democratisationversustheempowermentofnationalistelites.docVIP

THE CAPACITIES OF THE PEOPLE VERSUS A PREDOMINANT, MILITARIST, ETHNO-NATIONLIST ELITE: DEMOCRATISATION IN SOUTH AFRICA C. 1973-97 Kenneth Good Kenneth.good@.au South Africa possessed in the early 1990s a relatively industrialised and diversified economy. As the country approached the year of majority rule, 1994, industry contributed some 37 per cent of gross domestic production (GDP), of which manufacturing represented 25 per cent. It was easily the strongest capitalist economy in Africa. It’s GDP of some $133 billion ranked it around thirtieth in the world, or twenty third in terms of purchasing power. In regard to employment, agriculture contributed about 10 per cent of the national total, industry 25 per cent and services 64 per cent. There was a well developed infrastructure built upon roads, railways and sea and air ports, extensive urbanisation, and technological and scientific resources superior to anything else in Africa. Despite the manifold distortions and wastefulness of the apartheid system, the developmental capacities of the state were high. The exigencies of advanced capitalist development offered big opportunities to black workers. In the 1950s they had been confined to unskilled labour, but a burgeoning economy and an ever-growing state bureaucracy required increasing numbers of black clerical and junior executive workers, and thus in turn a big increase in black secondary and tertiary education. Between 1965 and 1975, the numbers of black pupils attending secondary schools rose almost five fold to some 319,000. Industrial capitalists made their own contribution to new class formation from the end of the 1960s, reorganizing the labour force towards reliance upon black skilled workers, and pressured the state into corresponding policy changes; from the early 1970s, g