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Race, Class, and Power: Ideology and Revolutionary Change in Plural Societies
Examining in detail the apparently inexorable polarization of society in such countries as Rwanda, Algeria, and South Africa, the author questions whether current theories correctly explain the past or offer adequate guides for the future. In their place he puts forward an alternative neo-Durkheimian view of the possibility of non-violent revolutionary change, based on the development of such social and cultural continuities as already exist within each plural society. But he warns that "this is an age of passionate commitment to violence in which vicarious killers abound in search of a Vietnam of their own." The aim of this groundbreaking and challenging book is to create theoretical perspectives in which to view the racial conflict of plural societies. Written in the turbulent early 1970s, the book demonstrates the inadequacy of then prevailing views such as Marxist interpretations of racial conflict as class struggle, and the Fanon a priori rejection of non-violent techniques of change, which Kuper holds responsible for the acceptance of what he calls "the platitudes of violence." The book concludes with more personal sections focusing on the author's struggles with the then prevailing South African society, critiques of that, and censorship of his attempts to make these public. In the light of subsequent changes in South Africa many decades later, this book serves not only as an important work of political sociology but as a personal testament to the fight against racism in South Africa. Leo Kuper was professor of sociology and director of the African Studies Center at the University of California, Los Angeles. A South African by birth, he was one of the first writers on genocide as well as other aspects of African studies and urban sociology. His major book, Genocide (Penguin, 1981), remains in print. The Leo Kuper Foundation is a non-governmental organization dedicated to the eradication of genocide through research, advice, and education. It was created in Washington, DC in 1994 following the death of Leo Kuper, with the aim of improving measures to prevent genocide. The main area of work for the past five years has been in support of the creation of an International Criminal Court. Troy Duster is director at the Institute for the History of the Production of Knowledge, New York University.
348 pages, Paperback
Published August 31, 2005
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December 20, 2014
Stalwart of the anti-apartheid years Kuper positioned himself in the ranks of the Liberal party, though much of his work was in dialogue with the Marxist-influenced wing of the ANC. His preoccupation in these essays was an analysis of what he called ‘plural’ societies – understood as segmented social marked by the absence of Durkheimian organic solidarity.
The examples of these types of societies discussed in this book are French colonial Algeria, Rwanda, with its Tutsi and Hutu cleavages, apartheid South Africa, and the multi-fractured Zanzibar and Pemba. In each case some type of revolution had occurred during the decades of the 1950s and 60s which raised the issues of race, class and power.
Kuper discusses the way in which the Marxist currents, present in all the cases considered, had offered up analyses based on the presumption that class exploitation was the critical element in these societies even though issues of racial division has risen up to obscure this point. This viewpoint is disputed in the essays in this book, with Kuper setting out an alternative view which saw the racial divide as primary and operating in a way which precluded a resolution of tensions and conflict based on class solidarity.
This much seems quite straightforward, but the implications are extended to consider what the primacy of racial division would mean for the struggle to chain power structures. At this point, drawing on his own long-standing discussions with stalwarts of the Communist Party of South Africa, he develops his ideas on the role of violence in revolutions in plural societies, and the need to advance alternatives to themes of class solidarity which emphasised the role of individuals engaging with one another at whatever interstices existed where the racial segments overlapped. The role of professionals and the middle class intelligentsia are presented as the main possibilities for supporting this process.
The Marxist currents, and he appears to mean only those under the thrall of Moscow’s dogmatic and mechanistic version of the theoretical approach, floundered across the landscape looking for social groups who would play the role of the proletarian vanguard. In pursuing their class interests the rest of society, bewitched by ruling ideologies and the material advantages that the system has allowed them to enjoy, would shrug off this influence and follow the lead of the class-conscious social groups.
His accounts of the revolutions in the African countries whose situation he reviews in detail set out his reasoning as to why he believed that this was likely to be a forlorn hope in the case of South Africa, which at the date of the publication of this volume – 1974 – was still awaiting the overthrow of apartheid. Algeria showed that Islamism allied to the military interests of the FLN would ensure that the influence of Marxist socialism was marginal. In the case of Rwanda the small Tutsi-led communist faction was overwhelmed in the Hutu uprising. The final outcome of John Okello’s rebellion in Zanzibar, which produced a brief period of orthodox Soviet style under the leadership of Abeid Amani Karume, is not considered in any detail in these accounts, though Kuper dwells on the evidence of anti-Arab and Asian pogroms which swept across the island.
In a rich account of the nature of the social and economic cleavages that hold plural societies in their separate fragments, Kuper gives detailed consideration to the position of the small number of intellectuals who are permitted to emerge from the subordinate group. He draws on analogies with the civil rights struggles in the US at this point, seeing that at least a portion of them will spurn the privileges that might be made available by this rise and continue to identify with the lot of the group with whom they are linked by ethnicity. The possibility of a non-violent transition in the case of South Africa seemed remote to Kuper, given the chronic weakness of the groups that could act as intermediaries and promote organic solidarity. Noting this difficulty he speculates on the possibility that external pressure on South Africa, from the dominant powers, might provide scope and the space for this small segment to prosper and become more influential.
