tribal labour b u r e a u x " ; "the functions of efflux control from the homelands and influx control from the administration areas coincide and are co-ordinated." 7 The labor control framework has indeed had a profound impact on the lives of black South Africans and the privileged opportunities of white workers, industrialists, and farmers. African women have in fact been barred from factory employment in certain areas, particularly the Western Cape. 8 Commuter townships in the bantustans, such as Mdantsane, Mabopane, and KwaMashu, are concrete expressions of state policies that have virtually stopped new housing construction for Africans in the white urban areas. And there is a bitter reality to the forcible removal of some 3.5 million Africans from white areas during the 1960s and 1 9 7 0 s and the some 9.9 million influx control arrests during the same period. 9 But the dimensions of the labor control framework and its pernicious consequences should not detract from an enormously contradictory reality: this is a framework that has regularly proved insufficient to cope with the increasing scale of market processes. The framework today is incomplete; the laws and regulations are unevenly implemented and enforced and not always effective; the bureaucratic machinery is understaffed and sometimes overrun. The operation of the labor framework has proved internally contradictory; that is, its successes—the constraints on labor mobility, the bottling up of rural black populations, and the stratification of the African working class—have only strengthened the forces threatening to undo the system of control. As we shall see in this and subsequent chapters, state efforts to control the labor market have constantly been challenged by black workers, requiring yet more developed forms of state control—only to set in motion yet more determined efforts by workers to circumvent the system. At the same time, officials and politicians have had to struggle with the spiraling costs that have accompanied the expanding system of control: the simple, but real, budgetary costs; the greatly expanded coterie of clerks, managers, magistrates, inspectors, and

State against the Market police; the "market distortions" that have favored some sectors and some employers over others and that have set off struggles within the white community; the growing entanglement and illegitimacy of state and economy; the specter of growing African disaffection and resistance on a large scale; and, finally, and perhaps most important, the evident prospect that new control measures will prove insufficient. This contradictory reality is at the center of our understanding of state and market processes. The South African labor framework has been elaborated, we shall discover, as officials have tried to control increasingly unwieldy market and class processes. Mechanisms and conventions that forced labor tenants back into the fields or that held compound laborers to the terms of their contracts proved inappropriate and ineffectual as Africans came increasingly to seek wage employment in the cities and as developing manufacture in turn sought access to African labor supplies. Rudimentary labor bureaus under the control of local authorities proved insufficient in scope and capacity as the African rural areas grew increasingly impoverished and their burgeoning "surplus" populations grew desperate for wage employment in the cities. The state has loomed larger and larger in the market, not because control measures have proved effective, but because each generation of controls has proved inadequate to the developing forces tending to circumvent them. Paradoxically, the tendency to lose control of the labor market has produced a growing state presence, a further entangling of politics and markets, and a further refinement of the racial state. 10 This process, the insufficiency of state capacity and the growing size and complexity of the state machinery, has produced recurrent and growing political turmoil within the state. The elaboration of the state in this contradictory context has produced, not unity, but doubts and, increasingly, a struggle over the best means for preserving privilege and maintaining order. Some actors, the strongest elements up until now, have responded to the insufficiency of repressive and racist methods with demands for yet greater state controls over the African population. Others, against the dominant presumptions favoring increased control, have given tentative voice to new policy directions: less evidently coercive ways for allocating labor, new mechanisms to reduce the costs of state regulation, and new approaches to inducing compliance and building broader support for the social order. Conflicts amongst these elements have raged pe-

Contradictions and State Presence

33

riodically, sometimes amongst class organizations and joined by the white political parties, sometimes as a less public struggle within the state institutions themselves—between and within state departments and between officials at the national and local levels. These struggles have been waged since the late 1930s and have now become so intense and indeterminate that they threaten the coherence of the state. In this chapter, we shall examine the challenges to the labor control framework and, in response, the attempts to fashion more refined and more effective state mechanisms of control. We shall consider the formative period (1937—48) when rapid African urbanization forced these issues and struggles to the forefront; the innovative period (1948-60) when state officials designed, but only partially implemented, a system for regulating African proletarianization; and the repressive period ( 1 9 6 0 - 7 6 ) when the Nationalist regime and state officials combined severe repression with intense regulation in an effort to take control of the African labor market. In chapter 3, we shall consider the present era, a period of state incoherence, when rising African resistance and severe contradictions in the labor system brought new political struggles in and outside of the state and new efforts to control what increasingly seemed uncontrollable. T h e Formative Period ( 1 9 3 7 - 4 8 ) When Africans began abandoning the rural areas in favor of jobs and houses in the white cities in large numbers during and after World War I, the government of the time seemed loathe to stop them, and perhaps incapable of doing so. There certainly were formal legal remedies available to forestall this flight to the cities, but these remedies were underdeveloped and underutilized. The Native (Urban Areas) Act of 1923 and subsequent amendments in 1 9 3 0 and 1 9 3 7 gave local authorities extensive "powers" to establish African locations, register employment contracts, and expel redundant Africans. In practice, however, these measures were erratically implemented. In 1 9 3 7 the minister of native affairs, Jan Smuts, warned the municipalities—the only available instruments of urban labor control—that the "Native influx from the country has been largely uncontrolled and the evils have been growing correspondingly." While

34

State against the Market

white farmers faced a growing labor scarcity, he observed, a "surplus of Native population, many of them probably unemployed," had been building up in the cities. The towns, he warned, "will develop a sense of responsibility to themselves and to the country," lest the central government be forced "to intervene."" Smuts's threats notwithstanding, the influx control system remained rudimentary. By 1937 only eleven towns in all of South Africa had taken advantage of the legal mechanisms for limiting the entry of Africans into the urban locations. Port Elizabeth, for example, refused to institute registration procedures under the 1923 legislation since, as one city councillor noted, "it is well known that the natives did not approve of registration.'" 2 When the central government directed the municipalities to conduct a local census and identify redundant Africans, the six largest cities reported no redundant Africans whatever; only ten municipalities found evidence of a labor surplus." But even these seemed disinclined to do anything about them: in Ladysmith the superintendent for native affairs reported that "the Census reveals that only 110 Natives of the age of 18 years and over are unemployed and of this number many of them are too old, while others are invalid and, therefore, incapable of performing any work and the Council has accordingly recommended that no steps be taken at the present moment to displace any Natives within the urban area of Ladysmith"; the Native Affairs Department in Dundee reported 1,208 unemployed, "comprising mostly of [sic] infants, adolescents and aged Natives," and stated accordingly, that it was "not of the opinion that there is a surplus of unemployed Natives"; in Klerksdorp the municipality indicated that "no steps are being taken to remove surplus or unemployed Natives, which compared to our population are not excessive.'" 4 After the war the government attempted to put some administrative muscle into the labor control system by urging local authorities to establish facilities for registering African employment contracts and for "compelling the departure" of those not willing to work. By 1948 only five local authorities had agreed to take on the responsibility; the Johannesburg City Council, responsible for the principal industrial and African residential areas, decided against participation. 15 The state regulative and coercive apparatus operated at approximately the same level of intensity during the 1930s and during the war years despite greatly expanded scope for urban influx control.

Contradictions and State Presence

35

At the outset of World War II, with rising urbanization, pass law arrests rose by almost a third, but they dropped to prewar levels again in 1942 as the government mobilized in support of the British war effort. The African urban population rose from 420,000 in 1 9 2 1 to 800,000 in 1 9 3 6 to 1,225,000 in 1946—a threefold increase—but the level of pass law prosecutions remained relatively constant, fluctuating around 130,000 a year during the two decades between 1926 and 1944. 1 6 Demands by farmers that the state take control of this process had not remained constant, however. The South African Agricultural Union and its various affiliates spoke increasingly of dire farm labor shortages and the congregation of idle and surplus African labor in the African locations. The farm organizations pressed various proposals upon the government, almost all of which required increased state control of the African labor market: the displacement of squatters and the use of emergency regulations to compel squatters to take up work on white farms; the removal of "loafers" and "idle" Africans from urban areas and their forced relocation to white farming areas; the "compulsory registration" of African laborers and "identity cards" as a condition of employment; the construction of "central camps . . . where prisoners under sentence of three months or less shall be kept, and from which farmers in the neighborhood can draw labour"; the expanded "apprenticing" of African children as farm laborers; the curtailing of the flight of African squatters and tenants by requiring the prior approval of local police and farm owners; and, finally, the legal division of the African population into rural and urban segments, with state barriers to block movement from one area to the other. 17 State officials during the war period regularly expressed concern about the white farmer's plight, but evidenced little sympathy for the repressive and racial solutions advanced by the farming community. During this period of rapid African urbanization, the government >eemed boldly dismissive of new labor control proposals: The Department [of Native Affairs], while it is keenly sympathetic with the farmers in their difficulties and is most anxious to assist in the production of food, feels that such a regulation could not be regarded as other than repressive and would amount to the conscription of labour. . . . It was also urged that steps should be taken to remove redundant Natives from the towns. But the position in the opinion of the Department does not indicate that there is in the urban areas any surplus of

36

State against the Market Natives of the type which would be suitable for employment on the farms."

In direct response to S A A U proposals in 1944, the secretary for the Department of Native Affairs rejected the farmers' basic premise: " N o artificial barrier against movement from one area or occupation to another will be effective." 19 The Department of Native Affairs recommended, instead, an increasing resort to market solutions. Labor shortages could best be solved, the department suggested, by improved conditions of employment; failing that, "it is impossible to deny to the Native the right to sell his labour in the best market." 20 Throughout the war and afterwards, the department reiterated its claim that farm work is "not popular" and that where there have been improvements in feeding, housing, wages, and hours of employment, "labour is normally sufficient and reasonably efficient." 21 By the end of the war, with Africans increasingly crowding the urban labor market and housing, and with African unionization and strikes on the rise, there emerged two conflicting approaches to the problem of the state and markets. The first, formed within the upper levels of state officialdom and the United party and within manufacturing circles, paid greater respect to the market, urbanization, and the need for some legitimating strategy; the second, articulated by farming and mining organizations and the National party, insisted on limiting African proletarianization and on the necessity for a greatly expanded state role in the labor market. The first view recognized "urbanization," the development of a settled and growing proletarian population, as "inevitable"—indeed, as a positive ingredient in capitalist growth. At the war's end, the Department of Native Affairs spoke, without hint of concern, of "the rapidly increasing integration of Native labour into the industrial system" and of the centrality of African labor to development. "It is the availability of this additional manpower which permits the Union to take its place with other countries in the economy of the world," it was noted. 22 Later, in 1948, the Fagan Commission (the Native Laws Commission of Inquiry) would formalize this posture: "We cannot get away from the fact that there is indeed a considerable Native population permanently settled in the urban areas, and that an argument about the desirability or undesirability of that

Contradictions and State Presence

37

state of affairs is purely academic—it is a state of affairs that is going to remain and that simply cannot be altered." 23 The government after the war was favorably disposed toward market principles, though it favored new state institutions to facilitate and regulate the developing labor market. The Fagan Commission rejected outright demands for state impediments to African proletarianization: "Legal provision or an administrative policy calculated to perpetuate migratory labour and to put obstacles in the way of stabilisation of labour, are wrong and have a detrimental effect." Instead, it urged an out-migration from the reserves "to relieve the economic pressure," to "guide and regulate the labour stream" to the "centres of employment," and "to catch up the stream in the towns, to distribute it then in the most beneficial manner, and on the one hand to assist the migrants, on the other hand to exercise such control as may be necessary for the purpose of preventing clashes and evil conditions." The commission's emphasis was on "stabilisation" and reasonably open-ended rules for granting urban residence rights.24 The Fagan Commission recommended the creation of new, noncoercive bureaucratic structures, "labor bureaus," a concept that had received increasing attention since the late 1930s. The Farm Labour Committee wrote ambiguously of "labor bureaus" that would act as a "clearing house for all Natives entering or leaving the urban areas," that would keep a register of "all vagrants, 'won't works' and criminals," and that, nonetheless, would avoid coercive enforcement, "as that would only frighten Natives away." 25 During the war years, the department gave increasing attention to "reception depots" where "the flow of labour" could be "controlled" and "distributed by a properly organised employment bureau." 2 ® The Fagan Commission in 1948 recommended a formal labor bureau structure, supplying market information and finding work, but without the compulsory aspects that would associate the bureaus with the "pass laws in an intensified form." Labor bureaus would introduce "order" and "efficiency" into market processes, but as an extension of market logic, not as an elaboration of South Africa's traditional labor-repressive machinery. Against the tenor of state thinking in this period stood the commercial farming organizations, the mining houses, and the National party. Farmers watched the growing flight to the cities and, as indi-

3«

State against the Market

cated earlier, demanded state action to forestall African urbanization. T h e mining houses, too, resisted government thinking about "stabilisation." In testimony presented to the Fagan Commission, the C h a m b e r of Mines defended the migratory labor system—the system of reserves and restricted u r b a n i z a t i o n — a s a "stabilising factor in the National economy and the National social structure." While others were n o w willing to entertain and advance market processes, the chamber remained vigilant in defense of labor-repressive policies: " T h e evils that exist have arisen as a result of rapid urbanisation of Natives employed in Commerce and Industry, a process which has relieved them suddenly of all tribal restraint. The Industry endeavors to guard its Natives against undesirable and subversive influences and is largely successful in spite of many recent attempts on the part of those outside mine compounds t o disturb the peace within." 2 7 The National party turned this concern for constrained proletarianization into a formal and bold declaration on state and markets. The Sauer Report to the party took note of the "unbalanced increase in the native population of our cities" and countered by proposing a strong state response: "Influx of the natives to the towns and their regular departure will be controlled by the state in an effective manner and on a country-wide basis in cooperation with urban authorities. . . . Influx t o the cities must be subject to every possible restriction." 2 8 In particular, this party report proposed that the central government compel effective enforcement by the laggardly local authorities: "All natives w h o come to the cities contrary to the law must forthwith be removed by the state on application of the local authority. Where the state is convinced that a local authority is not implementing the policy the necessary steps will be taken by the state." 29 The modest, market-oriented labor bureaus discussed in government circles since the late thirties were now transformed into something more bold: labor bureaus w o u l d form part of a "national system of labour regulation and labour control" that limited flight from the rural areas and distributed African labor "between agriculture, mines and t o w n s . ' 0 0 The state w o u l d , in effect, take charge of the market, controlling the sectoral allocation and proletarianization of African labor. With the National party electoral victory in 1948, this perspec-

Contradictions and State Presence

39

tive on state and markets became formal government policy. The breakdown of control processes during the 1 9 3 0 s and the war years spawned political struggles centered on the problem of control and incorporation and, in the end, brought new, more intensive efforts to take charge of market processes.

T h e Innovative Period ( 1 9 4 8 - 6 0 ) The new government determined at the outset that the labor market was out of control. The "indiscriminate squatting in urban areas" and the "overrunning of cities," the Department of Native Affairs declared, threatened public health and promised "unrest" and "general disorder." 31 The department and newly appointed secretary and minister warned repeatedly during the fifties of a "maldistribution," a "chaotic distribution" of African labor that produced surpluses of "alarming proportions" in the cities and shortages on the farms; they insisted, consequently, on invigorated state efforts "to eliminate the appalling wastage and uneconomic employment of native labour." 3 2 Verwoerd, the new minister of native affairs, was publicly preoccupied with keeping "the numbers down," with "sweeping" the urban areas "clean," with keeping "South Africa white." That rhetoric translated concretely into a preeminent concern with limiting African proletarianization. 33 Verwoerd acknowledged that one could not consider "stopping the development of South Africa—not even for a period"—and that there had to be a place for essential black workers. But the new government would exercise effective "control," limiting the free movement of African workseekers and their permanent settlement in the industrial areas: In other words, we want to make it possible for people to be happy and at peace in South Africa because White South Africa is now being overrun by a black stream and at the same time we want to give the Native their [sic] full opportunity of making a living at more convenient places. . . . And we do not believe that it will be safe to allow the free movement of Natives over the whole of South Africa and the confusion which will result when great numbers of N a t i v e s — 1 0 , 0 0 0 , 0 0 0 of them within 5 0 years—will be in urban areas in White South A f r i c a . T h a t is the radical difference. The United Party wants no control and we want planning to keep South Africa white. 3 4

4°

State against the Market

During the early 1950s, the government began outlining a comprehensive system of law and administration, to move from the "present chaotic distribution of Native labour" to "an efficient control system of labour canalisation." 35 N o longer would it tolerate a "free market" situation where African labor could "roam aimlessly." The minister of native affairs told Parliament in 1952 that the government intended to create a "modern labour system," "a system of labour rationalisation" that asserted control over Africans whether in the reserves, the countryside, or cities. 36 The government moved quickly to establish the legal framework for controlling African urbanization and proletarianization. Distinctions between "prescribed" (white urban) and "non-prescribed" (white rural) areas were formalized and given substantial legal meaning: Africans, unless exempted, were barred from prescribed areas, such as Johannesburg, for longer than seventy-two hours; any African presence in prescribed areas was presumed to exceed seventy-two hours and, therefore, contravened the law. Exemptions were granted to select categories of Africans—those "born and permanently" resident in the city, those w h o had worked for one employer continuously for ten years or w h o had lived lawfully and continuously in the city for fifteen years, those married to an exempted person, and those single migrant workers w h o had taken up employment contracts approved and registered with state labor bureaus. 37 To give practical effect to these demarcations and "rights," the government created a new compulsory "pass book," a consolidated official document for recording particulars on exempted status, employment, and residence rights. The package of restrictive legislation was extended in application to African women w h o , previously, were considered non-"pass-bearing" persons. In 1953 the government advised officials to apply these control measures with "extreme strictness," to deter Africans from entering a prescribed area without permission and to make special efforts to expel "undesirable Native women by means of the correct application of Section 10 (exemption provisions)." 38 The government also moved to create an effective bureaucratic machinery on the ground; that is, to force the local authorities to administer the labor control statutes—to register contracts, act as labor bureaus, and limit illegal entry into the urban areas. The larger municipalities had resisted earlier government entreaties to assume

Contradictions and State Presence

41

these labor control responsibilities, but now the government was insistent. "The facts are that there is only one policy source in the country in regard to Native Affairs and that is the Government itself," Verwoerd declared. "It simply cannot be permitted that differing policies be applied to the management of Native Affairs in different towns." Deviations from government policy, whatever their specific, reasonable justification, could not be allowed, as they detracted from the overall impression: "clear cut and concise principles according to a consistent programme." 39 But florid statements about government intent had nonetheless to contend with economic and political forces that resisted the new order. Officials at the local level, very much associated with the developing manufacturing and commercial sectors, were not anxious to constrain the urban labor market. Some of the resistance was no doubt political—the United party still maintained control over major municipalities—and some of it was no doubt bureaucratic—officials were not always anxious to be incorporated into a new set of command structures. But the local resistance was so general and so protracted as to suggest something more systemic. Pretoria officials apparently agreed to administer the registration regulations and enforced them with considerable fervor, but other localities resisted becoming part of the system.40 By the end of 1949, only five smaller municipalities had taken responsibility for registering contracts. Johannesburg declined to cooperate until 1 9 5 3 , and even then assigned only a skeleton staff to regulate and police the labor market. A report of the director of native labor and the chief native commissioner in 1950 depicted the following dreary staff situation: The staff position generally has deteriorated during the past year particularly in the lower grades. In some offices, notably the Pass Office, Johannesburg, the percentage of permanent officials in relation to the temporary staff is so low as to hamper efficient administration. Out of 88 second grade clerical posts at the latter office there are only 1 3 permanent units. Resignations continue with practically no replacements. 41

In fact, this pattern of noncooperation and nonenforcement seemed to characterize the principal urban and manufacturing centers. In 1954 the president of the Institute of Administrators of NonEuropean Affairs criticized the government for enacting this array of legislation without "a single example" of consultation with the

State against the Market

officials. He suggested that in response to the "rising tide of unrest," the government would have to concern itself with maintaining a contented African population, even permitting greater "freedom of movement." 42 When Verwoerd went before the officials, heralding the comprehensiveness of the government's efforts, he at the same time attacked the officials' insistence on "concessions" and "deviations." 43 In 1953 the Department of Native Affairs lamented that local authorities seemed unable to understand government intent: "Unfortunately, many local authorities do not yet realise that with the establishment of labour bureaux, the influx of labour must be regulated and co-ordinated with the demand actually existing in the labour market." 44 By 1 9 5 7 , frustrated by municipal intransigence, the government introduced new legislation to create labor bureaus outside the orbit of the local authorities. An explanatory memorandum accompanying the bill noted that "it is possible for the Municipal Influx Control Officer to allow Native workseekers to enter his area indiscriminately without regard to the labour position. Labour Bureaux have consequently not been able to function as effectively as they should." The location manager in Cape Town observed that the government, in effect, was accusing the local authorities of "sabotage"; government officials "appeared to be saying to themselves—'we'll show these Municipal chaps just how influx control ought to be exercised.'" 4S Despite these difficulties, the government was able to create an enlarged state presence in the market. In 1948, at the outset of National party rule, 214,000 Africans were prosecuted for curfew, passbook, and "native pass law" violations. This number rose steadily throughout this period, reaching 4x8,000 in 1959. 4 6 Though staffing and services were limited, the labor bureau system was also elaborated: by 1 9 5 7 there were 234 local labor bureaus in the white cities (though many with only part-time clerical staffing), and by 1959, there were 288; the number of labor contracts registered at labor bureaus rose from 159,494 in 1 9 5 2 when the system was essentially operated on a voluntary basis, to 998, 832 when the system stood atop a firm statutory foundation. 47 This period of state innovation and growing state presence, however, was not necessarily characterized by increasing state effectiveness in the labor market. The elaborated legislation and bureaucratic structures and increased police and court activity were,

Contradictions and State Presence

43

frankly, insufficient, given the forces at work and the stated goals of the new government. Pass law prosecutions increased to be sure, but so did the scale of the state's African labor problem: 3.3 percent of the African population were prosecuted under the pass laws in 19 51 and a comparable 3.4 percent of a considerably larger African population in i960; the rate of prosecutions of the urban metropolitan African population, the focus of state activity, remained essentially constant at .18 prosecutions per urban domestic African in both 1 9 5 0 and 1959 (.17), though the metropolitan population had increased by over 60 percent in that period. 48 A governmentsupported university program in native administration, tailored for state officials, looked back on the 1950s with some dismay: despite the "positive steps . . . to combat the flow of Bantu to the White cities," a growing "Bantu population" was increasingly urbanized and living in white areas (27 percent in 1 9 5 1 and 30 percent in i960). 49 But while greatly expanded state efforts in the 1950s did not halt the "flow of Natives" or increase the probability of prosecution, they did produce rising political costs and new struggles within the state. The African majority responded to the new legislation and police activity with increasingly vocal and organized disaffection. The 1950s were characterized by rising political unrest, focused above all else, perhaps, on the state's growing presence in the labor market and workplace. The period is bracketed on one side by the Defiance Campaign and rise of the Congress movement, which targeted the pass laws, amongst other racist and repressive initiatives, and on the other by the anti-pass campaign that left blood flowing in the streets of Sharpeville. This period of state innovation concluded with tens of thousands in the streets, pass burnings, national strikes, the detention of African leaders, and the banning of the principal resistance organizations. The upheavals in i960 reverberated through white politics and the state. The major business organizations, led by the Association of Chambers of Commerce and the Federated Chamber of Industries and joined by the Chamber of Mines and the Afrikaanse Handelsinstituut, presented a joint memorandum to the government urging officials to reconsider the "undue restriction of freedom of movement of the Bantu," to decriminalize the pass system, to relax restrictions on urban residence, and to accept that "the number of this type of Bantu would increase over the years"; in effect, to allow a more stable, consensual order to emerge.

