Written for students, laypersons, and scholars who seek a deeper understanding of the roots of apartheid in South Africa, this book focuses upon the relationship between apartheid and capitalism. The author argues, in contrast to prevailing views held both in South Africa and the West, that rather than resulting from capitalism, apartheid is the antithesis of capitalism. In short, Williams asserts, the evolution of apartheid can be seen as a struggle against market forces in order to confer privilege and status on South African whites. Williams begins with a brief overview of South African history, the racial and ethnic diversity of its peoples, and the development of thinking about apartheid. He then highlights some of South Africa's legal institutions, particularly its racially discriminatory laws, and traces the historical forces behind racially discriminatory labor law. Subsequent chapters apply standard economic analysis to apartheid in business and the labor market and consider market challenges to apartheid and governmental responses. Finally, Williams summarizes recent changes to apartheid laws and offers a general discussion of the lessons about racial relations that can be drawn from the South African experience.

The Jameson Raid was a pivotal moment in the history of South Africa, linking events from the Anglo-Boer War to the declaration of the Union of South Africa in 1910. For more than a century, the failed revolution has been interpreted through the lens of British imperialism, with responsibility laid at the feet of Cecil Rhodes. Yet, the raid was less a serious attempt to overthrow a Boer government than a wild adventure with transnational roots in American filibustering. In The Cowboy Capitalist, renowned South African historian Charles van Onselen challenges a historiography of over 120 years, locating the raid in American rather than British history and forcing us to rethink the histories of at least three nations. Through a close look at the little-remembered figure of John Hays Hammond, a confidant of both Rhodes and Jameson, he discovers the American Old West on the South African Highveld. This radical reinterpretation challenges the commonly held belief that the Jameson Raid was quintessentially British and, in doing so, drives splinters into our understanding of events as far forward as South Africa’s critical 1948 general election, with which the foundations of Grand Apartheid were laid.

Ruth First and Joe Slovo, husband and wife, were leaders of the war to end apartheid in South Africa. Communists, scholars, parents, and uncompromising militants, they were the perfect enemies for the white police state. Together they were swept up in the growing resistance to apartheid, and together they experienced repression and exile. Their contributions to the liberation struggle, as individuals and as a couple, are undeniable. Ruth agitated tirelessly for the overthrow of apartheid, first in South Africa and then from abroad, and Joe directed much of the armed struggle carried out by the famous Umkhonto we Sizwe. Only one of them, however, would survive to see the fall of the old regime and the founding of a new, democratic South Africa. This book, the first extended biography of Ruth First and Joe Slovo, is a remarkable account of one couple and the revolutionary moment in which they lived. Alan Wieder’s deeply researched work draws on the usual primary and secondary sources but also an extensive oral history that he has collected over many years. By weaving the documentary record together with personal interviews, Wieder portrays the complexities and contradictions of this extraordinary couple and their efforts to navigate a time of great tension, upheaval, and revolutionary hope.

The everyday lives of enslaved people were filled with the backbreaking tasks that their enslavers forced them to complete. But in spare moments, they found time in which to earn money and obtain goods for themselves. Enslaved people led vibrant economic lives, cultivating produce and raising livestock to trade and sell. They exchanged goods with nonslaveholding whites and even sold products to their enslavers. Did these pursuits represent a modicum of freedom in the interstices of slavery, or did they further shackle enslaved people by other means? Justene Hill Edwards illuminates the inner workings of the slaves’ economy and the strategies that enslaved people used to participate in the market. Focusing on South Carolina from the colonial period to the Civil War, she examines how the capitalist development of slavery influenced the economic lives of enslaved people. Hill Edwards demonstrates that as enslavers embraced increasingly capitalist principles, enslaved people slowly lost their economic autonomy. As slaveholders became more profit-oriented in the nineteenth century, they also sought to control enslaved people’s economic behavior and capture the gains. Despite enslaved people’s aptitude for enterprise, their market activities came to be one more part of the violent and exploitative regime that shaped their lives. Drawing on wide-ranging archival research to expand our understanding of racial capitalism, Unfree Markets shows the limits of the connection between economic activity and freedom.

