Legitimation and Control: Ideological Struggles within the South African State

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Stanley B. Greenberg (1983). Legitimation and Control: Ideological Struggles within the South African State. University of the Witwatersrand, African Studies Institute, African Studies Seminar Paper (8 August 1983). African Studies Institute, University of the Witwatersrand.

Type	conference paper
Scope	Wider apartheid literature
Method	mixed
Period studied	1974–1982
Regions	South Africa, Witwatersrand/PWV, Western Cape, Natal, homelands
Themes	politics ideology elections, business and state, bantustans removals influx, labour markets wages, transition post apartheid
Citation key	greenberg1983

Argument

Greenberg argues that the racial-state ideology of the 1950s and 1960s, which fused politics and economics through heavy state control of African labour, was dissolving after the mid-1970s. Afrikaner intellectuals and business leaders pushed a market-based substitute that 'uncouples' the political from the economic. Inside the state, the labour-control bureaucracy clung to control and expected a larger state role, while policy-level officials and political leaders adopted free-enterprise language selectively. For the political leaders this was a strategic resource against Marxism and a means of securing business support. The argument rests on interviews with officials at several levels and on documents such as commission reports and the AHI journal Volkshandel. It concludes that the state remains deeply entangled in the labour market while its ideology fragments.

Evidence and method

Interviews with state officials conducted between February 1979 and April 1982: policy-makers, chief commissioners, administration board directors and labour bureau directors, plus people outside the state. Documents: the Wiehahn and Riekert Commission reports, Jan Lombard's writings, P.J. van der Merwe, Volkshandel (AHI), Wassenaar, speeches by Botha and Horwood at the Carleton Centre and Good Hope conferences, SABC broadcasts, and the 1977 Defence White Paper.

Place in the debates

• Crisis of hegemony / legitimation in the late-apartheid state (see Why apartheid ended: reform, transition and elite bargaining). Builds on Saul and Gelb's 'organic crisis' reading but shifts attention to the content and breakdown of dominant ideology, and to struggles among state actors and their outside connections.
• Free-market reformism vs state control of African labour (the liberal/market critique of apartheid as practised by officials) (see Why apartheid ended: reform, transition and elite bargaining). Treats market-liberal discourse as partly an ideological mystification that obscures state-market entanglement, not a real retreat of the state. Officials continue to expect more regulation.
• Business and the state in the reform turn (see Why apartheid ended: reform, transition and elite bargaining). Sees employer and business pressure, especially Afrikaner business, as the main impetus for the Wiehahn and Riekert reforms. Lower-level bureaucrats are isolated from this alignment.

Findings

• The apartheid state was heavily entangled in the labour market, a feature that undermined its claim to a separate, legitimate public sphere. (p. 4)

  role in the market — allocating labor between sectors, controlling and limiting proletarianization, and suppressing African labor organization.

• The Wiehahn Commission's introduction presents South African history as one of unbroken free-market commitment, which Greenberg calls a revisionist mystification. (p. 6)

  The Republic of South Africa subscribes to the principles of a free market economy based on individual freedom in the market place.

• Lombard minimises the political side of economic history, including Afrikaner use of the state for economic advancement. (p. 7)

  Lombard also denies, against an impressive body of evidence to the contrary, that Afrikaners used their control of the state to realize economic gains

• The 'market failure' concept lets theorists defend influx control and other state penetration of labour markets while professing market principles. (p. 8)

  allows an elaborate state penetration of markets and, at the same time, an affirmation of market principles.

• The AHI, the main Afrikaans business body, doubted that homeland and decentralisation policy could stop African urbanisation. (p. 10)

  Economic integration of the Blacks is inevitable and unstoppable if work and welfare is to be created and maintained.

• Afrikaner business sought limited reform through stratification of urban Africans, not a general uncoupling of labour control. (p. 12)

  The focus of Afrikaner business was not essentially on uncoupling the political and economic in the labor field but on stratification.