State against the Market

44

That the Afrikaanse Handelsinstituut, the association of Afrikaner businessmen, joined this public challenge suggests that the reverberations were not confined to the business classes alone. T h e A H I , with close political and patronage ties to the state, would not likely have gone public without the support or encouragement of elements within state institutions. Indeed, at the height of the unrest, the government suspended pass law enforcement, suggesting considerable internal debate and indecision. O n e cabinet minister, Paul Sauer, w h o served as acting prime minister during Verwoerd's incapacity in this period, expressed public misgivings about government policies. But in the end, this cabinet, parliamentary, and business opposition was crushed: the A H I felt obliged to reaffirm its support for apartheid and to express "close feeling and cooperation with the government and its departments." 5 0 T h e Repressive Period ( 1 9 6 0 - 7 6 ) The National party government under Verwoerd's leadership emerged from this turmoil with considerable r o o m to maneuver. The organized African resistance movement had been smashed and forced to regroup underground and in exile. Indeed, the strong and effective government response to African unrest allowed the business community to retreat from this direct confrontation: the Federated C h a m b e r of Industries reassured the government that it would " w o r k within the compass of w h a t Parliament determines"; the A H I withdrew completely from the debate and instead instituted a public campaign to defend South Africa against its external and internal enemies." This political space after Sharpeville allowed the government once again to take on the developing labor market. For the moment, it w a s free to admit the insufficiency of the state apparatus during the innovative period and consider new initiatives. To gain control of the labor market, to limit and regulate African proletarianization, there would have to be a greatly elaborated state labor control framework, including a scale of labor repression not previously imagined. Efflux

Control

The government set out during the 1960s to create a comprehensive system employing both " e f f l u x " and " i n f l u x " controls. T h e latter approach, the "endorsing o u t " of the illegals and redundant, had

Contradictions and State Presence

45

proved unworkable by itself. Control officials in the cities could not cope with a growing African population that was already integrated into the wage economy, that had already located relatives and friends and arranged accommodation in the townships. The key to the elaborated control framework of the sixties was "efflux control"—measures applied at the source in the African rural areas. Using new draconian legislation and regulations, state officials sought to close off opportunities for lawful urban migration, while at the same time controlling the character of the essential labor still drawn into the industrial economy. The state moved first, and boldly, to exclude African women from the urban labor market. The policy was double-barreled: on the supply side, rural women were made an excluded category, excepting only those women continuously resident in the cities prior to 1959, those with a short-term visitor's permit, and those permitted on special occasions to take up work as domestics; on the demand side, urban employers requiring rural recruits were barred administratively from requisitioning African women. 52 Second, the state sought to institutionalize and expand migrant labor by "freezing" the right to acquire permanent and family residence rights in the cities. Previously, the government had depended on "Section 1 0 " as an exclusory mechanism with carefully defined exemptions. But, as noted by a confidential interdepartmental committee report, Section 1 0 had failed as an "instrument of control." The prospect of attaining "Section 1 0 rights" had turned the cities into a "Mecca for many Bantu."" The government moved decisively to neutralize that attraction by refusing administratively to grant new Section 1 0 rights. From 1968 onward African men were allowed to take up employment, but only on a one-year contract basis, after which they were compelled to return to the bantustans to seek employment again. Though the system was sometimes fictitious in practice, the administrative arrangement effectively precluded "continuous" employment and precluded African migrants from gaining permanent residence rights in the cities.54 To fashion a migrant contract labor system, where Africans remained dutifully in the bantustans to await lawful employment, the government had to create a rural control machinery where none had previously existed. Under the Bantu Labour Regulations of 1968, bantustan tribal authorities were now required to establish tribal

State against the Market

46

labor bureaus. These structures would register African workseekers, process job requisitions, and attest employment contracts. The state's intent was undisguised: the tribal bureaus would receive displaced squatters and redundant Africans, "Bantu who are no longer productively employed outside the homeland"; they would promote contract labor and prevent urbanization; and they would, above all, become a point of control, "in as much as every Bantu who wished to leave his homeland to take up employment outside has first to obtain the approval of his Bantu authority, failure to do so being a punishable offense." 55 In 1975 the government concluded a secret agreement with "homeland leaders" from the Ciskei, Bophuthatswana, and Lebowa to transfer these "efflux" control functions to magistrates under the new bantustan governments. But the transfer was effected under South African control requirements, as the agreement read: "Magistrates of black states will have no discretion in the matter and endorsements not based on such requisitions or call-in card [return to work] documents will be of no effect and holders of such documents will be in the White area illegally and will be dealt with accordingly."56 The implementation of the new regulations was uneven from the beginning. Few of the tribal labor bureaus, for example, ever performed labor or control functions; most were moribund, carried on the books as a legal fiction. In 1969 the Department of Bantu Affairs described what were no doubt monumental problems of implementation: "As could be expected, teething problems are still being experienced in explaining this new machinery to the Bantu authorities and its functioning to employers and employees. The Division had, in fact, to embark on a large-scale publicity and educational campaign." 57 In fact, the system would never perform its mandated functions, as we shall see in the next chapter. "These tribal offices are not functioning," a Gazankulu official lamented. "They concentrate on the side of collecting taxes because requisitions come once in a blue moon." 58 Africans by the tens of thousands declined to wait at such phantom tribal offices and continued to seek out the urban labor market. The main burden of labor control, consequently, remained with the urban bureaucratic machinery. Influx Control The interdepartmental inquiry into the pass laws in 1967 (the van Rensburg Committee) concluded that past policies, for all their

Contradictions and State Presence

47

g o o d intentions, had not mastered the labor market: the " f l o o d of Bantu to the cities" continued. It advised the government that redoubled efforts w o u l d be necessary to keep the numbers at " a n absolute minimum." 5 9 T h e repressive period, w e shall discover, has been characterized by a series of radical and effective steps to take control of the process: measures limiting the size of the A f r i c a n labor force in firms, a state freeze on new A f r i c a n housing, the nationalization of labor control activities and removal of local authorities, and, finally, a massive intensification of pass law enforcement. T h e Physical Planning Act of 1 9 6 7 established a permissible ratio of A f r i c a n to white labor f o r firms locating or expanding in the principal industrial areas of the Transvaal and the C a p e . This ceiling w a s placed initially at 2.5 A f r i c a n s f o r every white employee, but it w a s m a d e stricter yet, 1 to 1 , f o r factories established after J u n e 1 , 1 9 7 3 . 6 0 The policy w a s in fact more sweeping in the Western C a p e . In 1 9 6 2 the government formally demarcated this area and declared that whites and coloureds w o u l d enjoy an absolute statutory preference over African labor. In 1 9 6 7 the government announced regulations capping A f r i c a n employment levels in C a p e firms at their 1 9 6 6 levels. 61 From 1 9 6 6 in the C a p e and a f e w years later in the rest of the country, the state virtually stopped building housing f o r A f r i c a n s in the white areas. (The private sector had never accounted f o r a significant proportion of black housing.) In addition, the "concession" allowing Africans to buy their o w n houses w a s suspended. 6 2 In 1967—68 only 1 4 , 3 6 9 housing units were erected f o r Africans in the whole of the country and this figure dropped steadily until 1 9 7 2 - 7 3 , when a paltry 5 , 1 4 9 units were erected; in 1 9 7 6 — 7 7 , when the government itself estimated the housing shortage at 1 4 1 , 0 0 0 family units and 1 2 6 , 0 0 0 hostel beds, only 6 , 1 0 9 units were built. 63 The urban labor bureaucracy, formally responsible f o r requisitioning and allocating laborers and dispelling redundant ones, which had been largely ineffective during the fifties, w a s substantially elaborated in this repressive period. Some of the changes simply rationalized existing practices—from 1 9 6 4 , expanded scope and powers f o r "inspectors of Bantu labourers" to "enter any compound or other place occupied by Bantu labourers or any place at which Bantu labourers are e m p l o y e d " ; also f r o m 1 9 6 4 , a betterdifferentiated, hierarchical bureaucratic structure to allocate requisitions for labor and communicate more uniform labor control pol-

48

State against the Market

icies; from 1967, computers to bring the "population register" under control. 64 The most important change, however, was the abolition of the lethargic and uneven structures on the ground and the creation of Bantu administration boards (later called administration boards and now called development boards). The Bantu Affairs Administration Act of 1971 dispelled in one shot the ambiguity that had left the administration of labor control in the hands of disparate and sometimes uncooperative local authorities. Now, "Bantu affairs" in all of white South Africa—prescribed (urban) and non-prescribed (rural) areas, and local and district labor bureaus—were brought under the control of these new administration boards. The local officialdom was simply incorporated into this national structure: "Whenever the area under the jurisdiction of any local authority is included in the administrative area of any board, such local authority shall second every person employed in the department or section of such local authority administering Bantu affairs." 65 The white area of South Africa was divided into twenty-two board areas, later reduced to fourteen, to permit a more efficient allocation and control of African labor. The boards became the administrative focal point of the labor control framework—responsible for constructing and not constructing African housing, the administration of labor bureaus, the granting of workseeker permits and Section 10 rights, the requisitioning and recruiting of labor, clearing and resettlement of "black spots," and the expansion of the inspectorate. This administrative elaboration was accompanied by a tremendous expansion of the state coercive machinery, reflected most clearly to Africans in the accelerated police activity and prosecutions during the 1960s. Whereas 406,000 Africans were prosecuted under the pass laws in i960, 502,000 were prosecuted in 1965—66 and a staggering 644,000 in 1 9 6 9 - 7 0 — 4 . 1 percent of the total African population and 10.2 percent of the African population of working age. 66 The Contradictory Inheritance of L a b o r Repression By some narrowly defined set of standards, the government's efforts in this repressive period were "successful" where earlier poli-

Contradictions and State Presence

49

cies had proved indifferent: the "numbers," at last, were kept down. The pass laws were tightened and enforcement was greatly intensified: .2.1 prosecutions per African in white metropolitan areas (up from . 1 7 in i 9 6 0 ) . State efforts up to i 9 6 0 had only marginally slowed the pace of urbanization, but after i 9 6 0 the rate began to lag behind a plausible expectation for urban growth, despite high rates of economic expansion during the 1960s. A t the end of the period 1 9 6 0 - 8 0 , Charles Simkins writes, South Africa emerged 9.4 percent underurbanized, leaving 2.7 million people, in effect, "successfully" barred from the white urban areas. 67 At least 2 million persons had been displaced from the white urban areas, and, with massive population removals, perhaps another 3.5 million from the white rural areas. The percentage of the African population living in the bantustans rose from 39.5 percent in i 9 6 0 to 48.4 percent in 1 9 7 0 , and to 5 1 . 7 percent in 1980. 6 8 But there is an enormous irony in such "successes," as displacement of Africans to the bantustans has created a contradictory inheritance in the shape of growing labor surpluses—large concentrations of landless and destitute persons, desperate to find work in the cities. South Africa's political economy has consequently produced growing pools of workers with powerful incentives to challenge and circumvent the state labor control framework.

The Marginally Superfluous Outside virtually all labor bureaus in the urban areas and outside tribal bureaus and magistrate's and mine recruiting offices in the rural areas stand clusters of idle workseekers. 6 ® At the Ngwelezana township, near the Richard's Bay "growth point," sometimes 3 5 0 , sometimes 1 , 0 0 0 people will wait outside the gate at the magistrate's office looking for work. Such queues of workseekers lead officials to extreme conclusions. A Port Natal Administration Board labor official observed, "At this point in time, there is an unlimited supply of labor." T E B A (gold mine recruiting organization) officials in the Transkei, KwaZulu, and Lebowa report that upwards of 500 workers stand at the doorstep every morning, with perhaps only 50 mine jobs available. T E B A officials everywhere believe they could readily double their "labor output" without considerable effort and without labor agents. Some, like those in the northern Transvaal, Bophuthatswana, and southern Natal, believe they could triple their output. 70

50

State against the Market

For many Africans in the rural areas, there is no labor market. As we shall see in chapter 3, large portions of Lebowa, Gazankulu, KwaZulu, and the Transkei fall outside the legal recruiting process. "Requisitions" for labor and labor recruiters only infrequently reach these areas; manufacturers, except those in the lowest-paying unskilled sectors, now show almost no interest in this impoverished labor pool. Even the mining sector, which traditionally depends on recruitment in the bantustans, has rationalized its labor recruitment, concentrating on the reengagement of experienced mine workers at the expense of unskilled novice miners. The use of "valid-reengagement guarantees" (VRGs) has become so widespread that traditional mine recruiting areas are frequently "closed" to new applicants. In the Transkei, T E B A officials indicate that new recruitment from January to October never rises above 10 percent. In Lesotho, the percentage of new miners dropped from 70 percent in 1976 to 40 percent in 1979. 7 1 The labor surplus problem has been greatly exacerbated by the overpopulation of the bantustans and their declining capacity to support productive agriculture: even by i960, agriculture in these areas was supporting fewer than 20 percent of the population. 72 Officials in KwaZulu and Transkei now report that the question of "seasonal rains and droughts has much less effect than it did 10 years a g o " (TEBA: KwaZulu). The massive retrenchment of African labor in the white farming areas has contributed further to the overcrowding in the bantustans. The African labor force on white farms has declined since the late 1960s, accompanied by the accelerated and forced removal of African tenants and squatters and the elimination of "black spots" in white rural areas. Between i960 and 1982, in the Transvaal alone, 400,000 Africans were evicted from farms and 400,000 relocated in the course of "consolidation" and "black spot" removals; 74,276 were relocated in 1980 alone. 73 This "modernization" process in white agriculture has forcibly displaced millions of Africans nationally to utterly impoverished "closer settlements" in the bantustans, to a Kwaggafontein in an imaginary Ndebele "state," to a Winterveld in an "independent" Bophuthatswana. Under such labor surplus conditions, announcements of work opportunities often produce quite startling results. A t Maluti in the

Contradictions and State Presence

51

Transkei, the arrival of an I S C O R recruiter in 1982 with a requisition for three hundred experienced workers brought out over a thousand former ISCOR employees; an open request for three hundred workers in 1978 brought out four thousand workseekers. 74 At Motetsi in Lebowa, the labor bureau clerk rings a bell to announce the arrival of a new job requisition. When he rings the bell on a Monday, two or three hundred people line up. In January, one officer observes, "there is a hell of a rush . . . if you ring that bell. They come out like moles out of their holes." To protect against a rush of desperate job seekers, T E B A in Transkei has erected security fences around its offices—"not to guard against terrorism," an official notes, "but to keep the workers out, to keep them from tearing the place down." In King William's Town, T E B A , which had for a number of years employed virtually no novice miners, received "a pretty considerable order." When it was announced, "the blacks just flattened the fence" (TEBA: Transkei). Previously T E B A relied upon labor agents and runners to seek out labor in the more remote rural areas, but the ready supply of labor in recent years has made such a network superfluous: the demise of the agents, a Transvaal official observes, is "one of the penalties of the oversupply of labor." Officials of A C R O (the coal mine recruiting organization) near Pietersburg used to advertise vacancies, sending African runners on bicycles to advertise posts. Now, people come on their own, without notice, from as far away as Tzaneen. The T E B A networks have also been abandoned in KwaZulu and the Transkei. 75 In Durban, a T E B A official stated, "They're stacked up at our door." An official in the Pietersburg area described the new mood: "The T E B A recruiter has an easy time of it these days. He must just sit back and wait for them to come in. I remember when I had to address meetings, give all sorts of parties, drive all over. Those days are in the past" (TEBA: Northern Transvaal). South Africa's most prominent economists differ on the scale of South Africa's labor surplus problem. P.J. van der Merwe, an established economist and a high-level official in various state labor institutions, relies upon 1 9 7 0 census data and unemployment increases in subsequent years to arrive at what he himself considers a "minimum" estimate. Unemployment on white farms and in urban areas, he calculates, grew from 252,000 in 1 9 7 0 to 528,000 in 1976, from

Si-

State against the Market

6.1 to 10.9 percent of the labor force (though no doubt higher for the African labor force). 76 Unemployment and underemployment in the bantustans rose precipitously during the early 1970s, from 32,000 in 1970 to 396,000 in 1976. Van der Merwe's estimates suggest that well over half of the new African entrants to the labor market in the early 1970s could not be accommodated in employment. 77 The problem was no doubt compounded during the post-1976 recessionary period. By 1979, according to one conservative estimate, African unemployment in the metropolitan areas had risen to 16 percent, and in the "self-governing Black states" to 20 percent.78 Other observers have supplemented census figures with employment surveys and estimates of underemployment in the bantustans (based upon the numbers of workers who could be productively employed there).79 These calculations, like van der Merwe's, suggest a rising tide of unemployment in the 1970s, but, by contrast, place current unemployment levels at staggering heights and well above the census estimates. Lieb J. Loots suggests tentatively that unemployment may have doubled between 1970 and 1 9 7 7 , with the urban figures rising from 9.5 to 2 3 . 1 percent.80 Charles Simkins, incorporating measures of agricultural underemployment, places overall unemployment at 22.4 percent in 1977—2.3 million people, almost all of whom were black. Simkins, like Loots and van der Merwe, believes unemployment rose steadily throughout the 1970s. 8 1 These quantitative studies and the personal impressions related earlier are apparently just snapshots of a gathering labor surplus problem. The numbers of unemployed likely doubled during the 1960s, a period of rapid economic growth, increased at a yet greater rate during the 1970s, when the pace of economic growth was a respectable 3 percent, and seem almost certain to expand, perhaps even phenomenally, during the coming decades. 82 The prime minister's economic advisors project that, with an annual growth rate of 3.6 percent (the actual figure for 1970—77), unemployment would increase from 10.6 to 21.9 percent in 1 9 8 7 , from 903,000 to 2,406,000 persons. The African unemployment rate, even by these conservative government estimates, would likely exceed 26 percent.83 A study prepared at the Institute for Futures Research, University of Stellenbosch, is even more pessimistic. It takes note of the declining employment growth in the formal economy after 1975 and

Contradictions and State Presence

53

projects that by 1990 only half (52.8 percent) of the African labor force will be accommodated in formal sectoral employment. That emerging pattern, the study concludes, represents "an explosive growth in Black unemployment over the coming decades." 84 Creating incentives to "Shoot Straight" The growing marginalization of the African population and its displacement to the bantustans have created compelling and growing incentives to "shoot straight"; that is, to circumvent the system of labor regulation and go directly to Johannesburg, Durban, or Cape Town. These developing incentives are inherent in the stark contrast between rural impoverishment and urban opportunities and in the high cost of remaining in this rural hell. By damming up the African labor surplus, the system of labor control has only magnified the inducements for millions of Africans to become "illegals" in the dark recesses of the urban labor market. The operation of the economy and labor control framework has created three crude strata of Africans—those who have had legal access to the urban labor market and urban residence rights, those who have gone illegally to the cities and live on the margins of the economy, and those who stand outside, with only qualified access to employment housing in the urban areas. 85 The first hold a "privileged" position in the labor market and, indeed, receive considerably higher wages than other Africans. The last face stagnating or declining living standards, as the growing labor surplus conditions, the contraction of the labor market, and state barriers in the market have all tended to suppress wages. In the period since 1970, African wages in the urban industrial sectors have increased fourfold, while rural incomes, excepting urban remittances, have stagnated. By the mid 1970s the ratio of African urban to rural income—8.3 to 1 among wage earners—was beginning to assume the proportion of European-African inequalities.86 That gap, in part the creation of the state, has become a powerful inducement to overrun state controls. In i960, before the surplus conditions and urban-rural inequalities were so glaring, the manager for non-European Affairs in Johannesburg observed that "native families" constitute a "favoured class who enjoy a standard of living superior to that enjoyed by their compatriots outside the city." Consequently, Johannesburg serves as "the Mecca of every work-

54

State against the Market

seeker in the country and this is doubtless too the reason why these men will resort to literally any means of gaining entry into the town." 87 Today, the widening gap invites Africans to bypass their tribal labor bureaus and go directly to the urban areas without the proper authorization and passes. "Most of those who don't get jobs" at T E B A or the labor bureau, a mine representative commented, "make their way South. They are not prepared to wait" (TEBA: KwaZulu). The conditions in the bantustans have become so desperate that it is difficult to imagine the level of repression that would be sufficient to forestall the pursuit of market alternatives. By one estimate, an African from Lebowa can take up work illegally in Johannesburg, spend three months out of the year in jail, and still improve his or her personal income by 255 percent; even if an individual rots in jail for nine months and works for only three, his or her income would still exceed by 85 percent the income likely from trying to remain and work in Lebowa. 88 The maintenance and elaboration of influx controls have operated to create labor surpluses and displace them to the rural bantustans. The massive state repression of the 1960s and 1970s has held the rate of urbanization in white areas constant over two decades, i960 to 1980, despite a quite considerable advance of productive forces. As we pointed out earlier, millions remain outside the city gates who, under conventional circumstances, might have become part of the urban working class; many more, we shall see later, live in a legal and economic limbo, in informal and illegal squatting areas, seeking integration into a developing South African economy. The displacement of the "marginally superfluous," the apparent goal of officialdom, has only underlined the contradictions in state apartheid policies. The displacement of labor surpluses and the exacerbation of urban-rural inequalities have simultaneously become an inducement to migration. As Simkins observes, at constant levels of state regulation, there is a tendency for the unemployed and the poorer rural workers to seek out higher-employment and higherincome areas. Indeed, the process of impeded labor mobility, displacement, and forced relocation, yet continuing capitalist growth, has simply enlarged the "discrepancy between where people want to be and where the South African state would have them live." In-

Contradictions and State Presence

55

creased state enforcement to forestall movement from the countryside to the cities exacerbates urban-rural inequalities and enhances the attractiveness of migration.89 The enormous state investment in controlling proletarianization, evident most clearly during this repressive period, has not accrued like savings. The tremendous costs involved in this elaborated bureaucratic and police presence in the market have to be borne every day, lest the work of the earlier years be undone. The cutback in pass law enforcement in the late 1970s (.06 arrests per African in the white metropolitan areas, down from .21) was also accompanied by an increase in the growth rate of the African population in the metropolitan areas (26 percent growth in the 1960s and 3 2 percent in the 1970s) and an end to the out-migration of Africans living in the white urban areas. 90 Although the aftermath of Sharpeville left the state with room to elaborate these repressive policies in the 1960s, the 1970s were very different, with less and less room for political maneuver. Intensified repressive policies were now accompanied by escalating African resistance—widespread work stoppages and general strikes, nearly universal urban civil disorders, school boycotts, community organization, a black power movement, unionization, a growing underground movement, and more. By 1976 the administration boards, the administrative centerpiece of the system of labor control, had emerged as a primary focal point for African disaffection and resistance. The repressive period, the triumph of the state over markets, had left South Africa amidst debilitating contradictions—growing surplus populations threatening to descend on the cities, the unrelieved and growing costs of repression, and the massive and now organized disaffection of the African majority.