The contributors to this volume draw on a non-dogmatic Marxist approach to explain the systemic and conjunctural dynamics of crisis inherent in global capitalism. Their analysis asks what is historically specific to capitalism's crises while avoiding catastrophic or defeatist claims. At the same time the volume situates left agency within actual patterns of resistance and class struggle to clarify the potential for transformative change. The cycle of resistance strengthened by the World Socal Forum and transnational activism is now punctuated by the experience of the Arab Spring, the agency of anti-systemic movements, left think tanks, the Occupy Wall Street Movement, labour unions, left parties in Europe such as Syrizia and Podemos and peoples' budgeting in Kerala, India. On the down side, we are witnessing the waning of the Workers Party in Brazil and serious challenges for South Africa's once powerful labour movement and still formative social justice activism. All these developments are assessed in this volume. This is the second volume in the Democratic Marxism series. It elaborates on crucial themes introduced in the first volume, Marxism in the 21st Century: Crisis, Critique and Struggle (edited by Michelle Williams and Vishwas Satgar).

Samir Amin remains one of the world's most influential thinkers about the changing nature of North-South relations in the development of contemporary capitalism. In this highly prescient book, originally published in 1997, he provides a powerful analysis of the new unilateral capitalist era following the collapse of the Soviet model, and the apparent triumph of the market and globalization. Amin's innovative analysis charts the rise of ethnicity and fundamentalism as consequences of the failure of ruling classes in the South to counter the exploitative terms of globalization. This has had profound implications and continues to resonate today. Furthermore, his deconstruction of the Bretton Woods institutions as managerial mechanisms which protect the profitability of capital provides an important insight into the continued difficulties in reforming them. Amin's rejection of the apparent inevitability of globalization in its present polarising form is particularly prophetic - instead he asserts the need for each society to negotiate the terms of its inter-dependence with the rest of the global economy. A landmark work by a key contemporary thinker.

This is the first comparative analysis of the political transitions in South Africa and Palestine since the 1990s. Clarno s study is grounded in impressive ethnographic fieldwork, taking him from South African townships to Palestinian refugee camps, where he talked to a wide array of informants, from local residents to policymakers, political activists, business representatives, and local and international security personnel. The resulting inquiry accounts for the simultaneous development of extreme inequality, racialized poverty, and advanced strategies for securing the powerful and policing the poor in South Africa and Palestine/Israel over the last 20 years. Clarno places these transitions in a global context while arguing that a new form of neoliberal apartheid has emerged in both countries. The width and depth of Clarno s research, combined with wide-ranging first-hand accounts of realities otherwise difficult for researchers to access, make Neoliberal Apartheid a path-breaking contribution to the study of social change, political transitions, and security dynamics in highly unequal societies. Take one example of Clarno s major themes, to wit, the issue of security. Both places have generated advanced strategies for securing the powerful and policing the racialized poor. In South Africa, racialized anxieties about black crime shape the growth of private security forces that police poor black South Africans in wealthy neighborhoods. Meanwhile, a discourse of Muslim terrorism informs the coordinated network of security forcesinvolving Israel, the United States, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authoritythat polices Palestinians in the West Bank. Overall, Clarno s pathbreaking book shows how the shifting relationship between racism, capitalism, colonialism, and empire has generated inequality and insecurity, marginalization and securitization in South Africa, Palestine/Israel, and other parts of the world."

Though pillage, profit, and plunder have been a mainstay of war since pre-colonial times, there is little contemporary focus on the role of finance and economics in today's "Drug Wars"—despite the fact that they boost US banks and fill our prisons with poor people. They feed political campaigns, increase the arms trade, and function as long-term fixes to capitalism's woes, cracking open new territories to privatization and foreign direct investment. Combining on-the-ground reporting with extensive research, Dawn Paley moves beyond the usual horror stories, beyond journalistic rubbernecking and hand-wringing, to follow the thread of the Drug War story throughout the entire region of Latin America and all the way back to US boardrooms and political offices. This unprecedented book chronicles how terror is used against the population at large in cities and rural areas, generating panic and facilitating policy changes that benefit the international private sector, particularly extractive industries like petroleum and mining. This is what is really going on. This is drug war capitalism. Dawn Paley is a freelance journalist who has been reporting from South America, Central America, and Mexico for over ten years. Her writing has been published in the Nation, the Guardian, Vancouver Sun, Globe and Mail, Ms. magazine, the Tyee, Georgia Straight, and NACLA, among others.