This book provides an overdue critical re-engagement with the analytical approach exemplified by the work of Harold Wolpe, who was a key theorist within the liberation movement. It probes the following broad questions: how do we understand the trajectory of the post-apartheid period, how did the current situation come about in the transformation, how does the current situation relate to how a post-apartheid society was conceived in anticipation, and what are the implications of what have been failed ambitions for progressives? The contributions to this volume cohere around the following themes: labour and capital in post-apartheid South Africa, the post-apartheid South African economy, the state and transformation of South African society, and social policy in post-apartheid South Africa. The aim is not to provide a common or coherent theoretical perspective, but rather to probe a core problematic and set of theoretical concerns. The contributing authors explore not only historical and contemporary specifics, but deploy and reflect on theoretical tools that allow us to make sense of those specifics and to engage with the dynamics of race and class, and the form and functioning of the state, including its articulation with an increasingly financialised form of global capitalism.
About the Author: Ben Fine is emeritus rofessor of Economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, a visiting professor at the Institute of Social and Economic Research at Rhodes University, and also at Wits School of Governance. He is an internationally acclaimed scholar of political economy and has published extensively. His Marx's 'Capital' has been in continuous print since 1975 and translated into eleven languages. He has published 27 books, more than 85 chapters in books, more than 150 peer-reviewed articles and numerous working papers. He has substantial academic and policy links to South Africa and served as co-editor of the Macroeconomic Research Group (MERG) report in 1993 and as an international expert adviser on the Presidential Labour Market Commission. He co-authored (with Zav Rustomjee) the seminal text South Africa's Political Economy: From Minerals-Energy Complex to Industrialisation (1997). John Reynolds is the founding head of the Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit at Rhodes University. He has more than twenty years of applied research and policy experience, including in provincial growth and development planning, water resource management, land reform and public participation facilitation. He has worked in the Eastern Cape since 2000 and focused increasingly on social and economic development, policy support and critical reflection on the limits of policy challenge in the South African state. His work has included the Eastern Cape Provincial Growth and Development Plan 2004-14 and the establishment of the Thina Sinako Provincial Local Economic Development Support Programme. He has authored numerous research and policy reports and most recently published Development Planning in South Africa (Zed Books, 2018). Robert van Niekerk held the Matthew Goniwe Chair in Social Policy at the Institute of Social and Economic Research at Rhodes University, where he also served as director, until July 2018, after which he took up an appointment as a professor in the Wits School of Governance. His research focus is on the historical development of social policy aimed at overcoming inequality and developing social rights of citizenship and the good society, and the factors that account for success and failure in policy implementation. Key projects have included research on the piloting of the national health insurance proposals in South Africa; work on social democratic welfare and developmental states in the South and social policy.