The uneven and combined development of racial capitalism and South Africa’s changing race-class articulations

Surprisingly little uneven and combined development (UCD) work focuses on Africa. This article both widens the geographical scope of UCD literature and attempts to address a major blind spot in this literature: the importance of race and gender in understanding the UCD of world capitalism and global political economy. Helpful in this process, we argue, is an engagement with the work of Black Marxism and Marxist Feminism and the literature on Racial Capitalism. We draw on the work of Stuart Hall on race and class, and the importance of understanding their changing articulations, indeed of the need to look at multiple articulations – of the state and state power with forms of production; racialised ideologies; and systems of reproduction. We use a case study of South Africa to illustrate our argument. South Africa, previously on the periphery of the global system, was changed profoundly by the discovery of vast gold deposits and the construction of a forced labour system to secure its profitable extraction. South Africa’s specific form of racial capitalism challenges not only linear conceptions of development, but also binaries between free and forced labour, and Eurocentric conceptions of social reproduction.