3. The State Exposed

The attempt to manage the labor market, to limit and shape the emergent African mass, brought with it the elaboration of the South African state. By the early 1 9 7 0 s the state edifice seemed a coherent and powerful presence. Its repressive agencies lorded it over the market and workplace and, for the moment, could demand silence from the African opposition. Its regulative agencies and officials now seemed to direct African urbanization, mobility and resettlement, job allocations and employment rights, housing construction and township development, and more. Within the state itself, an increasingly coherent statist ideology gained wide adherence and helped cement diverse factions, while lending an air of confidence and unity to state regulation. 1 This powerful state was, however, proving increasingly ineffectual, even as the scope of bureaucratic regulation was expanded and appearances suggested self-confidence and effective control. The labor control framework, in particular, was emerging as incomplete and uneven, financially burdensome, and itself creating pressures— evident in burgeoning labor surpluses—that would soon become unmanageable. Rising African resistance, evident first in the Durban general strikes in 1 9 7 3 and 1 9 7 4 and the township uprisings from 1 9 7 6 onward, focused increasingly on the labor control institutions, above all on the administration boards. The strong presence of this "unitary-effective" state in the market was the focal point for a profound African estrangement, with implications for the framework's cost, efficacy, and coherence. A close examination of the labor control framework in the post1 9 7 6 period reveals a widening gulf between the legal order—its completeness and rationality—and the control order in practice. The system of administration, increasingly unwieldy and confronting increasingly complex markets and growing labor surpluses, has lost control of the bureaucracy on the ground: central policy direc-

56

The State Exposed

57

tives are frequently ignored or reversed, despite strenuous efforts by upper-level officials to achieve uniformity. The bureaucracy is understaffed and underfinanced, unable to implement policy or police the system effectively. Indeed, in large areas of urban South Africa, the system of control has become intermittent, incapable of coping with the tremendous growth of illegal squatting and illegal employment. In the rural areas, the tribal labor bureaucracy has broken down, abandoning large portions of the bantustans. The system of administration has given way to corruption, withering markets, and illegal flight to the cities. With the system weakly controlled from the top, local interests—farmers and industrial employers in particular—have been able to demand access to "illegal" labor supplies. In the process, they have reinforced the unevenness of the system and encouraged Africans to circumvent the order of control. The framework has influenced this process to be sure, displacing urbanization somewhat to the margins of the metropolitan centers and creating divisions between Africans secure in their access to the market and those seeking entry through informal and illegal means. But influence in the process is not effective control over it. The growth of an unwieldy working-class mass in all the major metropolitan regions, the growth of massive labor surpluses in the bantustans impeded only intermittently by functioning tribal, administrative, and repressive agencies, and the spreading organization and resistance of the various African communities have proved a severe challenge to the order of control. Mired in the M a r k e t The passage of the Bantu Affairs Administration Act of 1 9 7 1 was, in many respects, the decisive moment in this contradictory process. The central state, incompletely in command of the market, now swept away the local agencies that had supposedly blocked uniformity and effective control. The affairs of Africans in the white areas were now invested in a single authoritative agency (the administration board), visibly controlled by the central government, that would respond to state directives and impose effective control of African proletarianization. Armed with the new restrictive labor regulations of the late 1960s, the boards became repositories for a vast array of control functions. They assumed control of the labor bureaus in prescribed (white urban) and non-prescribed (white rural) areas and ac-

State against the Market

cordingly took charge of requisitioning and recruiting labor and sanctioning employment and lawful residence. They were responsible for the provision of African housing and, as it turned out, for the "freeze" that ensured no such housing. They brewed and sold beer and collected rents and fees. Their inspectors searched premises and workplaces; they pursued "illegals" and the "idle and disorderly"; their stamps in the pass books offered the prospect of legal presence or of being "endorsed out." They assumed responsibility for relocating whole communities that had the bad fortune to inhabit "black spots" scheduled for removal. The government, even if it ultimately failed to master the labor market, had succeeded in creating a central point where the full meaning of the state's entanglement in the market would be vividly apparent. There is an irony here, as the attempt to centralize the system and achieve uniformity at the same time created a kind of clarity and a nexus. "At the labor bureau," one lower-level official observed, "that is where your contact is between the government and the people" (LB: Krugersdorp). 2 The African masses quickly came to appreciate the centrality of the labor bureaus and administration boards: they proceeded at first opportunity to burn or tear down as many of their facilities as possible. During the 1976 Soweto uprising, virtually all the administration board liquor stores, beer halls, and garbage trucks were destroyed. 3 In the aftermath, administration board offices have been ringed with barbed-wire protective fences and sometimes by sandbag implacements. The officials on the ground, charged with regulating the lives of Africans, have become the focus of the legitimacy problem and popular disaffection. Though the question of legitimacy and the state in South Africa is posed on a grand scale, it is confronted every day by officials who have become the repositories of the state's racial partiality and labor-repressive policies. A principal legislative advisor on labor matters acknowledged that "the administration board is a very unpopular institution among blacks." He hopes that, with an emphasis on "more positive services" and the new name "development boards," "perhaps the image will improve." Just a few years after delegating these functions and powers to the administration boards, elements in the government began questioning the wisdom of this concentrated state presence. The Riekert Commission on the utilization of manpower, the major government

The State Exposed

59

statement on the subject in 1979, adopted a critical stance, questioning whether the boards effectively regulate markets and meet the needs of employers, and suggesting that they needlessly antagonize Africans. The commission concluded that the "boards already have too many functions and that some of them should be taken away from them." It also questioned the impartiality of the Department of Cooperation and Development, which is responsible for the affairs of a single racial group. Accordingly, the commission proposed that the department "surrender those functions that it performs for Blacks and which are performed for the other population groups by other departments." Responsibility for control, consequently, would be déconcentra ted; the character of control, too, would change, as racial discrimination would give way to "functional" responsibilities/ But, as we shall see in chapter 4, the administration boards have not been easily stripped of their functions and centrality. With the framework of control under assault, the boards have taken on a larger role in the market, with yet greater responsibilities for African housing and labor recruitment. They are vulnerable, however, as the new waves of African resistance sweep the townships. Uneven Control The National party government after 1948 insisted on a "native" policy applied comprehensively and uniformly across the face of South Africa. With the establishment of the administration boards and the takeover of the labor bureaus in the early 1970s, the labor control system was at last to measure up to the aspirations and the pressures of the market. The deputy minister of Bantu administration and education told Parliament in 1 9 7 1 that to avoid a "madhouse" of conflicting interests and local authorities, as on the Witwatersrand, "a body has to be established which will be able to cope with the necessary administration and to exercise the necessary control.'" But uniformity proved elusive. Some of the diversity of policy and practice is no doubt normal "friction" in a sprawling bureaucratic structure and some variation may represent a purposeful flexibility. Government notices and circulars set out uniform policies and, as the legislative advisor to the minister points out, "In these regulations, we spell out almost every possible contingency." Nonetheless,

6o

State against the Market

"It is difficult to lay down a rule that has no discretion. With regard to influx control, one must leave a great deal of discretion." The vast variations in state practice that are sometimes contradictory and strongly at variance with state directives have, however, clearly gone beyond the realm of friction and flexibility. What we have called "unevenness" represents a labor system only intermittently controlled from the top and conventionally shaped by accommodation to diverse employer needs and demands and by the limited resources available at the bottom. The central officialdom, we shall see, has not been able to take effective control of the bureaucracy or the market; "local interests" and the "local situation" have managed to remake the state apparatus, and in the process to subvert the system of labor control. The Vagaries of Farm Labor After World War II, under pressure from the agricultural unions, the National party government acted to "protect" African labor supplies in white rural areas. New legislation divided the country (less the African reserves) into "prescribed" urban and "nonprescribed" rural areas, creating new legal impediments to urban migration. Accompanying regulations and circular notices provided that African farm laborers and their families could not be recruited or requisitioned for industrial employment unless the white farmeremployer certified that all labor obligations had been fulfilled and the agricultural unions in the district certified that African labor was in ready supply. For many Africans, the stamp "farm laborer" in one's passbook came to symbolize a special form of labor bondage. 6 By the early 1970s labor shortages had eased, as mechanization and land consolidation had changed the type of agricultural production and the dominant labor forms. The principal national agricultural unions no longer insisted on strong controls over African labor and industrial employers wanted access to these labor supplies. In 1 9 7 5 the department consequently changed the policy, allowing farm laborers to take up work in "prescribed" areas on the same terms as all other workseekers from nonurban areas. For "anybody who is properly signed off and has a job in the prescribed area," the department deputy secretary declared, "there is nothing to stop him coming in." The change in policy has, however, only haltingly become official practice. 7 The Port Natal Administration Board seems willing to

The State Exposed

61

register workers regardless of farm labor status, without consultation with the agricultural unions, as long as the tribal authorities receive their proper fees and attest the employment contract (AB: Port Natal; LB: Empangeni; T E B A : KwaZulu). Some boards have implemented the policy literally; that is, they have accepted that "farm lab o r " is not a bonded status, but require that the laborer and his family or children return to the bantustan, rejoin some tribal entity, and await "legal recruitment." Since the KwaZulu authorities are themselves quite lax about these procedures, there is a genuine opportunity here to escape the farm labor status. The policies are pursued more strictly in the central Transvaal and eastern Cape, however, where the administration boards will register a former farm laborer, but he must have returned to Bophuthatswana or the Transkei and must have been physically recruited at a tribal labor bureau in the bantustan. Literally, the "black is only a farm laborer while he is a farm laborer," a board official observes. "When he's discharged, he can go wherever he likes," as long as he first moves back to the African rural areas with his family (AB: Central Transvaal; also C C : Eastern Cape). No other labor bureau, administration board, or chief commissioner in this survey, however, followed even this literal rendering of state directives. Each has adapted state policy to suit the local labor market conditions and the demands of white farmers in the nearby non-prescribed areas. The deputy secretary of the department acknowledged that policy directives get lost in the lower tiers of the bureaucracy. Indeed, he expressed enormous frustration with his inability to gain official compliance, calling administration board officials "bloody fools" and "bloody monkeys." 8 Some urban officials accept farm laborers and their children, though contingent upon the labor shortage conditions in the rural areas. The Orange-Vaal Administration Board, which has a reputation for humane administration, permits a farm laborer to take up work if "there is no work in the rural district. . . . When there is no work in the rural areas, then we can let him in." That determination is, in any case, usually left to the agricultural union in the rural district and the individual farmer (AB: Orange-Vaal). The chief commissioner for the Witwatersrand will allow farm laborers into the city "only if labor is available and if the farmer gives his consent," and if "local arrangements" have been made with the agricultural union. In practice, the West Rand Administration Board applies the

6z

State against the Market

policy broadly and strictly: "If there is any farm connection, the farmer and the agricultural union of the area must approve it; so we duck it" (DL: West Rand; also LB: Johannesburg). Though the department no longer requires consultation with the agricultural union or the permission of the farmer-employer, these strictures are applied in many of the administration board areas, including the Drakensberg, northern Transvaal, and East Rand, as well as the West Rand (CC: Natal; AB: Central Transvaal; LB: Germiston, Kempton Park, and Boksburg). The former chief commissioner for the Witwatersrand spoke of the need to accommodate the white farmers, even as he acknowledged obliquely that such deference may create a uniquely coercive order: "I would prefer that he go to the farming union to certify that no farm labor is available. It almost never happens. [The unions never recognize a labor surplus and permission is never given.] Unfortunately, the farmer cashes in on this. This is a sore point. We must watch out for slavery." At labor bureaus near or surrounded by farming districts, officials are enormously responsive to farmer needs, regardless of departmental policy. Some officials, together with the farmers, construct and regulate a form of complementary labor service. In Lichtenburg, the labor bureau allows the wife and children of a registered farm worker to enter temporary, three- to six-month contract employment, after which the laborer must return to work on the white-owned farm. The Klerksdorp Labour Bureau has reached a "general understanding" with the agricultural union, permitting "children of a farm family resident on the farm" to come "to the prescribed area"—that is, "if they continue to live on the farm. We don't like to break the family ties." Some of these labor bureaus simply and categorically refuse to permit farm workers to cross this line. "If you allow it," one official noted, "it would drain all their labor," as Africans "would chase higher salaries in the cities" (LB: Krugersdorp). A labor bureau official at Carletonville affirms this absolutist position: "If they are born on a farm, I will not normally let them work here. . . . The main thing is where he was born. That will decide where he can work. If he was born in a non-prescribed area, then he is bound to this area." Somewhere between the department's head offices in Pretoria and the labor bureau offices across white South Africa, national policy has been renegotiated. In a few cases, government attempts to

The State Exposed

63

weaken the farmers' hold on African labor and to reassert the role of the bantustans have been realized in bureaucratic practice. More often, labor bureaus, not seriously restrained by central authority, have reached their own understanding with farmers and local market conditions. They have, in effect, maintained the farmers' privileged control of African labor, even as the central government has sought to redesign its own control apparatus. Little wonder that upper-level officials have been left muttering "Bloody fools!" or "Bloody monkeys!" Employers: Subverting the System The labor control framework depends on a series of practices enshrined in law and regulation: first, that African workseekers in the rural areas remain at their tribal labor bureaus until legally recruited; second, that employers in the urban areas register their vacancies at the local labor bureau, hire local labor if available, and only then seek an "open requisition" to recruit African labor from the bantustans; and third, that the labor officials and police insist on legalities—that is, refuse to "legalize" employment where laborers and employers have failed to conform to the law. Without such official insistence on legality, the system would surely break down, as rural workers would have no incentive to queue up or, more usually, hang about these desolate tribal bureaus and await recruitment. Upper-level officials are insistent on the legal system that keeps the rural laborer at bay: "A citizen of a national state [bantustan] knows that he must report to a tribal labor bureau. They will call him if a job is available on the other side [urban South Africa]. But if a chap just gets on a train, he is breaking the laws of his country and my country. I'm giving him preference over the guy who is waiting [to be recruited at the tribal labor bureau]." If an African tries to go on his own, unauthorized, "We say sorry. . . . At the moment, we send the chap back" (deputy secretary). Local labor bureaus and administration boards repeatedly seek exceptions from the policy, as the tribal bureaus apparently do not function properly. But the department is insistent on the basic operating principles: "You tell me the tribal labor bureau doesn't work. How do you expect it to work when you in effect tell him to break the law? You say forget about the fact that he left home illegally. And now you want to legalize it. Why should he [the African rural worker] wait there?" (deputy secretary). In fact, the depart-

State against the Market

64

ment told local officials "to stop it." Labor bureau officials recall that department circulars in 1980 and 1 9 8 1 were insistent that workers be sent back to the tribal bureaus for "attestation," so the system not be "bypassed" (CC: Eastern Cape), that recruitment take place only in the bantustan, "to clear him out there" (LB: Boksburg), and that the local bureaus do away with "single [specific worker] recruitment" (LB: Kempton Park). No such system exists in practice, however. As we shall see below, the tribal labor bureaus have virtually disintegrated and their charges, the African workseekers, have in large measure, "made their way south"—that is, gone directly and illegally to the cities. And the white officials, from the local labor bureaus to the chief commissioner's office, have acceded to the system's collapse. SANCTIONING ILLEGAL EMPLOYMENT

Virtually all the officials acknowledge that they allow illegal urban migrants and squatters to take up employment, that they allow employers to engage workers "off the street." In the East Rand, where policy is otherwise applied relatively strictly, officials speak of widespread exceptions: although it is "not the policy," in " a specific case" involving a specific worker, "you can't stop it" (AB: East Rand; LB: Kempton Park). Some labor bureaus are permissive where local labor supplies are abundant (DL: Western Transvaal) or where there is a specific understanding with employers, such as the construction industry in Johannesburg (AB: West Rand). Others are more broadly permissive, allowing employers free rein, excepting certain categories of workers, such as African women from the Transkei (AB: Port Natal). Some are utterly permissive, particularly the labor bureaus operating in close proximity to the bantustans. In Natal, officials simply register the workers and send the requisite fees to the KwaZulu authorities (AB: Port Natal); in Lichtenburg, near Bophuthatswana, the system has been relinquished altogether: "Those who come from the homeland just go into town and the employer brings them for registration. The right way is to recruit them, but it doesn't work that way. They just look for a job" (LB: Lichtenburg). The chief commissioners say they "would like to see the policy enforced, instead of responding to the local situation; we would like to be stricter on our end" (CC: Witwatersrand; also former CC: Witwatersrand). Nonetheless, these regional officials, directly re-

The State Exposed

65

sponsible to the department, conventionally defer to the local officials and their specific requirements. If an African woman makes her way to the Witwatersrand, the chief commissioner noted, the East Rand board will "tell her to get out; the West Rand board will try to accommodate her." The commissioner conceded, "usually these administration boards have evaluated the situation beforehand" (CC: Witwatersrand). LOOSENING THE TRIBAL CONNECTION

The formal labor system, it was hoped, would physically connect and hold the contract laborer to the rural areas by requiring the "attestation" of contracts in the bantustans. The African laborer from the rural areas, no matter where he or she found employment, would establish residence in a tribal area, physically return there to pay his or her fees and taxes, show knowledge of the employment contract's provisions, and register the contract. According to the department's deputy secretary, that was indeed state policy: "[It] is in the regulations. The chiefs get their one rand registration which goes into a tribal account, but half goes into the chief's pocket. . . . It must be done in person." By requiring this personal appearance, an upperlevel official observed, the tribal order maintains its hold on industrial workers: the chiefs can determine "who has gone"; "they can stipulate conditions, so that he [the African worker] may have to return afterwards or send a certain amount of money" (director, Manpower Commission). In 1982 the government sent a circular letter to labor control officials across the country reaffirming the policy requiring that Africans be attested at the tribal bureaus or magistrate's offices in the bantustans (TEBA: KwaZulu). In some urban areas, officials seemed earnestly to apply the policy. The West Rand board made a "special arrangement" with the construction industry to "regularize" illegal employment, but insisted that these workers "go home" to pay their fees (AB: West Rand)."The man must go back," a Western Cape official noted. "It is regarded that he is subject to his labor district" (DL: Western Cape). The government itself sought to avoid placing bureaucratic/tribal roadblocks in the way of "a quick procurement of labor," however, and in the process facilitated the disassociation of Africans from the tribal areas. An official of the Bophuthatswana government, for example, "sits in the office in Pretoria" or on the "border," and "attests

State against the Market

66

the contracts" (director, M a n p o w e r Commission). In L e b o w a , a van belonging to the Northern Transvaal Administration Board travels by a fixed route and schedule, fully equipped with labor attesting officers, providing Africans with a "one-stop service" (AB: Northern Transvaal). Such procedures, while fulfilling formal attestation requirements and successful in collecting fees, seem somehow to miss the point of this legal exercise, the continuing association of the African proletariat with its tribal "homelands." Elsewhere, the system became even more remote from the original design. In many labor bureaus in the urban areas of N a t a l , an African clerk w o u l d play the role of attestation officer and simply exchange a stamp, "permission to proceed," for various labor fees. The Port Natal Administration Board seemed to have dispensed with the necessity for workers to return to the tribal areas, attesting contracts locally and mailing the fees back to the tribal officials.® O n e labor official in Durban indicated that he insists that Africans go back, but recognized that most of the other bureaus in Natal "don't bother" (LB: Durban). W h e n a circular letter reminded officials in Natal and K w a Z u l u of this regulation, many of the magistrates chose to ignore it, allowing laborers to be engaged and attested wherever they were recruited ( T E B A : KwaZulu). With the system of attestation breaking d o w n , with Africans only sometimes returning to the tribal areas, the government recently chose to acknowledge the limits of its control. Africans will no longer be required to return to a tribal area, but may have their contracts attested by a bantustan official in the white area. T h u s , a formal (but meaningless) connection to the bantustan is maintained; perhaps as important, the bantustan officials still collect their fees. 10 UNCERTAIN PROSECUTION

Arrests and prosecutions under the labor control f r a m e w o r k — unlike death and t a x e s — h a v e depended on where you are and, more important, on w h o you are. The legislative intent, of course, was uniform and comprehensive: no African shall remain in a prescribed urban area for more than seventy-two hours without the permission of the influx control office. O n the Witwatersrand and in the Western C a p e , until the 1 9 8 4 - 8 6 unrest overwhelmed them, labor officials seemed intent on applying the act, even if the scale of the circumvention exceeded the scope of their efforts. In Natal, however, the law

The State Exposed

67

had been dispensed with in practice. With KwaZulu so proximate and so closely tied to white Natal, "the 72-hour provision has disappeared as such," the chief commissioner observed. "It is not being used in Natal." The chief director for the Port Natal Administration Board noted, " 7 2 hours is out." The massive squatting in peri-urban areas, some of it formally within KwaZulu, has created pools of Africans who cannot be convicted for urban areas offenses." When labor bureau inspectors have apprehended an illegal worker, illegally engaged by an employer, one would have expected that at least at this point the wheels of justice would turn unimpeded. Indeed, in the Western Cape inspectors had been instructed to proceed without discretion to cite both the employer and employee. The former chief commissioner, known for strict application of state policy, placed a particular burden on the employer: "To me, it is much more serious if he [the employer] employs a man who is in the area illegally. That undermines the whole policy of influx control. It should be very much against the employer." In Boksburg, the labor bureau has tried to "work with one system, not to make exceptions." Yet, if a "local worker" was involved, the inspector issued the employer a warning, not a summons; the African employee was invariably charged and prosecuted (LB: Boksburg). Similar unevenhandedness was evident in the West Rand and Orange-Vaal areas. There, "the man [the African] is charged"; the employer, at least the first time around, is given a warning (DL: West Rand, Orange-Vaal). 12 ACCOMMODATING EMPLOYERS

Why has the entire structure of officials seemed to tolerate this abrogation of the legal and administrative order of control? Why have these officials, schooled in restricting the African influx, in "keeping the numbers down," acted willingly day by day to "legalize" the "illegal" African presence? Why have officials been willing to send out a message that illegal migration can be regularized, that attestation can be ignored, that prosecution is uncertain? Their actions, as the deputy secretary of the department understood, have sent out a clear signal to the tribal areas: "You say forget about the fact that he left home illegally, came into the area illegally, took up work illegally. And now you want to legalize it. Why should he wait there?" We shall see below that the legal-administrative order has been

68

State against the Market

subverted, in the first place, because of bureaucratic incapacity: limited staff, limited policing resources, and the breakdown of the rural bureaucratic structures. But the system has also been subverted in the political interplay of employers and officials w h o are only marginally constrained by central state directives. Sensing the state's uneven capacity and their own strength in society, employers have been able to insist on widespread "exceptions" and illegality. Officials themselves, many of whom maintain a contradictory sympathy for the labor needs and feelings of the local employers who confront them across the labor counters, have chosen to accommodate local interests at the expense of national policy. Officials reported almost universally that employers prefer contract and illegal workers to local ones; after all, the permanent Africans with urban residence rights have greater market opportunities and can command better working conditions and higher wages. "Some of these employers are very clever," one labor bureau official observed, "they are only interested in their pocket books. The outside man is prepared to work for a lower wage" (LB: Boksburg). This theme was reiterated by officials across South Africa w h o emphasize the cost advantages in migrant labor and the wage demands of local ones (CC: Witwatersrand; former CC: Western Cape; AB: Orange-Vaal). Where the worker is engaged "off the street," even if registered later, those cost advantages are further compounded: the employer "will take a chance because he knows [the African worker is] illegal and [he] can pay a lesser salary" (LB: Krugersdorp). The intractability of the urban working class, the settled Africans with "rights" to permanent residence, seems at least as important to this process as the lower cost of migrant and illegal workers. Employers, and apparently officials as well, see local African labor as "fussy," "spoiled," and "work-shy." As a rule, the people from M a melodi are a bit more "fussy," leading Pretoria employers to look "outside" (DL: Central Transvaal). In Johannesburg many employers say they "can't work with Soweto people" (DL: West Rand). These people are "reluctant to come forward" for heavy industrial work—they "think it is below their dignity." Because of "the attitude of the local ones," the chief commissioner concludes, "they have gained a reputation as unreliable" (CC: Witwatersrand; see also AB: Port Natal). And by contrast, an East Rand official noted, "The outside man is subject to the conditions of a contract" (LB: Kempton Park).