My own thoughts are that Kuper’s sociological perspective leaves the issue of the dynamic of South African capitalism unexplored, which provides the wider context for the consideration of class issues. From the perspective of Marxism, class is not the social formation which it is represented as in classical sociology. Capitalism constantly works to change the structure of class as the evolution of its own internal composition alters its needs for different skills and degrees of flexibility from workforces. The working class itself, though used by capitalism as a commodity, is not produced by the market relations which present the optimum form for commodity production, but by relations of power, which ultimately involve the structures of the state. The scope for change in a country like South Africa, where capitalism existed in a relatively developed form, ultimately occurred because the apartheid state was now longer producing the type of working class that it needed. A precondition for addressing this issue was the resolution of the racial issue. Once the interests of the economic system impelled South Africa towards change the resolution of the race issue became essential.
But Kuper’s independence from the sort of stultifying orthodoxies which have beset Communist Party Marxism allowed him to explore areas of social existence which have a bearing on understanding post-apartheid South Africa. The abandonment on the part of ANC elites of their commitment to the ordinary masses of the country in their mad rush to claim the their place in the new capitalist order suggests that, after all, the evolution of plural societies might ultimately be accounted for by factors which look an awful lot like class struggle.
The examples of these types of societies discussed in this book are French colonial Algeria, Rwanda, with its Tutsi and Hutu cleavages, apartheid South Africa, and the multi-fractured Zanzibar and Pemba. In each case some type of revolution had occurred during the decades of the 1950s and 60s which raised the issues of race, class and power.
Kuper discusses the way in which the Marxist currents, present in all the cases considered, had offered up analyses based on the presumption that class exploitation was the critical element in these societies even though issues of racial division has risen up to obscure this point. This viewpoint is disputed in the essays in this book, with Kuper setting out an alternative view which saw the racial divide as primary and operating in a way which precluded a resolution of tensions and conflict based on class solidarity.
This much seems quite straightforward, but the implications are extended to consider what the primacy of racial division would mean for the struggle to chain power structures. At this point, drawing on his own long-standing discussions with stalwarts of the Communist Party of South Africa, he develops his ideas on the role of violence in revolutions in plural societies, and the need to advance alternatives to themes of class solidarity which emphasised the role of individuals engaging with one another at whatever interstices existed where the racial segments overlapped. The role of professionals and the middle class intelligentsia are presented as the main possibilities for supporting this process.
The Marxist currents, and he appears to mean only those under the thrall of Moscow’s dogmatic and mechanistic version of the theoretical approach, floundered across the landscape looking for social groups who would play the role of the proletarian vanguard. In pursuing their class interests the rest of society, bewitched by ruling ideologies and the material advantages that the system has allowed them to enjoy, would shrug off this influence and follow the lead of the class-conscious social groups.
His accounts of the revolutions in the African countries whose situation he reviews in detail set out his reasoning as to why he believed that this was likely to be a forlorn hope in the case of South Africa, which at the date of the publication of this volume – 1974 – was still awaiting the overthrow of apartheid. Algeria showed that Islamism allied to the military interests of the FLN would ensure that the influence of Marxist socialism was marginal. In the case of Rwanda the small Tutsi-led communist faction was overwhelmed in the Hutu uprising. The final outcome of John Okello’s rebellion in Zanzibar, which produced a brief period of orthodox Soviet style under the leadership of Abeid Amani Karume, is not considered in any detail in these accounts, though Kuper dwells on the evidence of anti-Arab and Asian pogroms which swept across the island.
In a rich account of the nature of the social and economic cleavages that hold plural societies in their separate fragments, Kuper gives detailed consideration to the position of the small number of intellectuals who are permitted to emerge from the subordinate group. He draws on analogies with the civil rights struggles in the US at this point, seeing that at least a portion of them will spurn the privileges that might be made available by this rise and continue to identify with the lot of the group with whom they are linked by ethnicity. The possibility of a non-violent transition in the case of South Africa seemed remote to Kuper, given the chronic weakness of the groups that could act as intermediaries and promote organic solidarity. Noting this difficulty he speculates on the possibility that external pressure on South Africa, from the dominant powers, might provide scope and the space for this small segment to prosper and become more influential.
My own thoughts are that Kuper’s sociological perspective leaves the issue of the dynamic of South African capitalism unexplored, which provides the wider context for the consideration of class issues. From the perspective of Marxism, class is not the social formation which it is represented as in classical sociology. Capitalism constantly works to change the structure of class as the evolution of its own internal composition alters its needs for different skills and degrees of flexibility from workforces. The working class itself, though used by capitalism as a commodity, is not produced by the market relations which present the optimum form for commodity production, but by relations of power, which ultimately involve the structures of the state. The scope for change in a country like South Africa, where capitalism existed in a relatively developed form, ultimately occurred because the apartheid state was now longer producing the type of working class that it needed. A precondition for addressing this issue was the resolution of the racial issue. Once the interests of the economic system impelled South Africa towards change the resolution of the race issue became essential.
But Kuper’s independence from the sort of stultifying orthodoxies which have beset Communist Party Marxism allowed him to explore areas of social existence which have a bearing on understanding post-apartheid South Africa. The abandonment on the part of ANC elites of their commitment to the ordinary masses of the country in their mad rush to claim the their place in the new capitalist order suggests that, after all, the evolution of plural societies might ultimately be accounted for by factors which look an awful lot like class struggle.
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