• Labour bureaucrats remained committed to control and expected the state's role to grow, in contrast to the new market ideology. (p. 15)

  The enduring commitment to control translates into two streams of thought that are difficult to reconcile with the new ideology

• Lower-level officials justified influx control as protecting local urban Africans from cheaper outside labour, and saw employers as the villains. (p. 20)

  If influx control were to be relaxed, if the state were to leave the labor market to its own dynamic, the local labor would be the first hurt.

• Top officials wanted to de-racialise the appearance of control while keeping it; Wiehahn framed this as a matter of imagery. (p. 22)

  The key, he points out, is "imagery," the imagery of "removing discrimination."

• Policy-level officials saw direct employer pressure as the main driver of labour reform and the legitimation turn. (p. 23)

  Officials at this level view employers as the principal pressure group that has forced the state to face the problem of legitimation.

• For political leaders, free enterprise functioned as a strategic idiom against the 'total onslaught' and for winning business support. (p. 27)

  Free enterprise is, above all, a counterpoint to the Marxist, "total onslaught" -- both external and domestic.

• Greenberg concludes that practice remained entangled even as ideology dissolved, with political leaders barely developing a disentangling programme. (p. 31)

  In policy terms, the state remains deeply mired in the market; in ideological terms, political leaders have hardly begun to elaborate the themes

Evidence ledger

Sources used

Source	Kind	Period	How used
Interviews with state officials in the labor control bureaucracy (policy makers, chief commissioners, administration board chairmen and directors of labor, labor bureau directors)	interviews oral history	February 1979 to April 1982	Supplies the officials' own statements establishing the persistence of control ideology, hostility to market principles, the protect-the-locals justification, and the divisions between upper- and lower-level officials.
Interviews with strategic actors outside the state (former AHI president, general secretary of the Free Market Foundation, director of the Urban Foundation)	interviews oral history	1979-1982	Documents the views of Afrikaner business and free-market intellectuals on the state, free enterprise, and urban Africans.
Commission of Enquiry into Labour Legislation (Wiehahn Commission) report	commission or official report	c. 1979	Quoted for its free-market statement, as an example of 'revisionist historiography' that denies the state's historic role in the economy.
Riekert Commission report (Commission of Inquiry into Legislation Affecting the Utilisation of Manpower), as analysed by P.J. van der Merwe	commission or official report	1979	Used via van der Merwe's analysis to show the free-market belief and the 'market failure' concept justifying state control of labor markets.
Jan Lombard, On Economic Liberalism in South Africa (Bureau for Economic Policy and Analysis, University of Pretoria) and related Lombard speeches and articles	other	c. 1978-1981	Textual source for the market theorists' tenets: diminished state, economy over politics, and universal market principles.
Bureau for Economic Policy and Analysis, Focus on Key Issues: Political Stability, No. 26	other	July 1980	Cited as evidence that the failure of homeland development was acknowledged within government-linked think tanks.
Volkshandel (journal of the Afrikaanse Handelsinstituut), 1976-1981 issues	newspapers periodicals	March 1976 - October 1981	Source for AHI positions on the homelands, urban Africans, attacks on parastatals and the Industrial Development Corporation, and African trade unions.
AHI memorandum to the Wiehahn Commission	employer association records	c. 1978	Supports the claim about AHI attitudes toward labor reform and stratification of urban Africans.
Prime Minister's meetings with business leaders: 'Toward a Constellation of States' (Carleton Centre, 22 Nov 1979) and 'A Regional Development Strategy for Southern Africa' (Good Hope Civic Centre, 12 Nov 1981)	other	1979-1981	Shows business concern with urban African housing and training, and Botha's free enterprise bargain with business.
A.D. Wassenaar, Assault on Private Enterprise: Freeway to Communism	other	1977	Primary text for the Afrikaner business attack on state absorption of the private sector.
Speeches by Finance Minister Owen Horwood (1820 Settlers' Monument Foundation conference, 19 Nov 1979) and P.W. Botha opening address, Carleton Centre	other	1979	Shows the political leadership's formal affirmation of free enterprise and its use as a strategic political resource.
SABC Current Affairs broadcasts, 1974-1976	newspapers periodicals	July 1974 - June 1976	Evidence that traditional racial-state ideology survived in state media through 1976.
White Paper on Defense 1977	commission or official report	1977	Used to show the state's aim of enlisting the whole population in a national strategy against the 'total onslaught'.
Human Sciences Research Council, 'Possible National Research Programmes'	commission or official report	early 1980s plan	Cited for the state's research interest in the susceptibility of cultural groups to ideologies.
Rand Daily Mail, 12 October 1979	newspapers periodicals	12 October 1979	Source for Koornhof's view that the government's task is to form an ideology enlisting black cooperation.
Speeches and papers by J.H. Steyn (Urban Foundation) and other conference papers (Good Hope Conference, South Africa Foundation briefing papers)	other	1979-1981	Documents the Urban Foundation's framing of urbanization as natural and linked to free enterprise.
Free Market Foundation surveys among Africans (as reported)	author survey or fieldwork	c. 1980	Reported as showing African partiality to 'Marxist rhetoric', prompting a market-based counter-idiom.