The State Exposed

69

The employers frequently prefer to engage a worker "off the street" rather than pursue the more anonymous and legal requisitioning process, what one official describes as a "kind of blind date." Employers "mostly prefer to get an illegal worker in this area; they prefer this system by far" (LB: Kempton Park). Sometimes "it is easier to go for the illegal worker," given production demands. "You take a builder busy building a block of flats. He came to the labor bureau; he urgently needs ten blokes to finish some concrete. The local don't want to do that kind of work. So he sees the migrants in the streets. He is happy to employ them because he wants to finish the job on time. He will pay a 500 rand fine rather than lose 50,000 rand on a contract" (LB: Krugersdorp). To satisfy the employers and routinize their use of illegal workers, the administration board in Johannesburg has allowed three months for such illegally engaged workers to be registered—a grace period that conventionally exceeds the period of laboring employment in the building industry (DL: West Rand). The officials and clerks who face the employers seem unable to resist this free-form system operating outside the purview of legislation and departmental directives. Most employers regularly decline to register their vacancies; in fact, most ignore the labor bureau system altogether, hiring their own workers and demanding that the local labor bureau legalize the result—send a "specific" requisition back to the rural areas and arrange "attestation" (LB: Johannesburg, Klerksdorp, Grahamstown, Carletonville; DL: Western Transvaal). For the employer interested in a specific worker, "she is a queen," one official lamented (LB: Germiston). Some officials have resigned themselves to servicing the employer's needs, even if the demanded concessions play havoc with the influx control system. "There is no use forcing a local bloke down on an employer," one official observed. "There won't be a satisfactory work relationship" (CC: Eastern Cape). An upper-level official, though opposed to such disorder in the market, recognizes that officials and employers find their own independent rapprochement: "They could use the big stick, but they do not want disruption and particularly do not want to offend the large employers. What is the alternative? We can't force labor down the throat of employers" (legislative advisor). Officials who have insisted on the legal order against the wishes of employers have found themselves marginalized in the bureau-

State against the Market

7°

cratic world. Employers are in a position to make their lives difficult: "The skin gets pretty thick if you keep refusing employers who have people who want to work" (AB: Port Natal). Employers "continually go over the head of the local labor bureau." There is "pressure to accede to their needs; otherwise, a labor official finds that he has an unfortunate reputation with his supervisors" (legislative advisor). In the Cape, despite intense pressure on lower-level officials to limit the number of African contract workers, employers have frequently gone over the heads of officials to the chief commissioner. 13 Officials have therefore found themselves in a curious position: enforcing a clear government policy, yet overruled by superiors, the presumed purveyors of the policy, who are nonetheless responsive to the insistent demands of employers. The labor control framework has been reconstructed on the ground as employers and officials have worked out their own diverse arrangements for managing, and not managing, the urban labor market. In the process, they have opened up the prescribed urban areas to widespread illegal migration, while undermining the legal order that forces potential migrants to remain in the queues at their tribal labor bureaus. T h e P h a n t o m Tribal L a b o r Bureaucracy The ability to limit the emergence of an urban African working class and to displace redundant Africans to the rural areas has depended to a large extent on the viability of the tribal labor structures. Unemployed Africans have hitherto been required by law to seek entry to the labor market at one of the six hundred tribal labor bureaus spread across the bantustans: they could not legally seek work on their own or join the trek to the Rand or Cape Town. They were supposed to register as "workseekers" and then wait for an "open" job requisition to wend its way from a labor bureau in the city to the chief commissioner, to the territorial bantustan authorities, to the rural district officer, perhaps the magistrate, and, at last, to a tribal labor office near their homes. They were to queue up on the appointed day or when the bell rang or when the clerk stood at the door and shouted out an announcement. Very often, they were sent home in any case, disappointed by a meager labor requisition. If they were amongst the fortunate, they were to pay their fees to the

The State Exposed

71

tribal officials, have their contracts formally attested, and, alas, bec o m e authorized and legal contract workers in the cities. T h e tribal labor bureaus, however, have virtually ceased to function in the bantustans. 1 4 A few seem operative in K w a Z u l u near Pietermaritzburg and in the Bolobedu area northeast of Tzaneen, but virtually everywhere else—all of the Transkei, B o p h u t h a t s w a n a , and G a z a n k u l u , and nearly everywhere in K w a Z u l u and L e b o w a — t h e tribal bureaus are inoperative. In the M a l u m u l e l e area in G a z a n k ulu, an official reported, all fourteen tribal labor offices were closed in 1 9 7 9 , reflecting apparently their more general closure across all of G a z a n k u l u (magistrate, M a l u m u l e l e ; assistant secretary of interior, Gazankulu). Officials in the white recruiting areas reported, almost without exception, that "the tribal labor bureaus are not functioning in our area," that "they are useless," that the system is " h a p h a z a r d , " or that the bureaus " h a v e never functioned." A white official in K w a Z u l u observed that "in twenty years of service, I have never seen a tribal labor bureau function p r o p e r l y " ( L B : D u r b a n ; magistrate, Bolobedu, Empangeni; A B : Central Transvaal; T E B A : N o r t h ern Transvaal; A B : Port Natal). Both regional officials and policymakers look at the tribal labor structures and despair. " T h e r e is a flaw, a weakness in our system of distribution at that particular point," the legislative advisor quoted earlier points out. " T h e tribal bureaus do not function, leaving the employer to seek an u n k n o w n quantity in a vast homeland," leaving the African w o r k e r inaccessible, unregistered and, if resourceful, absent (legislative advisor; also C C : Western Cape). T h e white labor bureau officials in the cities despair as well. A survey not unsympathetic to the influx control system found urban officials frustrated with a rural system that has failed to perform. Officials almost uniformly reported that the tribal bureaus " a r e unsatisfactorily organized and managed, that no selection is done when a request f o r labour is received, that effective placement of work-seekers does not occur and that liaising with local labour bureaux is p o o r . ' " 5 White officials and labor recruiters ascribe the system's breakd o w n to the withdrawal of white authority and white personnel from the African rural areas and to the ascendance of a corrupt A f rican culture and officialdom. At best, officials see a chaotic rural bureaucracy that lacks professional standards: " T h e r e is n o professional handling of our labor force at the national states." T h e chiefs, when joined by seconded white officials, could manage the system,

State against the Market

but the partnership proved difficult. With the withdrawal of white officials, the chiefs "handled labor on an irregular basis" (assistant secretary of interior, Gazankulu). This trend has apparently been accelerated by "homeland independence," as white officials have given way to an independent African officialdom. "Since the black magistrates," a TEBA recruiter reported, "the labor service has gone to nothing" (TEBA: Transkei). The Bophuthatswana government, a Pretoria official observed, "can't offer a proper tribal labor bureau" (AB: Central Transvaal). Since Transkei's independence, "we have a majority of black magistrates, and they don't have the feel, the scientific approach" (CC: Western Cape). The consequences for the influx control system are no doubt quite devastating. As a Durban official observed: "[African rural workseekers] cannot leave the rural areas without permission. They are supposed to register, supposed to call us. [pause] It very rarely happens. The inefficiency and indifference of the black officials are the main drawback. It is unbelievable. You would have to see it" (LB: Durban). The deputy secretary for the department concluded that the "tribal bureau system will fail," as the "labor clerk under the tribe" cannot perform as a "public servant" in a bureaucracy. For the African worker who chooses to wait and place his fate in the hands of tribal officials, there is apparently a price—and a further inducement to bypass this bureaucratic sham. Whenever it touches the African worker and labor market, tribal officialdom demands its payoff. "This is Africa," one TEBA recruiter observed. "You don't visit the chief's kraal without paying." Africans in the northern Transvaal must ordinarily pay two or three rands at the local tribal offices in Venda and Lebowa to get a workseeker's permit, even though there is no such requirement in law. "The minor official sitting in the sticks is the problem," the recruiter observed. "If left to [a] black labor [officer], he will probably take the person who pays him the highest or the person he knows" (TEBA: Northern Transvaal). An official of the Northern Transvaal Administration Board confirmed the impression, suggesting that in Lebowa, "money passes under the table." In Gazankulu an official talked about corruption of the labor process at the local level: "Sometimes, the fees must go under the table to get preference" (assistant secretary of interior, Gazankulu). Officials reported a similar pattern of corrupt practices in Bophu-

The State Exposed

73

thatswana, KwaZulu, and the Transkei (LB: Johannesburg and Empangeni; CC: Western Cape). Indeed, at the highest level of administration, officials acknowleged that informal payments have eroded formal bureaucratic practice: "When this chap returns to pay his respect to the chief and he pays his respect in hard cash. So the chap in the labor bureau also wants to get paid. This causes a bit of trouble. They are not civil servants who have been trained" (deputy secretary). With tribal bureaus falling into disuse or corruption, workseekers, employers, and the administration boards have turned instead to the more remote, but at least functional magistrate's offices, formally "district" labor bureaus. These offices, staffed by European officials and independent of the chiefs, have emerged as informal assembly areas. They operate as labor recruitment points just inside the "borders" of Bophuthatswana and at various points inside KwaZulu (AB: Central Transvaal; LB: Empangeni; TEBA: KwaZulu). In Gazankulu, "the people flock to the magistrate's office and do not even touch the tribal offices," a bantustan official reports (secretary of interior, Gazankulu). The magistrate's office is for the most part just a place, a node in the labor market where fragments of the unemployed mass and employers find one another, formalize contracts, and pay the requisite fees. The magistrate, responsible for collecting taxes, registering deaths and marriages, and establishing water rights, as well as for the operation of the district labor bureau, performs almost no labor functions. The few larger employers who use the system almost always send their own agents, advertise on their own, and select their own workers. An official at Malumulele (Gazankulu) indicated that 90 percent of the workers are hired directly by agents: ISCOR, for example, "might find them in the bush and bring them here for registration" (magistrate, Malumulele). A bantustan official confirmed that this pattern is nearly universal in Gazankulu (secretary of interior, Gazankulu). In Nongoma (KwaZulu) the magistrate indicated that ISCOR announces a date and time when it will show up at the magistrate's office to select new employees or to reemploy experienced workers. An official for the Matatiele District (Transkei) indicated that agents for the apple farmers, construction companies, railways, and ISCOR "come and fetch their own labor" (TB: Maluti). With the breakdown of tribal labor bureaus, the labor market in

74

State against the Market

these rural districts has become localized at nodes, leaving vast areas and populations virtually outside the legal and functioning labor system. The Northern Transvaal Administration Board sends its mobile units into a portion of Lebowa, but neglects most of it, while bypassing Gazankulu altogether. The board officer admits that "parts of Gazankulu are not being tapped" (DL: Northern Transvaal). Large portions of the African rural areas receive virtually no requests for employment ("requisitions"). At Maluti in the Transkei, the tribal bureau receives no requisitions from Umtata for months at a time—the waiting hall with its rows of benches standing empty and silent, the columns for posting job notices unmarred by a single piece of paper (TB: Maluti). Other research has found a similar pattern at Sterkspruit and at tribal bureaus across the Transkei.16 At Motetsi in Lebowa, only twenty-five kilometers from Pietersburg, some months pass without a single requisition; other months are better, with perhaps two hundred jobs, though usually from a few bulk requisitions for construction laborers. An official of the Lebowa Department of Interior observes that "very few employers come this time of year" (assistant to Department of Interior, Lebowa). Across KwaZulu, even in the immediate vicinity of industrial areas, there are widespread reports of an ever-shrinking labor market. In recent years, there has been virtually no labor recruiting in Umbumbulu, south of Durban; Ingwavuma, well north of Richard's Bay; Ongoye, near Ladysmith; Okahlamba, near Escourt; Inkanyesi, near Eshowe; Mapumulo, near Grey town; and Vulamehlo, near Umzinto. 17 Information about employment opportunities is narrowly communicated. TEBA offices fill their job allocations "as fast as we can," frequently on the same day and usually from immediately available sources (TEBA: KwaZulu). When the allocations cannot be filled off the "doorstep," TEBA will publicize somewhat more broadly that the mines are "open." The Nongoma TEBA representative on those occasions drives around the area in a sound truck. Sometimes labor agents will send out advance word that they will be hiring at a particular magistrate's office on certain dates, and the magistrate, perhaps irregularly, notifies headmen and chiefs by mail and phones up traders in the area (TEBA: Transkei; TB: Maluti). 18 More often, jobs are not advertised and a workseeker must be available and waiting when a requisition arrives. At Motetsi the

The State Exposed

75

clerk rings a bell when a requisition or agent arrives. Only those who hear the bell, or word of it, have an opportunity for employment. Only those waiting outside the gate at Ngwelezana or those sitting on the rows of benches at the Umlazi labor office may respond to the announcement and the query, "Any takers?" For those who live far from the magistrate's office—that is, most rural dwellers—even this rudimentary labor system may prove inaccessible. The labor officer at the Northern Transvaal Administration Board notes that many workers may have to travel up to eighty kilometers to seek work at bureaus that only recruit on intermittent Wednesdays. In the Malumulele district, workers may have to travel as many as forty kilometers each way just to see if work is available. At Nongoma in 1982, workseekers spent R2.00 in bus fare in order to wait at the magistrate's office; at Motetsi, they spent R3.40. The Nongoma office had no job requisitions in April; the Motetsi office, only one—for workseekers previously employed at 1 S C O R . In the northern Transvaal, T E B A has discontinued a policy, followed between 1975 and 1978, of refunding bus fares, even if the mines are "closed." For women, no matter how proximate to a bureau, the system has become even more remote. The magistrate at Malumulele (Gazankulu) can recall no requisitions for women; the Interior Department official in Lebowa quoted above notes that "99.99 percent of requisitions are for men." The Port Natal Administration Board requisitions women only for nursing jobs and for domestic service, but "only after local labor is exhausted and only in the immediate areas of KwaZulu." As a result, rural African women find themselves on the distant margins of the labor market, seeking work in the least remunerative and least stable areas—casual and daily farm work nearly everywhere, the sawmills in Lebowa, the roadworks in Maputoland and Venda, the very small farms in Gazankulu, and seasonally on the sugar estates in Natal. For Africans in the rural areas, the labor framework—its recruiting, queueing, and allocation mechanisms—has for all practical purposes ceased functioning. Access to the market comes not through the tribal labor bureaus: they hardly exist. And access only infrequently comes from labor recruiters and requisitions: they hardly ever reach these remote areas. For hundreds of thousands of rural Africans each year, access to the market comes through illegal means—"shooting straight" to the cities, risking arrest under the

76

State against the Market

pass laws, seeking out informal work opportunities, lodging in the townships or squatter areas, and, perhaps, with good fortune, being "regularized" by an erratic urban labor control process. Losing Control The labor control framework has had a profound impact on the lives of black South Africans. Every African has been legally obligated to carry a pass, and millions every year face searches on the streets, inspections at the workplace, and raids in their homes; nearly 900,000 were prosecuted between 1980 and 1984 alone for various influx control infractions. 19 The pursuit of work and a home has in fact been impeded by the sprawling labor control bureaucracy and its attendant police and legal apparatuses: urbanization has been slowed, perhaps marginally displaced to commuter areas on the outer fringes of the metropolitan areas and inside the bantustans; the displacement of redundant farm families from white farms or "black spots" has been "successfully" channeled to the bantustans, avoiding resurgent black urbanization in the white areas. African women have faced great difficulty establishing legal niches in the urban wage economy; illegals travel in the shadows of the institutional labor market and thus come to populate and depend on lower-paying sectors of the economy; and urban Africans with "permanent residence rights" have established genuine, if perverse, sets of market rights, including privileged access to employment in the larger urban establishments. Yet the evidence of repression and its human toll should not be equated with effective control over markets and the process of proletarianization. Nor should the accumulation of horrors suggest that this elaborated control apparatus has managed to tame the forces attempting to circumvent it. For the expanded exercise of control over markets, the displacement of urbanization, has paradoxically created almost frenzied efforts by African workers to pursue market opportunities, taxing the state's resources and will. There are substantial areas within South Africa where the bureaucratic apparatus has become incoherent and ineffectual. The visual evidence for the breakdown of control is evident in the sprawling squatter areas that now encircle the major white industrial areas. Crossroads outside Cape Town, where the government has grappled unsuccessfully with the some 50,000 Africans intent

The State Exposed

77

on defying restrictions on labor mobility, housing construction, and family accommodation, is the most notorious of these. Each night through the cold Cape winter, the government has launched its police and demolition teams, tearing down tents and corrugated iron shacks, but without apparent effect on the Cape squatter population. By 1985, with squatter communities growing and effectively resisting state removal and relocation efforts, the government renounced its own policy of forced removals. "For six years here in the Western Cape we wasted time and energy tearing down shelters, exposing women and children to wind and rain and deporting people," the Western Cape director observed. "If we had used the time building and developing earlier, we would have already been well on the road to orderly urbanization." 20 A defiant Crossroads is, however, only a fragment of a much larger and growing reality—a massive informal urbanization of the African working class. The director general warned the department's chief commissioners that "nothing typifies the disintegration of influx control more vividly than the massive flow of blacks to the urban areas, the high number of shantydwellers and township lodgers." 2 ' In the Western Cape, far from any proximate African rural area, the government has struggled more than anywhere else in the country to limit the African influx and "protect" the position of local— in this case, white and coloured—labor. This policy predates the National party government and included railway ticket restrictions during World War II and actions by officials in Cape Town and the Transkei to limit the influx of Africans during the 1920s and 1930s. 2 2 Still, the "Eiselen Line" was a new departure in policies that sought to close off the Western Cape and forestall the development of an established African working class. "Briefly and concisely put," the secretary declared in 1954, "our Native policy regarding the Western Province aims at ultimate elimination of Natives from this region."" In the late 1960s and early 1970s, administrators were told "to go full out," the former chief commissioner recalls. "The policy was very, very strict." Indeed, the scope of legal African employment was greatly narrowed by a Physical Planning Act that placed special restrictions on factory expansion in the Western Cape; the opportunities for legal accommodation were stalled by a housing policy that stopped new housing construction from 1968 onward. When the government joined the debate on the future of the

7«

State against the Market

labor framework, appointing the Riekert Commission in 1 9 7 7 , the Western Cape was specifically excluded and the coloured labor preference declared inviolate. Instead, the government offered raids, bulldozers, and buses to transport the illegals back to the tribal areas in the Ciskei and Transkei. "As long as squatting rears its head," the minister told the House of Assembly in 1 9 8 1 , "I will smother it instantly." 24 Nonetheless, upward of 100,000 illegals and squatters in the Western Cape, almost half the African population by government estimates, have overtaken the police and bulldozers. 25 Administration board officials doubt their own capacities to cope with the rush of illegals; indeed, by their own calculations, they fail to trace more than a fraction of those circumventing the system each day. The chief director admitted in the press, "We now have proof that prosecutions are failing to stop the illegal influx and it is clearly impossible to try to stop the urbanization process here." 26 In the absence of effective control in the rural areas or alternative opportunities elsewhere, the influx will no doubt grow, effectively unimpeded. The labor officers at the Langa township concluded: "Influx control as it was intended does not work in practice. It is ineffective. The mechanics of influx control are ineffective. . . . Influx control as it stands in the statutes has been ineffective" (LB: Langa). By 1986, the administration board had abandoned use of the labor process to impose influx control. "Labor regulation no longer exists. An employer no longer has to abide by any particular rule. Theoretically, if you do not register, you would be on the wrong side of the law. But nothing will be done to enforce that requirement" (DL: Western Cape). In KwaZulu the bantustan bureaucratic structures have broken down completely. Put simply by one official, "There is no influx control in KwaZulu" (magistrate, Empangeni). The breakdown has been accompanied by uncontrolled urbanization in and around the Durban complex. As in the Western Cape, the Department of Cooperation and Development has attempted to demolish some illegal shacks and displace the burgeoning squatter population, but to no substantial effect. 27 Between 250,000 and 750,000 squatters have crowded into the Inanda region outside Durban, a tribal trust area not yet incorporated into KwaZulu and not yet provided with elementary municipal services such as water. Typhoid swept the area in 1979, followed by a cholera outbreak at the end of 1981. 2 8 The influx from KwaZulu has brought rapid urbanization (9 percent a year

The State Exposed

79

growth of the Durban metropolitan region), with illegal squatting becoming the dominant living pattern in the urban areas. An Urban Foundation study found the city surrounded by a belt of squatters, 1.4 million strong, twice the legal population of the Durban area. 29 The Durban Chamber of Commerce warned the government that such rapid and uncontrolled urbanization, combined with legal impediments to regular employment, could "become the trigger to destabilise the entire area.'" 0 The squatter population in the other major urban areas has been somewhat displaced, though it remains a growing presence in the urban labor market. Bloemfontein has its Onverwacht, a settlement of at least three hundred thousand persons, fifty-five kilometers and sometimes a two-hour bus ride from the city. This squatter area rests formally on tribal trust land, linked to the Q w a Q w a bantustan and administered by the Department of Cooperation and Development; in reality, it is a residential suburban dumping ground for Bloemfontein's informal and formal labor market. 31 Johannesburg, unattached to any particular bantustan, nonetheless faces "a tremendous squatter problem." These illegal residents, a board officer notes, gather on the "nearby farms and work mostly in unlawful employment" (DL: West Rand). Pretoria has its Winterveld, a sprawling informal squatter camp of more than a million Africans draped over Pretoria's northern reaches. The problem has been formally displaced, as these squatters live "over the border," in Bophuthatswana. But the formalities do not disguise the realities of the control problem. South Africa's surrogate tribal leaders, responsible for this squatter suburb, describe this "infested area" as the "biggest menace" facing the Bophuthatswana bantustan: "If this illegal influx of people is not curbed timeously, the future of our country will be at stake." 3 2 In the urban areas, the formal labor structures, the bureaus, have in effect been bypassed by both employers and workers. Less than a third of employers have regularly registered their vacancies with the local labor bureau, though the law up to 1 9 8 0 required such notification, and fully half have only contacted the bureau for registration purposes after the fact. 3 3 The workers themselves have in most cases preferred to use their network of relatives or to visit employers directly, rather than register and apply for work at a local labor bureau. 34 It is little wonder that employers and African workers have cho-

8o

State against the Market

sen to circumvent the labor bureaus: employment services are at best rudimentary. On average, clerks spend only about 6 minutes with a workseeker, and in a large number of cases they ignore even the rudimentary job classification scheme provided by Manpower Utilization. Officials rarely develop information on special skills and aptitudes and only irregularly information on training and education. 35 A Cape labor bureau official admits that the bureau does no labor selection, no aptitude testing, and no interviewing. 36 Officials locate labor, as they do in Johannesburg: "We read them out in the y a r d " (LB: Johannesburg). In recent years, the government has tried to rationalize this process. The Guidance and Placement Act of 1 9 8 1 puts new emphasis on testing and orientation and the allocation function of urban labor bureaus. Each bureau, in fact, has been issued a new expanded set of standardized job categories; small orientation centers have been established for permanent workers in Mamelodi and Soweto and for commuters at Mndantsane, inside the Ciskei. But the recent emphasis on job placement has not been seriously advanced. The new guidelines have received a correct, but not very expansive, response within the administration boards. An upperlevel official admits that the implementation process is "no closer to being a service," as the system still largely concentrates on "this problem of influx control" (deputy director general, Manpower Utilization). The administration board officials themselves are skeptical about this "modernization": "They can hand it over to us because they have no system" (AB: East Rand). In any case, the planned rationalization is underfinanced and understaffed. The Port Natal board notes that its testing program has "basically come to a standstill," as the bureaus have no training staff (AB: Port Natal). In the Cape, a plan for rationalization remains a paper project: "At this point, we have plans to build a new bureau with an orientation center and aptitude testing, but we don't have the money" (DL: Western Cape). The administration boards and labor bureaus have also, however, lacked the staff and money to be effectively repressive. The system of control required a police and inspectorate staff that could search the townships for illegal lodgers, sweep the streets clean of pass law offenders, and inspect factories, shops, and white homes to ferret out unauthorized African workers. The labor bureaus have been directly

The State Exposed

81

responsible for the illegal workers and the administration boards for illegal lodgers and squatters, though the South African Police have of necessity come to play a more active role in both areas. Indeed, there are areas—the East Rand, Eastern Cape, and central Transvaal—where officials indicated that the boards have a sufficient and active inspectorate staff (AB: East Rand; CC: Eastern Cape; DL: Central Transvaal). But these boards do not represent the norm. Most of the administration board and labor bureau officials reported desperate staff shortages and the breakdown of enforcement. On the East Rand, where administration board officials reported no staff shortages, the local labor bureau officials indicated that perhaps 40 percent of the inspectorate positions were unfilled (LB: Kempton Park) and that the existing inspectors could not keep up with the vast illegality (LB: Germiston). Almost everywhere, in fact, the local labor bureau officials reported a shortage or complete absence of staff. Even those officials who favored intensified inspections believed that their efforts would be frustrated "because we can't find enough personnel" (LB: Carletonville). In one case, a bureau that sometimes employed three inspectors, now had none, as call-ups for military service took precedence over labor control (LB: Lichtenburg). The department authorized the West Rand Board to expand its meager inspectorate staff—135 European and 6z African inspectors for the whole of the Johannesburg area, covering thirteen districts and staffing the "special force for raids." The expanded force, board officials recognized, would fall far short of the problem: "There should be z,ooo [inspectors]" (DL: West Rand). The system seems to have collapsed completely in Natal. In the Port Natal area, covering the principal industrial and port complexes, the board and labor bureaus are so understaffed that inspections have come to a standstill. There are nineteen inspectorate areas and only nineteen "active inspectors"—a "not very happy," indeed, an "impossible" situation, one board official admitted (AB: Port Natal). In fact, the inspectors have assumed "a low profile," as they have had to take up "clerical work" to relieve the staff shortages in other areas. There are now "spot checks," but "very little inspection" (CC: Natal). The Durban municipal area has been assigned thirty-one inspectorate positions, but there are "only seven active in the field" (AB: Port Natal). The Durban labor bureau, located in the

State against the Market

82

central city, has twenty-four vacant positions and employs only one inspector responsible for locating illegal workers and idle and disorderly persons (LB: Durban). In the Cape Peninsula, officials reported severe understaffing, as inadequate salaries seemed unable to "draw the right kind of man" (CC: Western Cape). The inspectorate staff was denuded, one official observed, leaving the labor bureaus to "fight. . . with an empty gun" (DL: Western Cape). A staff of sixty was spread thin across the peninsula, making spot checks, but failing by all accounts to seriously monitor and control illegal employment. 37 Officials at the highest levels seem fully cognizant of the staff problem and their own impotence. The inspectorate, the deputy secretary observed, is a "shambles." "You can't get the European inspector." That sentiment was echoed by chief commissioners everywhere, who situated the problem in the "whole of the public service" (CC: Witwatersrand, Natal, Western Cape; also chairman, Employment Services Committee). The breakdown of state capacity on the ground is a reality both for those who would elaborate and those who would dismantle the labor control framework. The legislative advisor to the minister supported "intensified inspection" and department directives of recent years that require local bureaus to expand their efforts. But he recognized at the same time that "we are restrained by staff shortages." The economic advisor to the prime minister hoped to move "consciously" toward a "less restrictive approach," but in any event believed that it was no longer possible, given the state of finances in the public sector, "to maintain the more restrictive view." 38 F r o m Innovation to Incoherence The labor control framework—the administration boards and labor bureaus in particular—was the proud creation of ideologues and political leaders during the formative ( 1 9 3 7 - 4 8 ) and innovative (1948-60) periods. 39 This state framework, it was hoped, would bring order to the uncontrolled and indeterminate processes associated with labor markets. The state would counterbalance the "unbalanced increase" in the urbanized and proletarianized African population. It would limit the "influx" of Africans, employing "every possible restriction"; it would remove the "aimless," the

The State Exposed

83

" s q u a t t e r s , " the old, the " r e d u n d a n t " ; it would keep "the numbers d o w n . " In place of the "chaotic distribution of Native l a b o u r " produced by the market, the new f r a m e w o r k w o u l d offer a "national system of labour regulation and labour control." T h e state, not the market, would allocate labor between "agriculture, the mines and the t o w n s . " If local authorities, committed to local industrial interests, declined to join this national system, then the state would create the agencies necessary f o r centralized control and "canalisation." During its first decade, the National party government created the legal infrastructure for this new order: labor bureaus, new compulsory pass b o o k s , prescribed and non-prescribed areas, new definitional barriers to urban rights and entry. T h e government began to intensify its use of directly coercive means, including, above all, arrests and prosecutions under the pass laws. Yet the grand design and legal contrivances were insufficient. Despite the n e w passes and resort to repressive methods, the " b l a c k s t r e a m " to the cities w a s not appreciably slowed. T h e new order had not won over officials in many of the critical local authorities, such as J o h a n n e s b u r g , w h o declined to " k e e p the numbers d o w n " and w h o did little in practice to turn the new design into a reality. T h e African masses, too, turned on the new order, burning their passes, taking to the streets, and by i 9 6 0 forcing a general upheaval. The shots at Sharpeville reverberated through white politics, kindling public opposition by business and doubts within the government itself. The government responded to its inability to master these market processes with a greatly elaborated state presence: a greater scope f o r institutional control, including n e w agencies f o r regulating labor in the black rural areas; a tightened noose around the urban areas, including a freeze on permanent residence rights, African labor ratios in industry and African housing, and the d r a w i n g of the "Eiselen line" barrier across the C a p e ; measures to e x p a n d dependence on contract, rather than settled, A f r i c a n labor, including regulations severely limiting the entry of A f r i c a n w o m e n ; n e w bureaucratic apparatuses, the administration boards, to give effect to state directives; and, finally, a massive increase in the use of police p o w e r s , which in 1 9 7 0 jailed 1 0 percent of the A f r i c a n population of w o r k ing age. T h e government committed tremendous resources to tam-

84

State against the Market

ing this "madhouse." In the process, the state became deeply mired in the market, fully identified with the economic, racial, and political results. But even this massive effort was insufficient, and the contradictions in the process began to take their toll. The intensified repression of the 1960s and early 1 9 7 0 s slowed urbanization somewhat, but produced a paradoxical result—rising labor surpluses in the A f rican rural areas. In effect, the "successful" implementation of influx control created growing pools of labor, profoundly impoverished, desperate for work, and drawn to the cities by a growing disparity between African urban and bantustan incomes. State policy had created incentives to "shoot straight," to bypass all the legal and bureaucratic roadblocks and join the informal urban labor market. Labor-repressive policies accordingly required yet more repressive policies if the "black stream" was not to "overrun the cities." But in reality this elaborated state, mired in an increasingly complex market, is becoming increasingly incoherent and ineffectual. Within the state itself, central control is giving way to erratic implementation as lower-level officials and employers renegotiate and reconstitute policy at the local level. In the urban areas, understaffed and underfinanced labor bureaus can do little more than regularize the widespread use of workers "hired off the street." In the African rural areas, "efflux control" has given way to corruption and bureaucratic decay: the tribal labor bureaus have, in effect, disintegrated. Despite the intensified labor control of the repressive period, there is little standing in the way of the informal urbanization of the African working class—the hundred thousand "illegals" in the squatter areas of the Western Cape, the ring of informal urban communities that have doubled the African population in the Durban area, and the sprawling suburban slums, housing over a million Africans, that lie within reach of principal white cities, such as Pretoria and Bloemfontein. This is a state exposed. The intensified effort to control the market and proletarianization has left the state apparatus internally incoherent and ineffectual in the face of the forces it has sought to control.

