AnnMarie Wolpe
second look
In 1988 Harold Wolpe wrote a short, dense, theoretically engaging book, Race, Class and the Apartheid State. He argued that different and often diametrically opposed political views shared a common platform, which was to end apartheid. Yet these views neglected analyses that took into account the very conditions that upheld the state and institutional racism.
Wolpe said that racial “considerations enter into the structuring of class relations, and class relations influence the structure of the racial order”. In other words, they are interlinked. But he added an important rider that “it is no longer possible to distinguish between race and class on the basis that the former is an exclusively political phenomenon and the latter an exclusively economic one”.
In other words you could not ascribe to economic factors the ultimate determining factor in the formulation and maintenance of racism. Nor that racism could account for apartheid.
Further you could not assume that each racial group held similar views. So there are identifiable sectors within each racial group that can share common objectives, such as white capitalists and members of the black bourgeoisie. And remember the small but significant group of blacks who themselves benefited from the development of the “homelands” and, as such, whose interests were then identified alongside the whites.
Yet in the final analysis “it is the mediating effect of the institutional and organisational structure which is specific to each sphere [of race and class]”.
Harold Wolpe’s arguments were pertinent then and, it could be argued, are equally pertinent now. Current debates on racism tend to locate racism as uniformly occurring among specific racial groups, ignoring the economic, structural and organisation- al aspects of life. There is a very real danger that there is one language for racial oppression, as there is for gender oppression, but no visible language for class inequality. Focusing on race or gender can result in ignoring or overlooking the institutional, structural and organisational bases.
Since late last year a fascinating debate has taken off in the country. It follows an initiative by Mary Burton and Carl Niehaus, a reaction as Pallo Jordan has said, to his paper at the National Conference on racism.
The Declaration of Commitment is a statement white South Africans are urged to sign. Among other things it is a statement that recognises “that racist attitudes of white superiority and black inferiority continue to shape our lives, communities and institutions”. It includes an acknowledgement of whites’ benefits from living under an apartheid regime, not an apology, which is how some people have interpreted the initiative. This initiative received the full blessing of the president of the country in his opening speech to Parliament on February 9.
Burton, Niehaus and their steering committee had anticipated some resentment on the part of certain whites but not the level of “vitriolic” response. On the other hand there has been almost a sigh of relief on the part of some of the people who have signed the declaration.
It was in the light of the extraordinary diversity of opinions that have appeared in the press that the Harold Wolpe Forum decided to open its year’s programme with a consideration of this issue.
The forum is one of the main functions of the Harold Wolpe Memorial Trust. The trust, set up shortly after Wolpe’s untimely death in January 1996, aims to keep alive the spirit of intellectual questioning and research that had come to be a hallmark of Wolpe’s writing, teaching and research. He was recognised as “a great man of intellectual integrity”. He made a major contribution to the analyses of the apartheid regime and an understanding of the functioning of the state and the polity. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, there has been a dearth of intellectual debate, a cornerstone of any democracy, since then. It is this stimulation of intellectual questioning that is a fundamental aim of the trust.
It is with this in mind that the forum’s first session this year has been to discuss the declaration. The forum, with the Institute for Democracy in South Africa and the Mail & Guardian, is holding a public meeting with a panel that represents some of the divergent views.
One of the key issues arising directly from the statement is the question of racism and its relation to the transformation process. Will the signing of the declaration lead to a focus on race only and ignore or overlook the institutional, structural and organisational bases of inequality in South Africa? Will the impetus of the declaration not create an even greater divide between President Thabo Mbeki’s “two nations”? What of racism that exists between different black groups? What are the necessary political and moral interventions that will generate “transformation”, a word that slips so easily off the tongue? It is the way forward that needs to be debated, while accept- ing a need for acknowledgement of past evils. It is hoped that the public meeting with its panel of speakers reflecting the divergent views will generate just such discussion.
Dr AnnMarie Wolpe is chair of the Harold Wolpe Memorial Trust and an education consultant. Idasa, the Harold Wolpe Forum and the Mail & Guardian present a public debate on Tuesday, March 6, on White Guilt/White Apology: Does it Matter? at the Cape Town Democracy Centre, 6 Spin Street, Cape Town. For more details, contact Lynne Abrahams: Tel: (021) 461 2559 or [email protected]