Anti-apartheid, anti-capitalism, and antiimperialism: liberation in South Africa

The entry analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of three movement strategies to achieve liberation in South Africa. The core of anti apartheid strategy was to unite forces to overcome the racist white domination of the Nationalist Party regime in power since 1948. The anti-capitalist strategy stressed the connection between apartheid‘s political and social discrimination with an underpinning capitalist exploitation, promoting independent working class organization and socialist objectives. The anti-imperialist strategy emphasized that apartheid was built on the foundation of African labor‘s super-exploitation that had been established by Britain at the beginning of the twentieth century, and that liberation has to overcome the continuing alliance between white capital and imperialism. Employing the political vocabulary of Marxism-Leninism, these competing strategies are articulated as distinct interpretations of the national democratic revolution in South Africa. These strategies have abiding consequences for diagnosing the process of transition and post-apartheid structural dynamics.