4. Reconstructing the Labor Framework—Reconstructing the Laboring Classes

The massive state effort of the repressive period, as we learned earlier, failed to gain effective control of market processes. Though police action was greatly intensified, pass and influx control laws were elaborated and given over to a more centralized bureaucratic apparatus, and state repressive policies were applied with a new intensity and brutality, the regime failed to bring order on its own terms. A growing African working class, pushed back here and there, nonetheless seemed a growing threat to the white cities: intensified influx control created labor surpluses in the bantustans, increased pressure to invade the urban labor market, and growing areas of illegal urban squatting. State management of the market failed to create orderly economic relations; instead, it seemed to bring strikes to the workplace, riots in the townships, and African assaults on the state labor control apparatus itself. The machinery of control, the legacy of three decades of National party imagination, now seemed costly and erratic, an obstacle to "positive development.'" The historic response to such unevenness and contradictions was heightened repression and bureaucratic elaboration. The evident limits of state power had brought redoubled efforts to take control of market processes. But by the mid 1 9 7 0 s this destructive dialectic must have seemed more and more unpromising (see chapter 2). Could the government, amidst rising African resistance and slowed economic growth during the 1 9 7 0 s and early 1 9 8 0 s , invest in a new round of heightened labor repression? 2 The ascendant political elements in this period said, " E n o u g h . " We shall see in chapter 6 that Afrikaner businessmen in larger-scale enterprises, together with some Afrikaner intellectuals, elements 85

86

State against the Market

within the military, and important verligte ("enlightened") factions within the National party began to challenge the conventional presumptions about the state and economy. They urged a diminished state role in direct investment, financial money markets, and the labor market. The future of the South African capitalist order, they maintained, lay, not with continuing racial dominance expressed through the state, but with the mechanisms more conventionally associated with markets in capitalist societies. The Riekert Commission report of 1 9 7 9 was, above all, a refusal to respond to the state's incapacities with expanded direct state intervention. The report spoke of ending "discriminatory measures" as far as possible. It urged the decentralization of decision making and the privileging of the "free labor market mechanism" against the normal presumptions in favor of state control. 1 Political leaders n o w recognized that moves to resurrect the old assumptions—an expanded state presence—would not create the "right mechanisms." "If I did w h a t the Conservative Party wanted," the minister for cooperation and development declared, "there would be revolt, conflict and trouble morning, noon and night." 4 Still, the government was not yet ready to yield to a market logic and allow the unfettered development of the African proletariat. Its White Paper in response to the Riekert Commission report, while accepting that a new direction was required, reaffirmed "that some form of control should remain over the movement of workers to the urban areas." The question, the paper concluded, was w h a t "mechanism for influx control" was "right" in "South Africa's circumstances." 5 The government in the present period has sought to reconstruct the labor control f r a m e w o r k — t o limit the state's exposure to troublesome political forces and to increase the efficacy of the state machinery without devoting more state resources to the effort. It has sought, in practice, t o manage the market and laboring classes in new ways, without resort to direct state intervention and labor repression on a larger scale. The new mechanisms include the delegation of control functions to Africans and employers, the creation of market appearances, the relinquishing of control in some areas to permit more intensified control in others, and, finally, the creation of "market privileges" for sections of the African population. T h e government has sought, in

Reconstructing the Labor Framework

87

effect, to reconstruct the labor f r a m e w o r k , and to offset the state's incapacities, by expropriating elements f r o m civil society: A f r i c a n elites to regulate their o w n communities and workers and employers to police their o w n market transactions; a market logic and norms to universalize and deracialize the state; and class divisions and the creation of allied groups to narrow the scope f o r labor control. Support f o r this reconstruction is by no means general within the state. Officials at all levels and politicians of diverse positions have clung tenaciously to the traditional presumptions about the state and markets: the proper response to the system's limits and to the g r o w i n g African proletarianization is direct and effective state control over African labor. Repeated efforts to rethink those presumptions or to institute legislative " r e f o r m " have occasioned bitter political struggles within the state: within the labor control bureaucracy, in some cases, drawing in close class associates outside, particularly Afrikaner businessmen; between state departments, such as M a n p o w e r Utilisation and Cooperation and Development; and amongst state managers, technocrats, and politicians. Amidst the division and acrimony, growth of state repressive practices has sputtered and slowed, but so, too, have the much-heralded legislative and administrative reforms. T h e attempt to reconstruct the labor f r a m e w o r k has only exacerbated the problem of incoherence. T h e South African state seems divided, irresolute, and exposed to market processes that it has failed to master. Depoliticizing L a b o r Control L a b o r control is intrinsically a political process, with state directives superseding market decision making, and with particular groups (whites, white workers, farmers, mining houses, employers), but not everybody o r every group, as beneficiaries of state activity. During the repressive period the Department of Cooperation and Development, the administration boards, and the labor bureaus, which embodied state control and partiality, had moved actively and visibly to the center of these processes. A t the same time, they moved to the center of the political storm; for Africans, they were the evident instruments of labor repression and the racial-class state. It is little w o n d e r that the Riekert Commission, the reform initiative in this area, devoted so much attention to depoliticizing the process—

State against the Market

88

ending the institutional centralization, obscuring the evident partiality of the state, and relaxing the most extreme form of state directive, direct coercion. 6 Fragmenting the Centralized State The Department of Cooperation and Development, constructed out of the old Department of Native Affairs (originally renamed the Department of Bantu Administration and Development, and then the Department of Plural Relations), had emerged by the early 1980s as one of the principal agencies of the state. By the mid 1 9 8 0 s , the department retained only a fragment of its old functions, the remainder having been parceled out to the Departments of Manpower, Justice, and, above all, Constitutional Development. In its heyday, the framework of labor control, encompassing the department, but also commuter subsidies, resettlement costs, decentralization, and assistance to the bantustans, consumed 3.5 billion rand, or 14 percent of the entire state budget. 7 The administration boards had emerged as a central agency within this structure: they coopted the "native affairs" staff and functions of the local authorities and had emerged, in effect, as the centralized instrument for controlling the market. Their staff complement, 26,000 in 1 9 7 1 , had doubled by 1 9 7 7 . 8 Less than a decade after the creation of this centralized labor control apparatus, the Riekert Commission offered a radical alternative: the administration boards and the department itself should be fragmented and their functions and personnel parceled out to other state departments. A single agency responsible for the regulation of one racial group was, ipso facto, racially discriminatory and partial— now, apparently, a violation of the more universal norms that were to govern the state.* The commission bluntly endorsed testimony suggesting that the "boards already have too many functions and that some of them should be taken away from them." The department itself, the commission concluded, "should surrender those functions that it performs for Blacks" to "functional departments" that could concern themselves with all racial groups. 1 0 The legislative advisor charged with giving effect to these recommendations concluded: "If my evaluation is correct, the Department of Cooperation and Development is on the way out. Its very existence is a discriminatory thing, catering to one race group."

Reconstructing the Labor Framework

89

The government moved quickly to enact legislation transferring responsibility for labor placement functions to a newly renamed Department of Manpower Utilisation." In a flurry of attention to market efficiencies and objectivities, this department created a new, more standardized job classification scheme, on the "same basis as other races" (deputy director general, Manpower Utilisation). The Guidance and Placement Act laid new emphasis on private placement agencies and training, though these services were made available only to permanent urban Africans; the others, potential "aliens" and "immigrants," were given over to other "functional" departments. The judicial and punitive aspects, the "pass courts" (commissioners' courts), where hundreds of thousands of "illegal" African workers faced jail sentences each year, were transfered to the Department of Justice—part of the "rationalisation" of the department and the deracialization of pass law enforcement. 12 The granting of "approved accommodation" remained, for the moment, in the hands of white magistrates and township managers, but little by little this critical control function has been taken over by bantustan officials and clerks and, in prospect, by local African councils (AB: Port Natal; legislative advisor). 13 Population migration from rural to urban areas has miraculously been reconstructed as "interstate" relations. Imaginary boundaries between African and white areas have become "borders," and their policing has increasingly fallen within the functional jurisdiction of the Department of Foreign Affairs. The dompas, consequently, is no longer a "pass book" issued by "independent" bantustans. 14 Labor bureaus, one official imagines, will become "passport and border points" and illegal urban migration and employment will be circumscribed by legislation restricting "illegal aliens" (LB: Boksburg). 1 5 Finally, in 1985 the administration boards themselves were renamed "development boards," and they, along with the influx control structures, were placed inelegantly within the Department of Constitutional Development and Planning; as one high-level official put it, "The head was torn from the body and the body is now torn apart" (advisor, Constitutional Development). The pass laws and influx control, the center of "black administration" for at least half a century, were now placed within a state structure whose public purpose was multiracial, diffuse, and uncertain. Labor repression in

State against the Market

9°

the "new dispensation," it was hoped, would be lost in the deep recesses of state departments and the confusion of constant state reorganization. Beyond

Coercion

The intensified repression of the late 1960s and early 1970s was followed by resurgent strikes in the workplace and violence in the townships during the mid 1970s and now the mid 1980s. The Riekert Commission urged the government to break this cycle: the state should no longer respond to market pressures with intensified repressive methods. Instead of pass raids and citizen-police confrontations on the street, the commission proposed indirect means— control at the point of employment and accommodation that would reduce "friction," the number of arrests, and the visibility of coercive measures. 16 Aid centers, it was hoped, would play an expanded role in reviewing arrests, circumventing court action, and providing "services" for African workers.' 7 In fact, the department has used the aid centers to apply influx controls, while avoiding "excessive" resort to the court system. In Pretoria in 1980, for example, some 40,000 African pass law offenders were referred to aid centers. Most of these (24,215) avoided further court action, though they were still penalized under the influx control laws: over two-thirds (17,500) were "endorsed out" of the "prescribed" urban areas. 18 Since at least 1979, the department has urged officials to "color" court statistics to give influx control a "positive image."" The emphasis within the labor control framework has shifted in the post-Riekert period from direct coercion to "service." Officials at the lowest levels acknowledge that the pressure to intensify inspections and police action, characteristic of the repressive period, has eased: "The main idea at the moment is to relax the whole system" (LB: Krugersdorp; similar observation by LB: Langa). "The laws have been eased quite a lot," one official observed, "to go back to 1953," to reverse the "very strict" practices of the "past couple of years" (LB: Johannesburg). In the midst of the 1984-86 uprisings, the government issued instructions to reduce prosecutions for pass law offences—that is, when using the coercive capacity, "to exercise the utmost discretion" (deputy secretary, Constitutional Development). Officials in the Western Cape, in north central Transvaal, and on the West and East Rand confirm that one is no longer "pestering people in the streets"

Reconstructing the Labor

Framework

91

(directors of labor). 20 Some of the strongest supporters of control within the administrative machinery now acknowledge the new reality on the ground. On the East Rand, one official with real policy-making authority observed: "The inspectorate is very seldom used. Picking up masses of blacks and taking them to the commissioner's court? That is a thing of the past. . . . We are not patrolling the streets anymore. That is a thing of the past" (AB: East Rand). In Pretoria, where experiments in reform had previously been undermined by officials, the new policy was also a reality: "Policy is now to give something better to the blacks. We are very glad to get away from the administrative part. It will collapse in total. That part is something of the past. . . . The urban black is free. There is no influx control" (DL: North Central Transvaal). In Soweto officials say that the conventional controls have given way to the "greatest circumspection" (DL: West Rand). Today, the "emphasis has shifted from control and prosecution to service" (AB: Port Natal). Most officials emphasized the "positive service" that the boards now make available: "streamlining the movement, recruitment, and processing of labor"; "becoming development and service organizations"; "using scientific tests for C S R " and "surveys of employers" (AB: West Rand and East Rand; C C : Eastern Cape). Indeed, there is an aspiration to do more, "to start manpower development centres" (LB: Durban), to "be trained to provide better service" (LB: Carletonville), to improve services for "the more educated kind of black" who is "not so prepared to accept the rules and regulations" (LB: Kempton Park). For some officials, the labor bureau under the new dispensation has become a sort of mediator: "They look to us for a service, a job. They can bring a complaint against the employer. We are a sort of ombudsman" (DL: Port Natal). Officials now recognize that under the "new dispensation" their encounters with Africans must take on a different character. Though few officials question the necessity of control, there is a developing understanding of appearances and manner that deflect attention from coercive methods. "Our people no longer wear uniforms," one official pointed out (DL: Port Natal). Others note that "they are trying to eliminate the small friction points." The deputy minister, reflecting on the new methods, observed, "we always try to do it in a compassionate manner. . . . [There] is a streak of humanity in all this." In Johannesburg, the room filled with long wooden benches

92-

State against the Market

where Africans wait endlessly to be processed by various officials of the chief commissioner's office is no longer sterile and indifferent: there are four mounted color televisions showing nonstop African wildlife films. In 1985 officials spoke of a wholly new "image." "In the past, it was control and administration; and today, it is development and administration," one influential official concluded. "The control part, we've gotten rid of that" (AB: East Rand). This new tone has been reflected in the department's efforts to forcibly resettle millions of Africans who remain resident, despite years of government warnings and notices, in "black spots" nestled among the white farms. In 1982 the government instructed officials to avoid the appearance of coercion and the use of violence: In the course of the settlement process, persons must be treated with the necessary human kindness at all times. Those being settled must be treated with respect and with sympathy for their problems, and the impression must not be created that they are no longer welcome in the white areas. The sincerity and reasonableness of the Government's policy of separate development must constantly, whenever the opportunity arises, be explained and emphasised. Under no circumstances should action be taken which would give Black persons reason to be dissatisfied.21

The new tone has been combined with redoubled efforts to find or create collaborative leaders, to create "privileged" strata with good landholdings in the bantustan resettlement camps, and to enlist landlords in the eviction process. Where such "voluntary" methods fail, officials have moved readily to more coercive, but still less public, means: threats to the more marginal, usually female and elderly, residents; individual evictions using the pass laws; closing schools and clinics, cutting off bus service, canceling trading licenses, and removing the engines from water pumps. Only after such "non-coercive" means fail does the department now turn to the traditional methods—encirclement by police, house-to-house searches, the bulldozing of homes, and the use of trucks and buses to transport the remaining stalwarts to their new "homes" in the bantustans." But that is hardly the preferred method in the present period, as such direct coercion complicates, rather than advances, the cause of labor control. In 1985 officials were quite unwilling to entertain the idea of "forced removals": "Squatting, we are still controlling that. But that also is a very sensitive

Reconstructing the Labor Framework

93

area. We don't really remove them unless we can provide alternative accommodation. The unlawful ones we are still repatriating, but that is also in very low gear. I'm not going to send twenty trucks and move these people. This is a sensitive thing" (DL: West Rand). Delegating Control Functions to Employers and Africans The Riekert Commission focused on the central point of disaffection and the state's incapacity: the daily and growing confrontation between agents of the state and African workers in the cities. The commission urged, in particular, the abandonment of legal provisions that barred most Africans from the prescribed white areas for longer than seventy-two hours and that in practice required surveillance and raids, the daily scrutiny of passes, and the jailing of hundreds of thousands of Africans each year. These police encounters on the streets, the commission wrote, "seriously disturb relations between population groups" and cause "bitterness and frustration."" The commission proposed, instead, that the burden of control be lifted from state institutions and placed on employers and approved accommodation, "without detriment to the effectiveness of control." 24 Now, "employers are seldom if ever brought to justice for the unlawful employment of Black workers," the commission observed. Their unlawful practices open the gateway to the cities and "undermine the whole system." It urged, consequently, stricter enforcement, higher fines, and the imprisonment of employers. 25 Subsequent to the report, the government announced a fivefold increase in the maximum fines (from R i o o to R500) and measures to force court appearances by employers.26 Against the tenor of existing practice, the government sought to force employers to become the mechanism for applying influx control—the first "pillar" upon which the "ordering of the urbanisation process" would rest.27 Controlled accommodation was the second "pillar." The commission recommended that "approved accommodation" become a legal prerequisite for lawful employment, placing the burden of control on a seemingly anonymous housing market and not very anonymous, but African, township officials. The market was severely and artificially constricted by government policies that froze new urban housing construction between 1968 and 1974 and that, since then,

94

State against the Market

has channeled most housing construction funds to the bantustans. The township officials over the short term were white magistrates and board staff who could be trusted to condition approved accommodation on lawful employment and the availability of housing (magistrate, Empangeni; LB: Durban). But, as one official responsible for the largest African township observed, the goal is to move away from a white officialdom applying white laws: "You won't have the type of influx control that you have now. Control will be exercised by tying the presence of people to housing," which in turn "could be exercised through the Black Councils" (AB: West Rand). The bantustans were the third "pillar" of control and, indeed, the greatest hope for delegation. The entire thrust of housing and decentralization policies, both before and after the Riekert Commission, has encouraged the growth of an African "commuter" population: people working in white industry but living within the bantustans and the political domain of rurally based African collaborative elites. Housing construction in the urban townships has stalled. In 1978 just 1 0 new housing units were built in Langa, Nyanga, and Gugulethu, outside Cape Town, and just n o in all of Soweto. In 1980 the West Rand Administration Board built no new housing units in Soweto, and in 1 9 8 1 it built a meager 48. 28 At the same time, administration boards were urged to divert their housing budgets to foster development in the distant bantustans instead. In 1979 West Rand board officials were already discussing aloud the shift of development funds to Bophuthatswana and the practicality of a twohour bus trip to reach places of employment in Johannesburg. By 1979 the board for the Vaal Triangle had already begun housing work in QwaQwa; the Central Transvaal board was at work in Mabopane, inside Bophuthatswana, and the Eastern Cape board in Mdantsane, inside the Ciskei. 29 Just four years later, virtually all the administration boards had shifted their housing efforts to the bantustans. The Port Natal Administration Board had completely stopped housing construction for the remaining urban townships in Natal, while contributing R i o million a year to the development trust in KwaZulu (AB: Port Natal). The Central Transvaal board, too, ceased housing construction in the proximate townships, shifting its efforts to Mabopane (AB: Central Transvaal). While the Western Transvaal board built a few houses at Carletonville and Klerksdorp, the great preponderance of the housing budget was expended at Itsosene, inside Bophutha-

Reconstructing the Labor Framework

95

t s w a n a ( D L : Western Transvaal). East R a n d officials talk proudly of employing " t e a m s " to build housing f a r off in the northern Transv a a l and the n e w Ndebele bantustan ( L B : Germiston). In the northern Transvaal itself, the board is feverishly redrawing its borders and contriving to create a universal commuter class: " O u r achievement is to resettle all o u r townships in the white areas. In Louis Trichardt, w e are in the midst of resettling all the Venda; in the next five years, there will be no Venda in Louis Trichardt" ( D L : Pietersburg). T h e policy has, in fact, succeeded in shifting the labor balance in f a v o r of bantustan-based commuter labor. In 1 9 7 0 there were 290,000 A f r i c a n c o m m u t e r s — a l m o s t half (43 percent) in K w a Z u l u , nearly a third (28 percent) in Bophuthatswana, and more than a tenth ( 1 3 percent) in the Ciskei. Between 1 9 7 0 and 1 9 7 6 the number of commuters nearly doubled, to 5 3 6 , 1 0 0 , and it had risen an additional 4 0 percent by 1 9 8 1 , to 7 3 9 , 7 0 0 commuters. These commuters n o w represent about 1 3 percent of the labor force, up from 5 . 2 percent in 1 9 7 0 . 3 0 With housing funds effectively diverted to the bantustans, one should expect that a growing number of workers will sleep there. T h e government, however, has sought much more than the displacement of sleeping accommodations; it has tried to devolve labor control functions as well, placing greater responsibility f o r laborrepressive activities in the hands of bantustan officialdom. The minister of cooperation and development entered into a secret agreement with his allied bantustan leaders in 1 9 7 5 that provided f o r a bantustan takeover of " e f f l u x " control. Officials in the Transkei, Bophuthatswana, and L e b o w a (Phatudi) agreed to administer the labor control regulations as set out by South A f r i c a n authorities: " M a g istrates of Black States will have no discretion in the matter and endorsements not based on such requisitions o r call-in documents will be of no effect and holders of such documents will be in the White areas illegally and will be dealt with a c c o r d i n g l y . " " These understandings were formally incorporated into the treaties that accompanied the "independence" of the Transkei, Bophuthatswana, the Ciskei, and Venda. 3 2 Since independence, during the period of the late 1 9 7 0 s and particularly the early 1 9 8 0 s , the government has sought to give concrete meaning to these legal forms. The department has expanded the role of "national representatives" in the pass courts, thus "consolidating and stimulating the homeland authorities' traditional authority and responsibility." In practice, these officials have been asked to take

