South Africa

Writing five years ago, in 1981, Stephen Gelb and I spoke of a "crisis in South Africa." If the phrase was accurate then, it is all the more so now. In fact, the level of resistance to the apartheid state in South Africa has continued to rise dramatically, especially since mid-1984; moreover, the diffuseness and semi-spontaneity of the activities that we identified (following Rosa Luxemburg) as beginning to constitute a virtual "mass strike" in South Africa have since been complemented by an ever greater—and often quite inspiring—degree of political focus and organizational capacity on the part of those who seek to overthrow that country's cancerous system. Since this impressively growing resistance movement has been the main factor keeping crisis on the agenda in South Africa it is, self-evidently, a reality that must be examined in considerable detail in this essay. But Gelb and I also sought, in 1981, to assess the apartheid regime's own response to crisis, specifying the way in which it was attempting to take "formative action" (its so-called reforms) as a means of diffusing rising resistance and of shifting the defense of its sharply contested system onto what it was hoped would prove to be somewhat more promising terrain.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website

Development economics · Economics · Formative assessment · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Resistance (ecology) · Sociology · State (computer science) · History · Law · South African History and Culture

• Facing the 'black peril

  B Bradford Brown•Journal of Southern African Studies•1987

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