The state and economic development in South Africa

In an earlier paper, I stressed the conceptual inadequacies prevalent in both the liberal analyses of the State in the process of South African capitalist development and in the ‘new’ literature which departs from the liberal paradigm.(1) To repeat the critique, the latter literature "is centred around the question of labour policy and is designed to show, in contradistinction to the liberal analysis, that racial and labour policy has been functional to the interests of ‘capital’ in South African economic development. Although centred on the question of labour, the latter literature has made some specific statements concerning the State and has, at least implicitly, derived a theory of capitalist development for the South African case. On both these questions, I would suggest that this literature has been largely incorrect, and this has resulted from an inadequate conceptual framework... This paper is primarily designed to give additional substance to this critique, in a number of ways.