State against the Market

charge of "their 'lost' and 'willful' subjects" and help repatriate them to the bantustans. 33 Bantustan officialdom has tried to integrate its activities into those of the larger labor framework. The "Labour Manual" prepared by Venda's Department of Internal Affairs incorporates all of South Africa's labor conventions, including call-in cards, attestation, and requisitioning; it acknowledges the jurisdiction of South African labor officials in authorizing employment and instructs district officers to organize "teams of workers" for seasonal agricultural work. 3 " To keep the contract system for urban workers within the orbit of rural bantustan officials, the government has moved "attestation" procedures to urban labor bureaus (where they were moving in practice anyway). There, bantustan officials, maintaining the fiction of relevance, approve contracts, stamp papers, and collect fees. The Ciskei bantustan regime, now "independent," has tried to reinvigorate labor recruitment and to provide better service for white industrialists. Above all, it has had to come to terms with Mdantsane, the second largest African township in South Africa, though officially a Ciskei commuter town servicing East London. The Ciskei government took charge of the tribal labor bureaus and the labor bureau in Mdantsane, and it has tried to "ratior.alise" labor recruitment and selection. The newly created Manpower Development Centre provides computerized data banks, as a Ciskei government promotional pamphlet puts it, to "guarantee prompt attention and speedy processing of employers' requisitions for labour." The pamphlet promises a "large labour pool" and selection procedures that grant "preference" to "those who have the required experience and a clean work record." 35 Such rationalization has been buttressed by bantustan police terror on a large scale. Chief Lenox Sebe labeled the South African Allied Workers' Union (SAAWU), the largest African union in East London, a "front organisation of the S.A. Communist Party" and subsequently detained hundreds of its members and leaders and eventually banned the union in the Ciskei. 36 When 80 percent of Mdantsane's commuters boycotted the buses rather than pay increased fares, the bantustan government responded with police and vigilante assaults on taxi and train passengers, mass detentiors, and torture at the soccer stadium, and by declaring a state of emergency.37 In both cases, the attempted suppression of S A A W U and the bus boycott, the bantustan regime worked closely with the Special

Reconstructing the Labor Framework

97

Branch of the South African Police.38 In this extreme instance, delegation to African agents did indeed seem to extend the institutions of labor control. Retrenching and Stratifying The labor control machinery could never plausibly be applied evenly across the face of the entire South African labor market. Yet during the late 1960s and early 1970s the government struggled to forge "one system," to achieve uniformity and comprehensiveness in application. But even in this period of intensification, there was a certain purposeful unevenness. Each variation on the Bantu Labour Act preserved the concept of permanent urban residents—individuals who, because of long continuous residence (fifteen years), long continuous employment with a single employer (ten years), or marriage to a long-time resident, could be exempted from the harshest control measures. In that sense, failure to apply labor restrictions created forms of labor market privilege. Still, the government tried to narrow these areas of nonenforcement and privilege. In 1967 the van Rensburg Committee condemned Section 1 0 rights, since, contrary to their original purpose, they encourage "huge numbers of Bantu . . . to get permission" to stay in the urban areas and acquire these rights. 39 It proposed instead that "uniform control measures" be applied to all, whether in the white rural or urban areas. 40 After 1968 the government built virtually no new housing for urban families and, using a particularly strict interpretation of the law, barred contract workers from acquiring rights to permanent or family residence in the white areas. The Riekert Commission offered a new, potentially more manageable and less costly, method for maintaining control. It proposed retrenchment and intensification—the application of control measures in a concentrated way at a reduced number of points. This purposeful unevenness represented a retreat to the most defensible points of application, with potentially profound consequences for the African labor market. By pulling back from certain areas, the state would open up new areas of "privilege" and disadvantage and foster pronounced divisions within the African working population. The Riekert Commission proposed that influx control be imposed at two critical points, approved accommodation and approved employment, and that control measures applied in the streets

98

State against the Market

be abandoned—in effect, that pass law enforcement be phased out. It sought increased penalties for employers unlawfully engaging African workers and intensified controls over squatting and illegal lodging. The government, accordingly, proposed legislation that provides greatly increased penalties for "unlawfully occupying or allowing such unlawful occupation" of urban land or housing, and greatly extended police powers for searching premises in the African townships. 41 The Riekert Commission acknowledged that the tribal labor bureau network was effectively moribund and proposed, as a substitute, a retreat to rural "central assembly centres" under the control of the administration boards. Here, the white bureaucracy, "after consultation with the governments of Black states," could carry out "selection, orientation and medical examinations." 42 The subsequent legislation proposed by the government made clear that such centers would be responsible for recruiting labor and documenting lawful employment and accommodation. 43 The legislation was slow to be enacted, but the department and some administration boards have tried to approximate the recommendations. Administration board jurisdictions have been enlarged informally to include the bantustans, "independent" or otherwise, and the boards have been encouraged to create de facto assembly centers. The Central Transvaal board, for example, has settled on two such locations "just across the fence," at magistrates' offices in Bophuthatswana. At Hammanskraal and Enkeleldebos on the South African side of the "border," liaison officers from the board formalize the employment contracts of workers headed for Pretoria and the West Rand (AB: Central Transvaal; deputy secretary; DL: Central Transvaal; LB: Hammanskraal). These central assembly areas disadvantage large expanses of the bantustans where there are no functioning labor bureaus and where use of such centers would require traveling extraordinary distances. Yet for the labor control framework, this reform has the advantage of reintroducing "professional" administration into portions of the rural areas and allowing genuine screening, authorization, orientation, and allocation. If "we had functioning assembly centers," the legislative advisor points out, "then we could insist that the labor wait there to be requisitioned." The government has decided, in effect, to dismantle the most elaborate aspects of its control apparatus in the developing com-

Reconstructing the Labor Framework

99

muter areas. Though these workers are formally contract workers from the bantustans, and therefore subject to "requisitioning," "attestation," 7z-hour restrictions, and so forth, officials have chosen to close their eyes and treat them as "locals." The Port Natal Administration Board considers long-time Umlazi and KwaMashu residents as "administrative Section ios"—in effect, locals with preferred access to housing and employment who may freely seek work on their own. At the same time, this category encompasses some bantustan residents, previously contract workers, who may no longer be distinguished and who may now gain access to more secure urban work (AB: Port Natal; DL: Port Natal). Similar administrative compromises are in effect in the Eastern Cape, where those displaced to Mdantsane have been assured of a preferential status comparable to Section 10 rights, and in the Transvaal, where those in the border areas may seek permanent employment in Pretoria as if they are "locals" (deputy secretary).44 Other boards have found it convenient to draw a circle around their white cities and create African areas where control regulations and enforcement have been relaxed and where the resident populations have gained a preferred market position. A form of "local" status has been conferred in effect within artificially fixed radiuses around Empangeni and Richard's Bay and around Pietersburg and Tzaneen, taking in Sishego in Lebowa and Nkowakowa in Gazankulu (secretary of interior, Gazankulu; DL: Western Transvaal). On the other hand, the Riekert Commission acknowledged the "political factors underlying the legislation" and chose not to tamper with the coloured labor preference policy and the strict controls on African labor in the Western Cape. 45 Here, the government attempted to maintain and intensify labor controls: squatter areas were subjected to intense pressure—sometimes nightly raids and bulldozing of tents and ramshackle shacks—and all new housing construction was stopped in Cape Town's African townships. The government intensified pass law enforcement, conducting sweeps of the squatter areas and busing the illegals back to the Transkei and Ciskei; round-the-clock roadblocks have been established at du Toit's Kloof Pass and Sir Lowry's Pass, the two main road routes to the Western Cape, to monitor the flow of illegals.46 Between 1 9 7 7 , the advent of the Riekert Commission, and 1982, pass law arrests in the Western Cape doubled, from 8,845 T O I 6 , O I Z . 4 7 But the attempt to hold the Western Cape as a coloured and white preference area

IOO

State against the Market

through draconian methods collapsed under the pressure of African persistence. Squatter areas such as Crossroads could not be cleared without unacceptably high levels of violence; distant townships and formal squatter areas such as Khayelitsha could be created, but the policy could not stem the flow of people. By 198 5 the attempt to create an island of unreconstructed controls in the Western Cape was in disrepute: pass law enforcement was suspended, forced squatter removals were applied only erratically, and the coloured labor preference policy was abandoned (DL: Western Cape). African women from the rural areas continue to encounter substantial barriers to labor migration. Women who live "legally" in commuter areas near Pietersburg and Durban may take up employment in the urban areas, but the great majority of rural women are pushed into the dark recesses of the labor market. Because of governmental regulations, the requisitioning of labor for the urban areas is confined almost exclusively to men. The magistrate at Malumulele (Gazankulu) recalled no requisitions for women; the Interior Department official in Lebowa noted that "99.99 percent of requisitions are for men." Port Natal Administration Board officials state that they requisition women only for nursing jobs and for domestic service, but "only after local labor is exhausted and only in the immediate areas of KwaZulu." The former chief commissioner for the Western Cape states categorically that no African women are permitted to enter as contract workers—"no exceptions"—and comparably firm exclusions have been applied in the western Transvaal and the Witwatersrand (former C C : Western Transvaal; LB: Langa and Carletonville). In the last case, the chief commissioner selectively allows administration boards to approve their own requisitions, with the condition that "you cannot approve any women from the tribal areas" (former C C : Witwatersrand). The relaxation and nonenforcement of controls have created distinct strata within the African community; in effect, a hierarchy of class groupings. Section 1 0 Africans with urban residence rights increasingly participate in markets for labor (and housing); they may take up employment relatively freely, bypassing the labor bureau system altogether. They enjoy a preferred market status, with ready access to the more stable and better-paying sectors of the economy, in part because the labor system grants formal priority to "local" workers, but also because of their permanence, mobility, and easier access to education and training. Commuters and "administrative

Reconstructing the Labor Framework

101

Section i o s " are in a less enviable position: their access to housing is restricted and many must travel considerable distances to and from work. Nonetheless, their employment access approximates that of the "locals" who may find their own work unrestrained by legal migrancy and contract employment restrictions. They sometimes live in areas, such as the Durban complex, where police enforcement of the pass laws has been abandoned. 48 The position of commuter administrative Section xos represents a considerable advance on that of illegal squatters, who maintain marginal access to the industrial labor market and are for the most part confined to the least stable and least remunerative areas of work. There are perhaps a million Africans in the Winterveld area, an informal settlement of non-Tswanas living inside Bophuthatswana. They exist in a legal limbo, denied recognition and services by the Bophuthatswana government and denied access to the legal labor market—a right conventionally granted by the administration board to Tswana commuters at Mabopane and Ga-Rankuwa. 49 In Inanda, outside Durban, the board has legalized the status of a narrow class of residents: those born in Inanda, those resident there since 1968, and those living at a small Urban Foundation project. But for the rest, perhaps half a million squatters, the labor market remains a gray area. They may not register as workseekers and join the legal job market unless an employer hires them off the street, provides accommodation, and sends a specific requisition back through the bureaucratic channels to a magistrate's office somewhere in KwaZulu (AB: Port Natal). Those male Africans who remain in the rural areas to await recruiters and requisitions fall near, though not at, the bottom of the hierarchy. They may only legally be engaged as migrant contract workers. In practice, their employment is confined to unskilled work (as laborers, night watchmen, and night soil removers), "dirty" work (the foundries at I S C O R or the mine pits), "unpopular" work (seasonal farm labor), and "unpopular" firms. Their employment is effectively confined to certain sectors: the gold- and coal-mining industries, construction (particularly state-supported civil engineering projects), farming (seasonal work in the sugar, fruit, and wine industries), and, above all, the public sector—municipalities, the railways, electrical power facilities, and the iron and steel industry.50 A labor official at Motetsi (Lebowa) observes: "Most requisitions that come here people know are not good." In the Transkei, the recruit-

IO!

State against the Market

ing of migrant workers for manufacturing has remained static since 1 9 7 4 , with virtually no increase since 1 9 7 c . 5 1 This marginalized rural population is further segmented by the unevenness of the labor framework in the rural areas. The state presence amidst this horrid poverty paradoxically creates a crude element of opportunity. Some areas remain tenuously connected to the migrant labor system. The Northern Transvaal board sends its mobile unit into a portion of Lebowa. Other boards, using "labor zoning" principles endorsed by the Riekert Commission, have concentrated their recruitment and development efforts in more narrowly defined and proximate areas: the Western Transvaal board in sections of Bophuthatswana, the East Rand board in a newly fashioned KwaNdebele bantustan, the Port N a t a l board in K w a Z u l u and, secondarily, in sections of Transkei (LB: Lichtenburg; A B : East Rand and Port Natal). But large and perhaps growing sections of these rural bantustans fall completely outside the labor market. The mobile van from Pietersburg neglects most of L e b o w a and all of Gazankulu. Requisitions are infrequent or completely absent in large parts of K w a Z u l u and T r a n s k e i . " Marginalization and impoverishment are particularly acute in the latter: there are no opportunities for commuter labor as in Bophuthatswana and few opportunities for illegal flight as in K w a Z u l u . " State control of the urban labor market has helped create this marginality near the bottom of the status hierarchy; ironically, the state's withdrawal or inability to establish a broader bureaucratic presence here has turned this marginality into a dire struggle for life. African w o m e n in the bantustans are at the bottom of the African status hierarchy. In each area of the African labor m a r k e t — t h e squatter settlements, commuter towns, and villages, whether proximate to functioning labor offices or in the more remote a r e a s — w o m e n have been assigned a secondary and marginal position. Strictures on recruiting African w o m e n to w o r k in the cities remain in place, even as other strictures have been selectively relaxed. For them, contract labor, even in unpopular industrial sectors, remains a privilege, available only by exception or by illegal means. In the context of desperate rural poverty and rising labor surpluses, increasing numbers of African w o m e n may have chanced illegal flight, accounting perhaps for the rising proportion of w o m e n amongst

Reconstructing the Labor Framework

103

those arrested for pass law infractions in the major cities (26 percent in 1982, up from 1 3 percent in 1 9 7 7 ) . " T h e Limits of R e f o r m The Riekert Commission acknowledged the contradictions and limits of the labor control framework and touched off a major exercise in reconstruction. The burden of the reconstructed order was to be carried by employers in the labor market and by African officials in the townships and bantustans. They were to bring regularity and comprehensiveness to control activities implemented only erratically by the present machinery. By taking on these delegated activities, employers and African officials would diminish the state's exposure: their effective participation would diminish the need for direct coercion and would lessen the visible presence of the central state in the market. But will employers, driven by the threat of heavy fines and jail sentences, carry the burden of control and strictly limit illegal African employment? The breakdown and unevenness of control methods resulted, in the first instance, from the pervasive accommodation of employer needs, even the sanctioning of illegal employment, and the withering of the staff, finances, and will to police the system. There is an unreality to stiffer penalties when officials at the highest levels acknowledge that the "inspectorate is a shambles" and when only seven inspectors police the whole of the Durban metropolitan complex. Indeed, local officials only reluctantly recommend employers for prosecution and the courts almost universally decline to apply the enhanced fines in the reconstructed order: the R500 fine in law is effectively a R 1 0 0 maximum fine in practice. Will African township officials, using the instrument of approved accommodation, enforce the strictures on illegal residence? It is difficult to reflect on the experience of urban areas near KwaZulu and Bophuthatswana with their enormous squatter areas or on the narrowly based African township councils, scorned by the overwhelming majority of urban residents, and imagine that this constitutes the "second pillar" supporting control. At present, the African labor officials seem almost incapable of processing simple job requisitions,

I04

State against the Market

assigning labor, controlling visible squatting, and collecting township rents. Despite the Riekert Commission recommendations, the deputy secretary at the Department of Cooperation and Development denies that any set of officials, African or otherwise, could impose control through approved accommodation: "For housing [approved accommodation] to work, you must check houses at night. In Soweto alone, there are 120,000 families, 600,000 people; [imagine trying] to find the 40,000 illegals. I'll get a fucking riot." The attempt to transfer major financial and administrative responsibilities to elected African councils in the townships has foundered in the township violence of 1984—86 and in the corruption of collaborative officials. Community electoral boycotts, mass resignations of town councillors, and some assassinations left many townships without collaborative structures, forcing the administration boards back into direct administration. Even where the African councils have continued to function, the breakdown of rent collections and squatting regulation has forced the administration boards to choose between chaos and the reintroduction of controls. In Mamelodi, near Pretoria, for example, rent collections in late 1985 were 59 percent in arrears, prompting a beleaguered white official to comment, "They [African councils] can't cope. If you leave their hand, they fall down" (DL: North Central Transvaal). Soweto in the recent period is still "fairly clean from a squatting point of view," but, as one official notes, "the whites are still controlling it" (DL: West Rand). Will the bantustan officialdom be able to take on the greatly enhanced responsibilities for labor controlf In the reconstructed order, bantustan officials would regulate assembly and commuter areas; they would, under treaty agreement, regulate border crossings and organize contract labor; and they would impose political order on African laboring communities. That role, of course, is pure fantasy, as the tribal structures have emerged as increasingly corrupt and ineffectual. The government has, in fact, invested heavily in these collaborative structures: the number of African officials in the bantustans increased two and a half times between 1973 and 1981 ; wages and salaries increased eight times.55 But there is little evidence that this rising investment has translated into effective control. The intense effort in the Ciskei has degenerated into police violence, martial law, and official corruption. In KwaZulu influx control has com-

Reconstructing the Labor Framework

105

pletely broken down, and Africans move freely and illegally to the white urban complex. The takeover of labor services by an "independent" Bophuthatswana has led to a collapse of "professional" services and the networks of tribal labor bureaus. Ironically, the attempt in recent years to rely more heavily on the bantustans has produced a greatly enhanced role for the administration boards. With the breakdown of effective administration in the African rural areas, the boards have been encouraged to "attach themselves" to a bantustan and to play an expanded role in resettlement and housing construction, as well as labor recruitment and allocation (deputy secretary; legislative advisor). The most direct form of involvement is the construction of new administration board facilities in the bantustans themselves. The Port Natal Administration Board now operates offices as part of the KwaZulu governmental complex in Umlazi and KwaMashu and plans to open new ones at Tzuma to service the growing squatter areas around Inanda, a released area; it has opened up a labor office in a KwaZulu governmental complex in Ngwelezana, just outside Empangeni and not far from Richard's Bay. In each case, these administration board offices register workseekers, post job requisitions, and register contracts; these offices have become the essential bureaucratic means within the bantustan for gaining access to lawful employment in the white areas. The Northern Transvaal Administration Board is deeply involved in the labor market of Lebowa. For the commuter areas proximate to white towns, the administration board circumvents the tribal authorities altogether, "processing" African labor directly. "Actually, in Pietersburg, our labor bureau acts as a tribal labor bureau," an official observes. "African labor comes here to us" (DL: Northern Transvaal). At the same time, the board has moved directly into the bantustan labor market. In about one-third of Lebowa, the board operates a mobile van that travels a fixed route each week, stopping at various local tribal offices. The mobile unit carries three officials from the administration board and one from the tribal authority. Like the Port Natal offices, these units provide a final and necessary legal step to authorized employment outside the bantustan. In the future, the board hopes to operate thirteen such vans, expanding the service to Gazankulu. In other areas of Lebowa, like Bolobedu, administration board officials will sometimes accompany employers and set up shop at the magistrate's office. Other boards have set up

io6

State against the Market

shop at the "borders," serving as control points, communicating requisitions to assembly areas inside the bantustans, and acting as immediate repositories for labor requests from more distant administration areas. The Central Transvaal Administration Board has established a border office at Hammanskraal that communicates just across the "border" by radio to the magistrate's office serving as an "assembly center" for labor. It, like similar offices of the Western and Northern Transvaal boards, processes and forwards labor requests from the immediate urban areas, but also from the West and East Rand (DL: Central Transvaal, Western Transvaal, and Northern Transvaal). To give effect to influx control in the Western Cape, the administration board there has employed buses to transport thousands of illegals back to the Transkei and then has established police roadblocks at the "border crossings" to prevent the return of the illegals." In practice, then, the administrative boards, while attempting to expand the role of the bantustans, have themselves become more deeply involved in regulating the market and more directly involved in the bantustans. The very developments and contradictions that forced officials to undertake this reconstruction have blocked efforts to delegate control functions to African officials. Indeed, in the process, the state has come to play a larger and more visible role in the market, only compounding the problem of control and legitimacy.

Will this large state presence be obscured by the fragmentation of the state control apparatus and the deemphasizing of directly coercive methods? In practice, the dismantling of the Department of Cooperation and Development may prove to be a paper exercise, with few genuine consequences on the ground where Africans daily confront the reality of the labor control framework. Functional responsibility has been transferred to other departments, but effective responsibility has remained with the administration boards. They now act as "agents" of the various departments, carrying out control activities in a unified, unfragmented way, despite the paper reorganization. By all accounts, the fragmentation of the Department of Cooperation and Development has done little to diminish the centrality of the boards, though their future functions are somewhat uncertain. Many administration board and labor bureau officials who have continued with their responsibilities largely unaltered seem bemused by the shuffle at the top. "I don't see how anything has

Reconstructing the Labor Framework

107

changed," one official observed (DL: Orange-Vaal). Whether it's labor bureaus or passport control, "it all amounts to the same thing" (LB: Boksburg; also CC: Western Cape and DL: Central Transvaal). The administration board officials, the "agents" for labor distribution, see the Department of Manpower as inexperienced and uninterested in "placing black people" (DL: West Rand).S7 The deputy director general of the Department of Manpower, now formally responsible for labor allocation, admitted that the administration boards, as agents, have retained effective control. "This is not a very satisfactory situation," he stated. "We would very much like to have this [labor placement for blacks and whites] rationalized under one roof [Manpower Utilization]. . . . We are very anxious to get it under our control." But up until now, he admitted, the department has had "no real effect" on the process. "For Africans, not very much has changed." Over the years, the government has sought to rationalize, centralize, and obscure the control machinery. It has moved from a rudimentary bureaucracy concerned with expelling redundant labor to a sophisticated regulative and allocative apparatus, and, recently, to a more antiseptic development and service agency. In the process, state labor offices have constantly been renamed, from "pass offices" to labor bureaus, from Johannesburg City Council offices to those of the Bantu Affairs administration boards, to administration boards, and, recently, to development boards and guidance and placement and orientation offices. But even today in the African townships, if one asks directions to the labor bureau or administration board, one encounters puzzled looks. To find the labor bureau, one must ask for the "pass office." For Africans, "not very much has changed" (deputy secretary for labor). Finally, can we expect, failing all else, that the pattern of retrenchment and stratification will create strata of privileged Africans anxious to support the order of control? To be plausible, that strategy requires that the "beneficiaries" of uneven application come to value their privilege and to collaborate in the system's maintenance. It is too early, of course, to dismiss that eventuality as implausible. Nonetheless, there is a great deal of evidence to suggest that urban Africans, living in the freest niches of this controlled market, are the most disaffected and rebellious. In the post-Riekert reform period, the urban townships have been racked by school boycotts, strikes,

io8

State against the Market

and marches, by attacks on administration board offices, and by murders of collaborating African councillors. Since 1984 the government has been forced to deploy military units in townships across South Africa to protect the order of control, particularly the coterie of local collaborating elites. Privilege creation in the present period, rather than limiting the scope of state control, has brought increased resort to direct and visible coercion. Immobilisme: Political Struggle a n d Faltering R e f o r m The process of reconstructing the labor framework has brought out intense conflicts within the state: between politicians w h o make policy and operate in larger arenas and officials who administer the labor control system and operate with a narrower base of support; between political elements allied with business, intent on some kind of "reform," and political elements allied with the officials, w h o seem unwilling to relinquish coercive methods and the elaboration of the repressive order. These conflicts, as we shall see in this concluding section, have proved debilitating. The reconstructed labor framework remains in pieces, a few fragments in place, though for the most part, not yet financed or legislated. The major premise of the reformed order—reduced dependence on pass law enforcement and direct coercion—has been implemented unevenly, largely in response to the breakdown of control mechanisms and the sustained opposition of Africans and outside actors. The officials, while continuing to play a market role, find themselves increasingly isolated, without support from identifiable constituent groups. Amidst this conflict, neither the process of reconstruction nor the process of elaboration has been able to proceed. Withering Constituencies

for Control

As the costs of maintaining control have risen, as the system has become more unwieldy and contradictory, and as Africans have mobilized against it, the constituencies for control have withered. The organized class actors w h o in the past championed labor controls have pulled back, leaving the state officialdom exposed, without concrete support in civil society. A t the same time, these actors have moved in some cases to lend support to elements within the government moving toward a reconstruction of the labor framework.

