Apartheid

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understanding South Africa – or Northern Ireland or Israel – in its
historical context and in terms of the global political economy. ‘Settler
colonialism’ represents a refinement of the orthodox Leninist theory
of imperialism but also shares some of the crude generalizing of the
Marxist theory of colonialism that does not apply to specific cases. In
response to those deficiencies, the South African Communist Party
developed the concept of ‘colonialism of a special type,’ or ‘internal
colonialism,’ but this term also misses crucial distinctions in the
processes of decolonization. It, too, obscures the interdependence of
internal colonizer and colonized as well as the relative independence
of indigenous settlers from outside control. Nor can the traditional
concepts of colonial departure and subsequent neocolonial sovereignty
explain what is taking place in South Africa. 101
It would actually make more sense – in classical Marxist, historical materialist, terms,
and not only there – to distinguish more sharply between colonialism and apartheid, rather
than subsuming apartheid under colonialism, and to concentrate more on racist practice than
racist theory and racist symbolism than it would be to follow Leninist theory to the obscure
conceptions and conclusions exemplified in the previous quote. 102 But even so, apartheid still
cannot be explained adequately as a mere fringe phenomenon among class societies.
Other broad aspects of postmodernism, its blanket protective attitude towards
minorities, its critique of truth, rejection of master narratives, and a related tendency towards
epistemological relativism, may all play commendable emancipatory roles, but they may also
work in the opposite way, for instance by making postmodernism a defense for apartheid. As
Truth and Reconciliation Commissions were formed in order to condemn and deliver to
justice apartheid perpetrators in countries like Guatemala and South Africa, much was done
by these perpetrators and their legal representatives and supporters to mystify and cover up
their crimes in a perfectly postmodern manner, namely by claiming minority protection
privileges. 103 Europeans and descendants of Europeans have claimed majority rights when
they were in majority, and even when they were not, as in South Africa, Guatemala and
Israel/Palestine. Now that democracy is spreading to areas where Europeans and some of their
descendants used to rule undemocratically, the descendants of those same people are claiming
special minority rights – in some cases democracy does not even look like majority rule any
longer – and post-modernism mysteriously appeared, at first in Europe and North America, in
the nick of time, to back up such claims. 104
Taken together, colonialism, apartheid and genocide, in my opinion, constitute a
subset of class societies, though not exactly in the way that Marx understood the term. The
economically dominant classes, the landowners and capitalists, are in coalition with the state
and also with the rest of the privileged minority civil society in apartheid, and it appears
impossible to say which of these three is the more powerful entity in such a society. It seems
as if the apartheid elites are usually in a kind of dynamic equilibrium, sometimes politicians
are dominant, sometimes the military, and sometimes the business elites. In any case, the
apartheid state is much more than just a tool for the economically dominant classes, for the
slave-owners, land-owners, and capitalists, although it may be seen as such on certain
occasions.
Apart from remaining vague, postcolonial theory has also concentrated on recent
101
Adam & Moodley: The Opening of the Apartheid Mind: Options for the New South Africa, 1993, Chapter 1.
Colonialism, Communalism, and Democracy: South Africa in Comparative Perspective, The Global Relevance
of South Africa
102
See Liedman: Surdeg: En Personlig Bok om Idéer och Ideologier, 1980, for a more realistic re-evaluation and
reformulation of some valuable aspects of philosophical materialism.
103
Hardt & Negri 2000: 155f
104
Hope: Great White Hope, 2003