Surplus people and expendable children: The structure of apartheid and the mortality crisis in South Africa
South Africa’s apartheid scheme is considered as a paradigm case for the creation and maltreatment of a putatively surplus population. Both active and passive policies are identified that are utilized to contain the numbers of the black population of the nation. Of particular significance is a strategy of neglect that has led to exceptionally high infant and child mortality rates in the “homelands.” In addition, the South African authorities’ efforts to destabilize neighboring regimes in Angola and Mozambique has had similarly adverse repercussions on mortality rates there.
Contradiction and Uneven Development in South Africa: the Constrained Allocation of African Labour-Power
In the post-World War II period, South African capitalism is considered by many to have been reproduced on the basis of ‘cheap’ African labour-power. This is generally understood to mean that the prosperity of capitalism in the Republic depended on the poverty of the African majority. On the one hand, between 1950 and 1979, gross domestic product grew (in constant 1970 prices) from R4·4 billion to R15·5 billion. On the other hand, Africans on average earned wages that were below subsistence levels as defined by such minimal indices as the poverty datum line, and that were only 5 to 25 per cent as large as those earned on average by whites – see Tables 1 and 2. As generally analysed, both overall growth and the absolute and relative poverty of Africans were the direct result of the apartheid policies of the régime, in particular those responsible for the so-called cheap labour system.
Political economy : recent views
1 Political Economy: Problems with Paradigms.- 2 Modern Public Finance: The Neoclassical Approach.- Comment by Philip A. Klein.- 3 Fiscal Behavior of the Modern Democratic State: Public Choice Perspectives and Contributions.- Comment by Margaret Levi.- 4 A Marxist Theory of the State.- Comment by Andrzej Brzeski.- 5 Whither (Positive) Political Economy? One Reading.- Contributing Authors.