Reconstructing the Labor Framework

109

C o m m e r c i a l farmers making the transition to capitalist agriculture prodded the state throughout this century to impose more effective controls on the movements of A f r i c a n labor. T h e South A f r i c a n Agricultural Union pressed f o r the removal of squatters, f o r the intensification and, later, the elimination of labor tenancy, and f o r the development of an effective pass system and the enforcement of labor contracts. O n the eve of the N a t i o n a l party ascendancy after World War II, the S A A U demanded the expulsion of " r e d u n d a n t " Africans f r o m the urban locations, central prison camps f o r f a r m labor, severe controls over the movements of A f r i c a n children on white f a r m s , and, most important, the legal division of the A f r i c a n population into rural and urban sections. 5 8 T h e S A A U continued to demand effective implementation of labor control measures until the early 1 9 7 0 s , when f a r m labor requirements began to change and the need f o r control measures lessened. The S A A U w a s more interested in land consolidation and the forced displacement of Africans to the bantustans. When the Riekert C o m mission took evidence in the late 1 9 7 0 s , the S A A U expressed only perfunctory support for the labor bureaus, the principal administrative mechanism of labor control. " T h e system is of little value to agriculture as it is administered at present," it declared. T h e S A A U w a s more concerned, not surprisingly, with the displacement of rural squatters, sharecroppers, tenants and independent A f r i c a n farmers and the " m a x i m u m consolidation" of black and white areas. 5 9 T h e C h a m b e r of Mines, too, played a central political role in helping fashion South Africa's labor control f r a m e w o r k . Throughout this century, it insisted that the state help construct, maintain, and police a cheap labor system f o r the mines. O n the one hand, the C h a m b e r of Mines urged the state to preserve viable "native reserves" as a necessary backdrop to oscillating labor migration; on the other hand, it w a s a preeminent supporter of the pass laws, influx control, contract and compound labor, and criminal penalties f o r breach of contract. Yet today the mines are attempting to rationalize their labor situation, selectively stabilizing in areas proximate to townships, such as in Kimberley, and systematically seeking the reengagement of experienced miners. With staggering overcrowding, destitution, and labor oversupply in the bantustans, the C h a m b e r of Mines has been able to dismantle T E B A ' s traditional system of depots, labor agents, and runners.

no

State against the Market

It has also been able to abandon its traditional defense of the labor control framework. T E B A officials now emphasize the role of markets and the organization's attention to service, testing, and communication. "The migratory labor system is a bad system anyplace in the world," a T E B A official concluded. "But in a necessary environment, we do a wonderful job. We keep a good contact system with the man at work and his people at home" ( T E B A : KwaZulu). T E B A officials now see themselves as "progressive" competitors for labor in a market environment. The old days, with the "big bwana types, sitting back in their offices," are gone. When black opposition to apartheid, and the pass system in particular, intensified in i 9 6 0 , businessmen from all sectors raised questions about the viability of the labor control framework. Five organizations, led by the Association of Chambers of Commerce and including the Federated Chamber of Industries, beseeched the government to reconsider the "undue restriction of freedom of movement of the Bantu" and to decriminalize the pass system. When violence and black protests became continual after the 1 9 7 3 general strikes and 1 9 7 6 civil disorders, businessmen again urged "reform" of the labor control framework, with an emphasis on opening up urban residence rights and creating opportunities for a "black middleclass." 60 In 1 9 8 2 , after long internal consideration of the Riekert Commission recommendations on labor regulation, the government introduced new labor control legislation—the Orderly Movement and Settlement of Black Persons Bill—that would have further tightened controls over the influx of African workers. Major business organizations in manufacture, however, publicly attacked the bill: "From [our organization's] analysis it will be seen that there are serious anomalies and shortcomings in the draft Bill and at the outset [this organization] must EXPRESS DEEP CONCERN over the apparent disregard for the views and feelings of the Black community evident in the draft legislation." 61 When unrest and a general strike swept the townships on the Witwatersrand in 1984, producing a government crackdown on community and union leaders and the introduction of the army, the organized business community expressed dismay. A joint announcement by all the major business associations, including the Afrikaanse Handelsinstituut, deplored the resort to state violence and warned that the state action threatened the industrial order. 62

Reconstructing the Labor Framework

HI

State control officials, it seems, must now face the growing contradictions in labor control without the direct support of labor control's traditional proponents. As labor requirements have changed, and as the state's role in the market has become more problematic, the mining houses, capitalist farmers, and manufacturers have distanced themselves from the state labor framework. There is, consequently, no longer the self-evident direction and sense of purpose that follows from a coherent political base. Instead, the ascendant class actors, particularly Afrikaner businessmen, have lent their names to the reconstruction of the labor framework, and, most important, to the movement away from directly coercive means. Preserving the Coercive Order In 1979, with considerable fanfare, the Riekert Commission announced the restructuring of South Africa's labor control framework. At the base of its recommendations were the two pillars of control, legal employment and approved accommodation, and the relaxation of police activity and pass law enforcement. Specifically, the commission recommended that Africans be allowed to move freely, circumscribed only by the necessity of work and accommodation, but no longer subject to the 72-hour limitation. It has taken six tumultuous years to move away from the pass laws and such formal restrictions on urban entry. The process has left the Riekert "reforms" in disrepute, repackaged in an uncertain program of "orderly urbanization," yet largely unimplemented. Amidst rising unrest and military action in the black areas across South Africa, officials toy with "déconcentration" points, new squatting laws, and housing developments in "independent African states"—all vehicles to block African migration to the cities. There is little evidence in the present period that the reforms have reduced the state presence and depoliticized or universalized the state machinery, and even less evidence that elements of the African working population have been won over to the political and economic orders. The struggle to achieve reconstruction has instead produced a political impasse, leaving the state internally divided and incapable of decisive political movement. The tortuous route to this impasse is illustrative of the incoherence that now characterizes the South African state. The government's White Paper in response to the Riekert Commission in 1979 rejected the repeal of the 72-hour provision, because

112

State against the Market

"achieving the same or a higher degree of effective control without the 72-hour provision may therefore require exceptionally strict application of control at the place of employment and the place of residence." 63 In adopting that position, the government sided with administration board officials who had urged the commission to retain this instrument of direct control.64 Though the government initially rejected the proposal, the minister of cooperation and development persisted in urging the Riekert Commission perspective. Before a seminar in late 1979, Piet Koornhof observed: "Influx control measures should be considerably more effective within the framework of the Riekert report in as much as control will be concentrated at less points. Instead of consistently demanding the production of reference books on the streets, which causes friction, the emphasis will fall more and more on the work and residential situation, as time goes on." 65 In early 1980 the minister made a surprise announcement that, on an experimental basis, the 72-hour restriction would be lifted in Bloemfontein and Pretoria. Later, the deputy minister redefined the exercise as a "test survey."66 The experiment was subverted on the ground by officials who were surprised by the announcement and opposed to relinquishing this legal instrument of control. The commissioner's courts in the two cities were advised by department officials, in effect, to ignore the experiment: "The Honorable Minister has dropped the 72-hour regulation. What does this mean? It means that a black may now not enter a prescribed area for even a single hour." 67 Local officials responsible for the experiment in Pretoria reported that "we had a terrible increase in people jamming the street." The two pillars, employment and housing, are "insufficient," one official concluded. "It is about time somebody told Riekert he made a bloody mistake" (DL: Central Transvaal). That local resistance was reinforced by the general political climate, particularly in the Transvaal, which "made it difficult for that [experiment] to succeed," and by the ambivalence of the security officials (deputy director general, Manpower Utilization). One individual privy to these internal discussions observed: "The security boys want the power to pick up people off the street. They like this sort of thing" (director, business organization). Officials in the labor control bureaucracy, no matter where they were situated, opposed the relaxation of pass law enforcement on

Reconstructing the Labor Framework

113

the streets. At the local labor bureau level, officials were convinced that the proposal, though it "in theory, sounds beautiful," was impractical: "It will not work at this stage"; "you will have chaos" (LB: Kempton Park, Carletonville, Johannesburg, Krugersdorp, Klerksdorp, Germiston, and Boksburg). The opposition was also intense at the middle level, among administration board officials and chief commissioners. Officials believed that influx control would collapse in the absence of the 72-hour limitation and continued police surveillance. "I don't know what they're thinking," one official observed. "You'll have the flood" (AB: East Rand; same point made by AB: Orange-Vaal and Central Transvaal; CC: Witwatersrand and Western Cape). An official in the Eastern Cape noted that Bloemfontein, in the middle of the Orange Free State, one site for the experiment, would not likely draw an "uncontrolled influx." But "we are sitting here next to two vast states [the Transkei and Ciskei bantustans]. If we do away with it [the 72-hour provision], what would be the result? We have nothing to hold it" (CC: Eastern Cape). Even the deputy secretary opposed the change, saying that the Riekert Commission offered "fine ideas" but that they "don't work on the ground." With strong "border control," it might be possible to entertain such a relaxation in Pretoria and Cape Town, but "you can't do it," he concluded. "You get buses and trains coming every morning; you would get a bloody war if the police are going to check them all." Such opinions, so clearly expressed, no doubt had an impact at cabinet level. "I would be a damn fool if I didn't take the advice of my officials," the deputy minister noted. In 1980, to try to give effect to the broader recommendations of the Riekert Commission, the minister of cooperation and development offered three major pieces of legislation called the "Koornhof bills," one of which attempted to strengthen the mechanisms of control at the workplace and residence. The legislation got rid of "Section 10 rights," except for those individuals already possessing them, and restricted new residence rights to those with lawful employment and accommodation. 68 But the Urban Foundation, the Afrikaanse Handelsinstituut, and other business organizations joined a storm of protest that condemned the legislation as too restrictive and as an intensification of state control over labor mobility. Just four months after introducing the legislation, the minister withdrew

ii4

State against the Market

it, saying, "I have decided that the draft bills should be urgently reviewed to ensure that the final product matches the spirit of the White Paper on the Riekert Commission." 69 The legislation was referred to a select committee on "Legislation Concerning Black Community Development" (the Grosskopf Committee). Consistent with the Riekert Commission reconstruction proposals, the committee report provided for strong employer sanctions and the monitoring (with a search warrant) of illegal lodging, and it reaffirmed that "migrants to the urban areas" should not be controlled "on the streets." 70 It also provided for the relaxation of regulations that in effect froze the number of permanent urban Africans: "Persons who are lawfully resident in the cities . . . would after a period [e.g., five years] be regarded as permanent residents, if they so wish." 7 1 The report remained private and was directly opposed by the director general of cooperation and development, who remained committed to pass law enforcement and more restrictive principles for limiting the development of an urban working class. 72 When new draft legislation finally emerged from the department and cabinet, there was little sign of the select committee emphasis on relaxed passed law enforcement and permanent urban Africans. The more restrictive view had apparently won out in cabinet. The "Orderly Movement and Settlement of Persons Bill" provided restricted access to workseeker permits and tighter controls over urbanization, including increased penalties for employers (R5,ooo or twelve months in prison), wider powers to search for unauthorized lodgers, unrestrained by notice or warrant, and the right to close urban areas to new workers where the minister determined that there was a surplus of labor. The existing provisions restricting the acqui sition of permanent urban residence rights were retained essentiall) unaltered.75 The opposition to the new draft legislation was immediate, heated, and effective. Intense criticism was voiced by prominent business organizations—the Federated Chamber of Industries and the Urban Foundation in particular—which demanded that the legislation be withdrawn, "mainly because it remains completely unacceptable to black people." "It is so fundamentally unacceptable that blacks would rather live with the present evil," the head of a prominent business association declared. 74 The legislative advisor reported that 43 6 parties offered comments on the draft legislation, and "everybody condemned it." Even the Manpower Commission,

Reconstructing the Labor Framework

"5

broadly a part of the labor framework, but including representatives from the private sector, condemned the legislation as restrictive (chairman, Manpower Commission). 75 The "Orderly Movement and Settlement of Black Persons Bill" was withdrawn again and sent to a new select committee, placed outside the orbit of African affairs amongst officials concerned with the new constitutional dispensation. 74 In 1985 legislation was enacted that eased administrative confusion in the granting of Section 10 rights, reduced residential qualifications from fifteen to ten years and brought the law into conformity with various court decisions. But genuine restructuring, officials indicated, would have to await a new "orderly urbanization" policy. Such clarity of direction was not readily forthcoming, however. The President's Council recommended the abolition of the pass laws and 72-hour provisions, though this was tied to "déconcentration" policies, informal housing, and squatter control—potentially repressive policies in a new form. Other interdepartmental committees, involving officials across the departments, were deadlocked on how to maintain control over urbanization as directly coercive measures were relaxed and over how to preserve the concept of permanent urban residence rights. The struggle within the state made indeterminate the course of state reform (deputy secretaries, Constitutional Development; DL: East Rand). Orderly Urbanization In March 1985, to break this logjam, the government turned to the newly constituted President's Council, whose chairman, Piet Koornhof, was a figure long familiar in labor control discourse. The President's Council, however, incorporated other elements in society—from business, the universities, and collaborative black strata—that allowed broader considerations to enter the labor control debate. Indeed, the report of the Committee on Constitutional Affairs, when made public in August 1985, seemed to move the state to new, more indirect, forms of control. The committee cleared away the traditional assumptions in labor control by affirming that the system aimed at managing proletarianization was, as this present book argues, a shambles: "The preponderance of evidence before the Committee indicates that influx control has been no use and does not work, and that it has been the direct and indirect cause of countless problems." 77 The problems

116

State against the Market

were of two types, demographic and political. O n the case of demography, the committee acknowledged defeat and a simple irony: the growth of the urban African population comes more from high African birthrates than from rural migration, a process little disturbed by influx controls, pass law arrests, and 72-hour restrictions. Indeed, the attempt to deny urbanization and an "urban culture" to Africans delays the drop in fertility normally associated with urbanization. Urbanization policies such as those that froze housing for African families only served to expand the African presence. 78 Second, the committee discovered that the labor framework "politicised" labor migration. Influx control, it wrote, is "one of the factors that give rise to the greatest discontent, resentment and racial tension among Blacks [Africans]." 79 Influx control has accordingly produced three undesirable results: it has contributed to the "unrest and conflict" in society; it has brought law and authority into disrepute; and, perhaps most important, it has compromised collaborative African officials and institutions, detracting from their "image and acceptability." With a "politicised" urbanization policy, "it seems unlikely that stable and effective Black leadership will emerge." 80 The President's Council report therefore sided with the Riekert Commission in favoring the abolition of the 72-hour provision and of pass law arrests on the streets. It went further in urging the abolition of pass books and any criterion for regulating entry, such as approved accommodation and work. These Riekert provisions were considered "extremely difficult to define" and likely to be ineffectual. 81 In place of the traditional labor framework and the Riekert Commission recommendations, the committee urged a policy of "orderly urbanisation." This new policy accepted that African urbanization ought to be state managed, though without the politicized encounters of police and African citizenry and without the weighty structures of African administration. The committee reaffirmed a commitment to control, however: "The Committee is of the opinion that it should be possible to apply indirect control measures to promote orderly urbanisation by means of disincentives in metropolitan areas in order to reduce pressure on the areas where imbalances occur (e.g. unmanageable influx, imbalances between formal and informal sectors [squatting], inability to provide employment with a resultant threat to order and safety, and so on)." 82 As defined by the

Reconstructing the Labor Framework

"7

committee, "orderly urbanisation" includes mainly "incentives" and "restrictive measures," euphemistically "based chiefly on market forces," but also "direct measures," using laws that "direct and control." T h e report concludes, without presentation of evidence, that existing urban centers are overpopulated and that the African populace, using incentives and disincentives, should be diverted to regional "deconcentrated" urban areas. 8 3 Though the committee urged that the main urban areas provide increased land for controlled squatting, the report concentrated on the spatial ordering of the African population outside the existing urban centers. Officials in the administration boards and the South African Police warned the committee that "you cannot simply open the sluicegates and say that the people can come in. You would have c h a o s . " Migration, without an orderly process, would make the urban areas "ungovernable," overload the infrastructure, and undermine the position of the urbanized African. 8 4 After the publication of the President's Council report, officials mocked the recommendations, calling them impractical and naive. " W e are laughing about the President's Council report," one ranking official declared. "It is theory, philosophy. But we are laughing at it. You cannot implement this report. T h e official can't do anything with i t " (AB: East Rand). T h a t theme dominated official responses at all levels. "Suitable sites" alone, one official pointed out, would never stem the influx from the bantustans (deputy secretary, Constitutional Development). Others were confident that a "rethinking" was underway and that the government would search for other "legs" of control ( D L : North Central Transvaal; West Rand). T h e officials hoped that an interdepartmental committee on urbanization, dominated by officials, would take charge of the situation: " T h a t is why we have our own report" (AB: East Rand). Here, officials were able to press for a "control document," continued recruitment of bantustan migrant labor, and, most important, the retention of Section 10 rights (deputy secretary, Constitutional Development; A B : East Rand; D L : North Central Transvaal). Officials were insistent that the government strengthen the mechanisms that root people in the bantustans: "Assembly centers must be utilized even more. All your vacancies must be sent there. This may be a way of getting people back to their homelands. Change the name to 'employment center.' But he must congregate in his own a r e a " (deputy secretary, Constitutional Development).

118

State against the Market

They were insistent as well that the government retain the distinction in law that demarcated permanent urban Africans and other Africans and that lent a purpose to state administration of labor markets. Some officials thought that the interdepartmental committee report would recommend "entrenching" such "rights"; some simply could not imagine how one could risk undercutting local Africans whose standards depended on state protection; others thought the "positive attributes of Section 10 would outweigh the negatives," though perhaps modified to apply to both whites and blacks (deputy secretary, Constitutional Development; D L : Central Transvaal; West Rand). In fact, the committee reached an impasse, unwilling to relinquish Section 10 rights and unable to define such cherished and elementary Riekert principles as suitable accommodation and a job (advisor, Constitutional Development). 85 At the end of 1985, seven years after the appointment of the Riekert Commission, the government seemed incapable of setting a clear direction, establishing principles to govern the labor market, or drafting new legislation. In 1986 the government moved decisively away from direct administration of the market to an uncertain policy hailed, perhaps euphemistically, as "orderly urbanisation." The state president gave notice in January and tabled legislation three months later that would abolish the traditional pass book, urban areas legislation, and distinctions between urban and migrant workers. Influx control, governed by administration boards and policed on the streets, was, in effect, brought to an end on April 23. But the question of state control over African movement remained unresolved. African residence in the urban areas would now be conditioned on "approved housing," tightly circumscribed by a massive state-created housing shortage (a quarter of a million units by one estimate), group areas laws that restrict land available for African occupation and that bar African residence in white areas, and new initiatives to restrict squatting. 86 The government deplored the "unordered urbanisation" associated with the "building of ineffective ideological walls around our cities." Instead, it offered something "well-planned and systematic"; "uncontrolled squatting" would "not be allowed." The new forms of control would prove more palatable than the old ones, the government argued with a straight face: "The measures prohibiting . . . [squatting] apply equally to people of all population groups." 87

Reconstructing the Labor Framework

119

T h e state labor control machinery, though greatly elaborated during the repressive period ( 1 9 6 0 - 7 6 ) , including the prosecution of 1 0 percent of the A f r i c a n w o r k i n g population in one peak year and the slowing of A f r i c a n urbanization by 1 9 8 0 , emerged ultimately as insufficient and contradictory. T h e operation of the labor control system w a s weakly controlled f r o m the top and thus reshaped and widely circumvented on the bottom. In the A f r i c a n rural areas, the tribal labor bureaus disintegrated; in the white urban areas, the labor machinery either sanctioned the illegal presence of A f r i c a n w o r k seekers or, in many areas, simply lost control of the process. Despite the 7 2 - h o u r provision and other legal instruments f o r limiting the i n f l u x — a n d despite bombastic statements by political leaders promising to " s t a m p o u t " this " e v i l " — s p r a w l i n g squatter areas and an epidemic of illegal lodging came to dominate A f r i c a n working-class communities across South A f r i c a . T h e elaboration of the machinery and the intensified repression only accelerated the processes threatening the order of labor control. In the African rural areas, the processes created g r o w i n g pools of " s u r p l u s " people, w h o s e impoverishment is a g r o w i n g incentive to " i l l e g a l " flight, to overrun the institutions of control. In the urban areas, these processes brought continual African resistance, expressed through w o r k stoppages, general strikes, bus and school boycotts, assaults on administration boards and collaborative officials, and spreading civil unrest in the townships. L a b o r control officials, no doubt supported by political elements, have resisted " r e f o r m " initiatives that would limit dependence on the pass laws and the police. Yet they have not been able to reassert the traditional assumptions about the state and markets; there is little enthusiasm anywhere in society and the state f o r a new round of bureaucratic elaboration and repression. Indeed, the labor control officials seem politically isolated, defending the order of control without the evident support of a coherent set of social interests. T h e ascendant political elements have advanced a reconstructed order that relies less on the pass l a w s and police and more on indirect, political, and, as w e shall soon see, ideological processes. T h e y have sought to retrench and refocus state efforts and to delegate and obscure control processes, while broadening the class basis f o r collaboration and support f o r the regime. But while these elements have appeared ascendant politically, supported enthusiastically by A f r i k a n e r business interests, their initiatives have encountered de-

120

State against the Market

termined resistance; they have advanced the new order unevenly, perhaps disingenuously, and with uncertain consequences. They moved to "reform" labor control only after the machinery had already broken down and after the African population had made direct control impossible to apply, except at great cost. The political process, paralleling the workings of the labor control machinery, has slipped into immobilisme.88

5. Constructing State Ideology

Introduction to Ideological Discourse "Apartheid" had been fashioned by the late 1960s, at the height of the repressive period, into an ascendant, indeed, hegemonic ideology. After a century of modern Afrikaner history, three decades of modern Nationalist mobilization and two decades of governance, this set of principles had emerged as coherent and all-encompassing, gaining broad adherence within the state and the white community. There was now, it seemed, a striking consonance between state ideology and state practice: the ideas and presumptions appeared to be commonsensical; the elaboration of the repressive order, appropriate, almost automatic. 1 This developed apartheid ideology enshrined racial-national groups as privileged social categories and secured and mystified the political and material privileges of the white community. As the state apparatus was elaborated during the first two decades of National party rule, this ideology glorified control and the political moment: national groups achieved realization only when fully associated with their own nations and state institutions; the state itself was placed over civil society, subordinating the will of individuals, classes, and markets. The inequalities that characterized civil society were not obscured or rationalized; they were elevated and inscribed in the state. The emerging centrality of the African "homelands" and independent states provided a broader sense of purpose and moral order for white society even as National party rule faced enormous challenges from below, from abroad, and from some elements within the dominant community itself. 2 By the late 1960s, this racial and statist ideology had achieved broad support in white society. It enjoyed wide acceptance at all levels within the state, from party functionaries and ideologues to departmental secretaries to local officials administering the affairs of 113

Legitimation and Control

Africans. Apartheid had also been embraced by critical class elements within Afrikanerdom—trade unionists, capitalist farmers, and businessmen—whose privileges were now secured by a coherent ideology. This whole edifice of ideas, state practice, and social support was buttressed by institutions in civil society, such as the Dutch Reformed churches and Afrikaans language press, that gave effective voice to the prevailing presumptions. 3 Apartheid ideology, with its complex social support, aspires only to a narrow hegemony, however: there is no philosophic attempt to incorporate the African majority or to legitimate the political and economic orders in society as a whole. Africans are subsumed within the racial-national group ontology and their political expression within the homeland schema; but Africans are not included as subjects or citizens. The state at the center of South Africa's political economy is the possession of the white minority and is invested with its symbols, history, and interests. This racially exclusive state is at the same time expansive, further narrowing the scope for legitimacy. As the ultimate arbiter of the nation's destiny, the state subordinates and regulates all social processes. By managing markets in particular, the state assumes direct responsibility for market results, conflicts, and inequalities. Consequently, the apartheid state is necessarily partial on social questions, with little scope for objectivity or universality. There is a powerful imagery here, reflective of the expansive exercise of state power in the repressive period. The state effort to subordinate markets and gain control over African proletarianization is sustained by a resonant ideology that privileges white identity, asserts the primacy of the state, and helps cement the state's foundations in white society. The interplay of state practice and state ideology therefore reinforces the imagery of unity, coherence, and effective state power. That imagery is reflected in conventional portrayals of South Africa that use the formal ideology to characterize the apartheid regime. "In no other system is the maintenance of racial stratification—systematic and inescapable—the primary object of policy," Leonard Thompson and Andrew Prior write, for example. The African opposition, growing in scale and militancy, is confronted by Afrikaner state power characterized by the "increasingly unequivocal determination of the controllers of the authoritative governmental institutions to maintain white supremacy at all costs." 4

Constructing State Ideology

This imagery and these accounts fail, however, to capture the tensions and contradictory processes that drive the ideological discourse in South Africa. The apparent resonance of state practice and ideology in the late 1960s was historically specific, a momentary respite from the ideological and political struggles that shaped labor control policies after World War II and that have derailed them in the present period. The ideological discourse in modern South Africa has centered on the problems of control and legitimation: how to manage labor markets and the proletarianization of the African majority. Apartheid ideology gained coherence as the governing National party attempted to take control of the African labor market and to overcome the limits of its own control efforts. The repeated insufficiency of control measures in the face of growing pressures on the urban areas and spreading political attacks on state policy brought an increasingly more elaborate state response. Apartheid, the ideological accompaniment of that process, came to assert the primacy of the state; it made no place for African workers, except as "aliens" in South Africa and as citizens of distant imaginary African states. In this introductory section, I shall highlight two contradictory aspects in the constructing of state ideology. First, the coming together of control and ideological processes, characteristic of the repressive period, was in no sense an automatic or reflexive response to state requirements. The state ideology had to be fashioned and made ascendant despite the ideological indifference of some actors and the outright opposition of others. Second, apartheid ideology, momentarily coherent and hegemonic, has itself become an enormous obstacle to state management of the emergent African working class. State control efforts have proved increasingly costly, insufficient, and contradictory, but the ascendant ideology has made it exceedingly difficult to contemplate or reconstruct the order of control. The state consequently stands philosophically preeminent, yet exposed—partial and exclusive, hopelessly illegitimate, and the object of the growing African resistance. Building Support and Coherence As a coherent statement on state and society, apartheid did not arrive full-blown with the National party victory in 1948. The new regime, as we shall see later, was heir to intellectual currents that proposed a central place for the state and racial-national groups, but