New data

A body of semi-structured elite and bureaucratic interviews conducted February 1979 to April 1982 with roughly 45 officials: policy makers, chief commissioners, administration board chairmen and labor directors, and labor bureau directors, plus business and Urban Foundation figures. They are quoted anonymized by office. This is not a quantitative dataset.

Inference

Quantification: None.

Qualitative discourse analysis. Interview quotations and published speeches, commission texts and business periodicals are grouped by location (outside the state, lower-level officials, upper-level officials, political leadership) and read against a theoretical frame of uncoupling the political and economic. The claims are not tested statistically.

Key claims

Claim	Basis	Strength
Intellectuals and Afrikaner business are building a market-based ideology that diminishes the state and obscures its role, while leaving state control intact in practice. (p. 4)	Lombard, van der Merwe, Wassenaar, Volkshandel/AHI texts and the Wiehahn and Riekert reports, read as discourse.	Partial data
Lower-level labor control officials hold to conventional ideology: hostility to the market, a demand for ever more control, and a justification of influx control as protecting local Africans. (p. 14)	Author's interviews with labor bureau and administration board officials, quoted and attributed by office.	Partial data
Upper-level policy officials seek to depoliticize and deracialize influx control without relinquishing control, and see employer pressure as the main impetus for reform. (p. 22)	Interviews with the Manpower Commission chairman, the Employment Services Committee, the economic advisor to the prime minister, and Wiehahn.	Partial data
The political leadership treats free enterprise as a strategic political resource to counter Marxism and win business cooperation, not as a well-integrated body of thought. (p. 26)	Speeches of Botha, Horwood and Malan, the 1977 Defense White Paper, the HSRC plan, and interviews with advisors.	Partial data
State ideology has dissolved since the mid-1970s into conflicting perspectives, with open acrimony between business-linked reformers and the labor control bureaucracy. (p. 29)	Interview quotations from commission chairmen and advisors, and Wassenaar's attack on the bureaucracy as 'foe'.	Illustrative or anecdotal
Afrikaner business challenged the homelands and state-control framework and pushed for stratification, a stake for urban Africans, and attacks on parastatals. (p. 11)	AHI statements in Volkshandel and the memorandum to the Wiehahn Commission, business remarks at the Carleton Centre and Good Hope meetings, and Urban Foundation material.	Partial data

The author's caveats

The author says the paper is an initial attempt to order interview and documentary material collected in South Africa between 1979 and 1982. It omits, for lack of space, the 'exceptional views which pepper the bureaucracy'. The author also notes that one individual asked not to be named as the source of a quoted document.

Gaps in the evidence

The paper gives no systematic sampling frame or coding for the interviews, so the claim that views split by bureaucratic rank cannot be tested for representativeness. It lacks archival records of internal Department of Cooperation and Development or Manpower Commission deliberations, and data on the actual operation of influx control, such as prosecutions and labor bureau placements. Such data existed then in departmental and administration board records and in later-opened archives. The causal claim that employer pressure drove reform needs Chamber of Commerce, Federated Chamber of Industries and AHI correspondence with the state.

Replicability: Data described but not public.