126

Legitimation and Control

Afrikaner ideological thinking about these questions was fragmentary. Some themes gained a philosophic basis during the "cultural" movements of the thirties; others were elaborated during the political party debates of the war years. But at the outset of National party rule, the "state ideology" was still undeveloped and unintegrated. Even within Afrikaner ranks, support for the Nationalist ascendancy lacked strong ideological content. Of the three principal economic sectors aligned with the National party—commercial farmers, semi-skilled Afrikaner workers, and Afrikaner businessmen— only representatives of the last seemed wedded to the ideological themes emerging within Afrikanerdom. Early in World War II the Afrikaanse Handelsinstituut, though representative of business interests, condemned the instrumental values normally associated with markets. Instead, it advanced national and spiritual concerns: "There can be no doubt that the present intellectual crisis is at the same time a transition period in which the liberalistic glorification and idolization of the individual with his almost unbounded 'rights' and 'freedom' will not emerge unscathed." 5 Still, the A H I soon retreated from such ideological fervor: its demands began to resemble the more interested concerns of other groups supportive of the National party. The Afrikaanse Handelsinstituut, along with the agricultural unions and Afrikaner-controlled unions in steel, the railways, mining, and sections of the public service, insisted upon specific policies to limit the African flight to the cities and to allocate labor between sectors; in effect, to control and sometimes supersede market processes. Together, these demands provided a powerful impulse to enlarge the political at the expense of civil society. The demands did not, however, represent ideology. They were assertions about interests and needs that would only later be integrated into a coherent statement about state and society.® Other groups important to any respectable form of ideological hegemony failed to warm to the new order of things. The business associations in manufacture and commerce reiterated their ideological position, supported earlier by the Fagan Commission, that the private sector, not the state, was the primary source of wealth in society, and that some permanent position would have to be found for urban African workers. In 1 9 5 1 , for example, the Federated Chamber of Industries warned the government that it must come to terms

Constructing State Ideology

with the "detribalised natives" or risk facing "a menace rather than a constructed [sic] factor in industry." African labor mobility and urbanization could not be blocked: "We must therefore recognise that the Native, who forms the bulk of the labour force of the country, must be given a permanent niche in our industrial centres." Ultimately, the FCI concluded, the country's welfare and the position of the African "should be determined from an economic and not a political point of view." 7 The government clashed directly with the business community, urging the business associations to avoid the political arena. At the policy level, the prime minister told businessmen in 1 9 5 1 that the government could not tolerate "black spots of millions of natives to encircle the European cities." At the general level, the government would not allow the "natural desire for economic gain . . . to take precedence over other more vital considerations." 8 In 1960—61, immediately after Sharpeville, with the upsurge of African resistance, businessmen, including the Afrikaner sections, publicly voiced their doubts about state labor control policies and the process of exclusion that they presupposed. Instead, businessmen offered concrete proposals to relax controls, to reduce the state's role, and permit elements of the African working class and their families to become permanently a part of the dominant order. But after some momentary hesitation, the government banned the African National Congress and the Pan Africanist Congress and formally rejected this challenge from the private sector. The major business associations consequently pulled back from this confrontation with the government. They sank into a dull passivity, as the regime proceeded to elaborate state repressive policies on a vast range of fronts and to foster ideological orthodoxy. 9 Municipal officialdom, directly responsible for the expanded state role in the labor market, showed little enthusiasm for the new order. During the wartime industrial expansión, they had overseen the rapid growth of African urban communities and worked as local officials servicing the requirements of local employers. While they were ambivalent about the "indiscriminate squatting" at Kliptown, Sophiatown, and other areas on the Reef, they did not share the statist, anti-market norms central to the emergent state ideology; many worried that the regime would emerge as too repressive, permanently alienating the African majority and inviting civil disorder. 10 Throughout the 1950s, the minister for native affairs lectured offi-

128

Legitimation and Control

cials on state policy. Demanding "uniformity" and compliance, he warned that "exemptions" and "deviations" could not be allowed to detract from the total picture of "clear cut and concise principles according to a consistent programme."" Even the South African Bureau for Racial Affairs (SABRA), an institution fashioned within Afrikanerdom to advance Nationalist ideology, failed to achieve coherence in this period. The intellectuals who dominated the organization and its journal up to i960 came increasingly into conflict with officials at the Department of Native Affairs and with Nationalist political leaders, including the prime minister. During the 1950s the intellectuals came to articulate a vision of apartheid requiring total segregation and genuine development of the reserves, diminished "economic integration" and labor dependence, and increased "sacrifices.'" 2 But these views, which would become ideologically ascendant during the 1960s, were still marginal during the 1950s. Eiselen and Verwoerd refused to accede to arguments about economic integration and segregation: "It will be for the future generations to decide whether they wish to achieve total apartheid." 13 They rejected the principal recommendations of the Tomlinson Commission, supported by S A B R A , to enlarge and advance the development of the reserve areas. 14 By the late 1950s, S A B R A intellectuals were openly critical of state policies and embarked on independent initiatives to meet black political leaders; they also opposed the decision of Nationalist leaders to pursue "parallel development" for the coloured population. For two years, beginning in 1959, S A B R A was itself wracked by internal struggles, as Verwoerd and his supporters sought to silence its intellectual leadership and end the conflict over the meaning of apartheid. In 1961 the Verwoerd forces successfully expelled the "dissident" intellectuals, though not the evidence of ideological conflict. 15 By the middle 1960s, however, after two decades of ideological development, struggle, and propaganda, the regime had indeed fashioned an ascendant ideology. Employers had fallen silent. Resistance amongst officials had given way to an ideological orthodoxy that supposed pervasive state control over market processes. Officials began offering sometimes extravagant proposals for elaborating the system of control. In 1965 the president of the Institute of Administrators of Non-European Affairs recommended expanded control

Constructing State Ideology

129

over labor migrancy, permitting two years of work in the white areas only if followed by a two-year ban on such employment. The incoming president in 1967 endorsed proposals for "labour zoning" to channel specific ethnic groups into proximate and closed labor markets. 16 In 1 9 7 1 an officer of the organization who would eventually join the National Manpower Commission offered an elaborate labor dispensation that included rigid labor zoning and restricted employment on an exclusively single sex, migratory basis. 17 The ideological position of the political leadership and labor control officialdom was buttressed after i960 by other institutions that now took responsibility for ideological questions. Adjunct university programs in "native administration," taken in large measure by officials and would-be officials, lent intellectual authority to these statist and anti-market themes. During the early sixties courses at the University of South Africa mainly catalogued formal government intentions. 18 By 1970 the courses were more broadly ideological, not only describing government intent, but supplying a sense of totality that officials may have had difficulty articulating themselves. Courses described a "unique system of control" rooted, almost inexorably, in industrialization and increased market contact between black and white: "With the increasing migration to the towns, the needs for these pass-laws became more pressing, and later necessitated influx control to prevent the swamping of the White urban areas." 19 After the formation of new regional administration boards in 1 9 7 1 , the courses described a system that seemed neat and total: now "the functions of efflux control from the homelands and influx control from the administration areas coincide and are coordinated." 20 This ideological coherence and broadening support, apparent by the mid 1960s, were important to the unity and seeming power of the South African state. But these ideological developments did not come easily. The ideology had to be elaborated and integrated, supporters had to be educated and brought along, and opponents had to be silenced. The government had to forge a broad base of support, both within the state apparatus and outside it. But this momentary coherence was no escape from the contradictions. The intensification of direct coercion marginally displaced urbanization, but could not forestall the rapid spread of illegal squatting, bureaucratic decay, and the growing desperation of an impoverished peasantry prepared to overrun an erratic control ma-

i30

Legitimation and Control

chinery. It could not suppress the spreading work stoppages in the factories or the civil disorders in the townships. Once the traditional presumptions about the state and market began to fall into disrepute, there was no escaping the central problem, the regime's illegitimacy. Entrenched Illegitimacy We shall see in this chapter that apartheid ideology embodies three central ideas: first, the primacy of racial-national groups; second, the centrality of the state and subordination of civil society; and third, the concept of the "homelands" as objects of fully separate national expression. The ideology allows no room for a legitimating project. By segregating national expression and identifying all of South Africa's national institutions with the white community, the ideology has formally precluded opportunities for broader loyalty and identification. By placing the state over the market, the ideology has robbed South Africa of legitimating processes conventionally available in capitalist societies. The market, structured by the state, cannot appear self-regulating, and therefore cannot sustain a powerful private realm where individualism and entrepreneurship are honored. In apartheid ideology, the South African state is formally identified with the racial and economic inequalities of civil society and cannot escape them; lacking autonomy, the state therefore cannot mediate conflict effectively or aspire to a more universal appearance. This theoretically entrenched illegitimacy posed few problems when apartheid's traditional presumptions prevailed: the appropriate response to insufficient control was intensified repression, including the more widespread use of directly coercive methods. But with the state overextended and exposed by the 1970s, this steady elaboration of the state apparatus and the growing reliance on state violence seemed too costly and unpromising; the heightened politicization seemed to intensify conflict and invite attacks on the state (see chapter 3). Important elements within the government and private sector began to call for "reform," for new ways of managing the growing African population in the cities and industries. But now this unreconstructed illegitimacy constituted a powerful blockage in the way of any ideological reconstruction (see chapter 6). Apartheid ideology, well-developed and fully integrated, with deep social support in white society, is the backdrop against which

Constructing State Ideology

new ideological thinking takes place. Its vivid imagery—a racial state, embodying group privilege and inequality, controlling the economic order—crowds out new images stressing the market, individualism, technocratic rationality, and universal values and identities. Indeed, for many, this narrowly hegemonic ideology makes it difficult to contemplate or chance any alternative vision. In practice, we shall see, elements committed to the traditional presumptions about the state and markets have wielded this imagery in the struggles that have spread through South Africa's state institutions (see chapter 6). This chapter examines the principal elements of apartheid ideology, the building blocks that have lent coherence to the South African state. They are, at the same time, profound obstacles, helping block reconstruction of state ideology, to the building of a more legitimate order in South Africa. T h e Republican Ideal: From Civil Society to the Political Order A preponderant state did not come easily to Afrikaner political thinking. In Paul Kruger's time, the rudimentary state was limited by freewheeling popular controls and, in philosophic terms, by competition from other realms of life—the family and the individual— that held a strong, direct claim on God's attentions. 21 To shift philosophic attentions away from such egoism, Afrikaner nationalist thought counterposed the national-racial group to the individual as a source of identity and spiritual value and as a historic actor. It generalized and politicized these groups, Afrikanerdom in particular, by placing their realization, not in society, but within the state. This trek from the individual and civil society to politics required, as a first step, the differentiation of racial-national groups, particularly the Afrikaner people. The Afrikaner's claim to a historic role and uniqueness, wrote the molders of Afrikaner political thought, lay in the "covenant" and "selection." Like the Hebrews of the Old Testament, the Afrikaners had a special relationship with God, who intervened to shape their fate as a separate people in southern Africa. "With the exception of Israel, as the specially chosen people of the Lord," S . J . du Toit stated in 1 8 8 1 , "God's hand has never been more visible in the history of any people on earth than amongst us in connection with the Transvaal events." 22 In Kruger's hand, the fact of the covenant was revealed in the Afrikaners' half-century of

Legitimation and Control wandering: the Great Trek out of the C a p e , the Afrikaners' uncertain destiny and suffering in the wilderness, the defeat of their enemies at Blood River and in the w a r f o r the independence of the Transvaal of 1 8 8 0 - 8 1 . The Afrikaners of the Transvaal, Kruger believed, were " a People of G o d in the external calling." 2 3 D . F. M a l a n , a minister of the Dutch R e f o r m e d C h u r c h , soon to be a leader of the purified N a tional party, looked back on the Afrikaners' "determination and definitiveness of p u r p o s e " and saw G o d ' s creative w o r k : " W e have a divine right to be Afrikaners. O u r history is the highest w o r k of art of the Architect of the centuries." 2 4 The notion of a distinct and covenanted A f r i k a n e r people facilitated a more encompassing and developed ideology only after the question of ethnic differentiation w a s raised to a general principle. In 1 9 1 1 M a l a n outlined the specific calling of the Afrikaners and the general theory of groups: " W e are Afrikaners and so ought w e always to be, because any nationality, formed by G o d through history and environment, has in itself a right to existence. G o d wills differences between nation and nation. A n d H e wills these because H e has placed before each People a unique destiny, a unique calling, like that of any individual." 2 5 N i c o l a a s Diederichs, a professor of philosophy w h o came to head the largest Afrikaner economic organization in the 1 9 4 0 s and w h o later became state president, reaffirmed the principle with a flourish: " J u s t as He ruled that n o deadly uniformity should prevail in nature, but that it should demonstrate a richness and variety of plants and animals, sounds and colors, forms and figures, so in the human sphere as well H e ruled that there should exist a multiplicity and diversity of nations, languages and cultures." 2 6 H a v i n g established that ethnic-racial groups are made distinctive by G o d and endowed with a right to exist and with a certain destiny, A f r i k a n e r theorists began submerging individual to group identity. In developing A f r i k a n e r thought, the individual finds meaning and self-realization not through individual expression but through membership and service to a culturally distinct national community. 2 7 Outside one's nation, the individual experiences an incompleteness and feeling of marginality. T h e "individual in itself is nothing," Diederichs claimed, " b u t only becomes itself in the nation as the highest (human) community." 2 8 It w a s n o small step, accordingly, to move f r o m this n e w social

Constructing State Ideology

133

principle to a concrete explanation of racial differentiation in South Africa. Just before taking power after World War II, the National party prepared a report on race policy (the Sauer Commission report) that made the philosophic linkages: "The party subscribes to the view that God determined it that there will be a variety of races and people whose survival and natural growth must be respected as part of the external and divine plan. In South Africa God in his allwise rule has placed the white race and the non-white race groups with deep racial and other differences. Every race and race group possesses its own character, national character, talents, calling and destination." 29 These philosophic and applied conceptions of groups and group differentiation contained from the outset the kernel of a political statement. The notion of a covenant, written back historically into the experience of the trekkers, attained initial prominence in Kruger's republic. There, the Volksraad stood as a symbol of national independence, volks control over the state and the exercise of God's will, because for Kruger, "the voice of the People is the voice of God." 3 0 This Republican ideal, as it would soon be called, emerged as an ideological tenet within Afrikanerdom that joined the notion of the voik with the political. During the Afrikaner mobilization of the 1930s and 1940s, the symbolism of the Republican ideal emerged center-stage and signified the increasing prominence of the political. The chairman of the Afrikaner national secret society called the Broederbond told its congress in 1 9 3 2 that the cultural project would soon be superseded by the political one: "And this aim must include a completely independent, truly Afrikaans government for South Africa—a government which by its embodiment of our own personal head of state, bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh, will inspire us and bind us together to irresistible unity and power." 31 When the National party came to power in 1948, political power had emerged as the preeminent consideration in the realization of cultural distinctiveness and group survival. The maintenance of "apartness," depended on the Afrikaner's—more accurately, the National party's—ability to control political institutions. But this was not control of political decision making in the conventional political sense. Apartheid ideology conceived of control over the state as an act of self-realization, reflecting back to the republican period, without which the Afrikaner volk would not long survive. 32

134

Legitimation and Control

State over Civil Society Since it placed national groups and their political realization center-stage, apartheid ideology subordinated the other elements of civil society, particularly market processes. In a narrow sense this emphasis represented a simple preference for Afrikaner national control over allocation decisions, rather than "letting things develop." Indeed, at times, apartheid ideology seemed a simple affirmation of state control. As leader of the parliamentary opposition during World War II, Malan declared that "the only salvation is to be found in State control."33 In fact, however, apartheid ideology emerged as a much more developed denial of civil society. Apartheid's specificity lay in three areas: the national capturing of the capitalist order using the state, the suppression of class forces, and control of the African labor market. The capturing of the capitalist order for the Afrikaner nation was reflected in expanded social welfare activities on behalf of Afrikaner workers and in diminished concern for the needs of private capital. In social policy terms, Afrikaner intellectuals demanded credit arrangements and other forms of state assistance "to suit the national requirements rather than capitalist profit."34 By 1943 the National party had articulated a broad social welfare policy that provided a much larger ideological space for state activity. Malan beseeched Parliament to adopt certain social principles, most important amongst them, "that the people be regarded as a moral economic unity . . . with full responsibility for providing to every one of them an existence worthy of a human being." He elaborated areas of proper state activity, including ensuring a "more equitable distribution of the wealth" and "effective State control over the gold-mining industry and, where it appears to be in the national interest, also of our key and other industries, including representation on the directorates of such industries by the Government as representing the people, and the participation in the profits by the State, the shareholders and the workers on a basis determined by the State."35 Such pronouncements included anti-capitalist currents, but the predominant ones were nationalistic. Capitalism was not so much to be overthrown as captured by the Afrikaner nation. The "new economic movement," the chairman of the 1939 volkskongres declared, "sets for itself the goal of reversing" the denationalization of

Constructing State Ideology

135

economic leaders and the proletarianization of the workers, "no longer to tolerate the destruction of the Afrikaner volk in an attempt to adapt to a foreign capitalist system, but to mobilise the volk to capture this foreign system and transform and adapt it to our national character." 36 The rising Afrikaner bourgeoisie stressed the necessity of Afrikaners taking over entrepreneurial roles and penetrating commerce and industry in the "interest of the material welfare of the whole of Afrikanerdom." Commercial activity in this instance was stripped of its bourgeois trappings. The Afrikaanse Handelsinstituut, despite its petit bourgeois base, opposed liberalism and individualism; it was inspired instead by national and spiritual concerns: "Both the members of the volk and the volk have their God-given vocation to fulfill, and each is responsible to God directly for that fulfillment. In a Christian order, we must strive to bring into harmony with each other the fulfillment of the individual life-task and the fulfillment of the national community's task." In the process, the economic order would be won over to the special needs of the Afrikaner community: "This does not mean passive adaptation to the existing economic system, but the active conversion of it on the basis of the Afrikaans Christian National volk's principles in order to realize Afrikaner self-sufficiency in the economic sphere." 37 The conquest of the economic order meant at the same time the subordination of class interests within Afrikanerdom. Diederichs, who celebrated the multiplicity and distinctiveness of national groups, expressed an abiding fear that the Afrikaner working class would be lost to the nation. "He must be drawn into his nation in order to be a genuine man," Diederichs wrote. "There must be no division or schism between class and class." 18 In varying degrees, virtually all the Afrikaner mobilizing organizations of the 1930s and 1940s took up the task of capturing the Afrikaner worker for the nation—to protect him from sinking to the level of the African and, at the same time, to deter him from seeking political alignments outside the volk.39 At the same time, the exploits of aspirant capitalists within Afrikanerdom were granted a national purpose, thus subordinating again the class components of Afrikanerdom. Support for Afrikaner credit organizations, insurance companies, and merchants became part of the larger effort to "rescue" the volk and conquer the capitalist order. Diederichs again issued the mobilizing call: "Come from near and come from far. Come you rich and come you

I36

Legitimation and Control

poor, you learned and you unlettered, you from the farms and you from the cities. Come Afrikaners, children of the same nation, one and all you must come. For we are busy with a great work; we are building a temple." 40 The hostility to an emergent African working class and the nonnational bourgeoisie was realized in apartheid's ideological opposition to labor markets—an economic sphere where "black and white jostle together" and where increasing mobility threatened the material foundations of the volk.41 Spokesmen for Afrikanerdom in the 1930s and 1940s warned of the new trek to the cities—both black and white—and called on the state to take control of it. The fate of the Afrikaner nation could not be left to abstract economic processes. The National party's Sauer Commission proposed a massive state presence in the labor market, freezing the number of "detribalised natives in the cities." To accomplish this end amidst developing industrialism, it urged the creation of an "efficient system of labour distribution between agriculture, industry, mines, and towns"; a "national system of labour regulation and labour control. . . with a central Labour Bureau and an effective network covering the whole country." 42 The ideological leaders of the new Nationalist government—Verwoerd and Eiselen—criticized their predecessors for having been "too weak," thus permitting a "chaotic distribution of Native labour" to develop. 43 The alternative to "letting things develop"—a phrase that Eiselen freely associated with Smuts—was "coordination of supply and demand," the control over African labor mobility by state allocation of employment opportunities. With the establishment of labor bureaus, the department argued in 1953, "the influx of labour must be regulated and co-ordinated with the demand actually existing in the labour market." In 1964 the deputy minister observed in Parliament that a "labour bureau network is essential if you wish to direct an otherwise uncontrolled movement of large numbers of Bantu to the White areas into the right channels thereby preventing an over-supply in specific markets or in specific classes of employment." 44 The opposition to labor markets and African proletarianization was extended to "demand," personified as the "parasitic employer." Verwoerd, in particular, identified the employer as the source of the problem and the principal beneficiary of "oversupply": "Surely that member himself ought to realize that if in a particular city, as was

Constructing State Ideology

137

the case in Pretoria, there is an excessive influx of Native labour, then the employers . . . have absolute power in their hands because they can play havoc with labour. They can dismiss labourers as they please because there will always be three or four to take the place of the one who has been dismissed." In 1956 Verwoerd told officials that employers "do not want to employ the native children born in the town but would rather see them idle"; they prefer to bring in workers from the rural areas "to fill vacancies in Industry." Their purpose, which Verwoerd deplored, was to create "an unnecessary large labour pool notwithstanding the adverse effects on the Native and on the European community." 45 Apartheid ideology consequently advanced the scope of state activity while subordinating the major elements in civil society. Afrikaner workers were dissolved in the national project; the nonnational bourgeoisie was shunted aside, inasmuch as the logic of private accumulation invited the African flood. The state emerged as an instrument and realization of the volk, capturing and nationalizing the capitalist order and taking control of chaotic market processes. In the end, the state superseded the market as the arbiter of social forces.

The Bantustans: Coherence and M o r a l Order Apartheid was not simply the justificatory argument of a new ruling group intent on deploying the state in new and more aggressive ways or on subordinating the African majority to the needs of the volk. As officialdom and government struggled to tame a resistant market and African working class, the ideology offered a sense of order, totality, and moral purpose. Verwoerd, the new minister of native affairs, was the principal apostle for the sense of totality. AH our work, Verwoerd told a gathering of officials, flows from an endeavour for a consistent application of a comprehensive programme. They [the principles of the program] are not just casual ideas touching an off point here and there, but is [sic] a programme extending its fingers deeply and affecting the circumstances in the lives of people seeking to make them happy, to obviate strife and bring in its wake peace and contentment. . . . [The] various directives are not just random ideas, but part of a comprehensive all-embracing programme. 46

13«

Legitimation and Control

The "bantustans," the "homelands," the "independent states" (the various terms for the artificial African reserves given constitutional status during the 1960s) were the essential, integrative element. The bantustans provided the common coinage that carried across diverse areas of policy and ideological thinking. They provided a sense of broad public purpose even as the state sought to subordinate the market and African population. And while policy practice was hopelessly partial, the bantustans suggested norms of evenhandedness and equivalence. Virtually all the modern statements about the volk, even the crudest ones that portrayed a chosen Christian people emerging out of a "sea of barbarism," allowed for an essential, if formal, equality of groups: each national-racial group had its own destiny in its own sphere.47 Such principles were elaborated in Diederichs's and Malan's earliest statements about nations and peoples, but achieved their clearest statement as the National party began to formalize its ideological position and as apartheid ideology became state ideology after 1948. A National party commission in 1943 set out the basic, universal principles: [The] party wants to put it on record as its firm conviction that any policy of oppression and exploitation of the non-whites by the whites is contrary to the principle of civilization and the moral and Christian foundation of our national life and wholly incompatible with its policy. The party subscribes to the view that G o d determined that there will be a variety of races and people whose survival and natural growth must be respected as part of the external and divine plan. In South Africa G o d in his all-wise rule has placed the white race and the non-white race groups with deep racial and other differences. Every race and race group possesses its o w n character, national character, talents, calling and destination.