[DEBATE] : (Fwd) Peter Alexander on Wolpe

[Patrick Bond]

(Peter's stimulating inaugural professorial lecture on August 16 at U.of 
Johannesburg... and he's happy to get feedback from the list and beyond...)

History, internationalism and intellectuals: the case of Harold Wolpe

I thought that something biographical might make this lecture more 
accessible. The obvious choice might then have been South Africa’s most 
famous sociologist, its first professor of sociology, but that was none 
other than Hendrik Verwoerd, and I thought that, perhaps, it would be 
better to leave him to someone else. My choice of Harold Wolpe was not 
difficult. First, he is probably the country’s second most significant 
sociologist. The historian Dan O’Meara asserts that his ‘work and 
actions played a fundamental role in revolutionising the way that social 
scientists and activists … understood … the workings of South African 
society and the appropriate ways to change it.’ Secondly, I can 
empathise with him rather well, both because he was an activist and 
because he secured jobs in sociology without having any degrees in the 
subject.

It is not my intention to present Harold’s biography, nor even a 
balanced assessment of his work. Time is short and I have elected to 
limit myself to three critical comments. My desire is to clamber on to 
his shoulders in the hope that I might see more of our social world, 
for, if Harold was not quite a giant, he was certainly ‘a tall man’. I 
begin with a brief sketch of his life, then make my three points and, 
finally, conclude by rooting my argument in contemporary soil. My thesis 
will be that a critical assessment of Harold’s scholarship can lay a 
solid foundation for seminal advances in sociology.

To start: a sketch

Harold was born in Johannesburg in 1926. The son of Lithuanian 
immigrants, he attended Athlone Boys High in Bez Valley and, in 1944, 
went to Wits University. After a year of natural science he transferred 
to BA Social Science, i.e. social work. The latter included some 
sociology, and also a course in statistics, which is where he met 
AnnMarie. Whilst an undergraduate, he joined the communist party, whose 
members included Ruth First and Joe Slovo, the latter becoming a close 
and lifelong friend. Harold was also ‘befriended’ by Nelson Mandela (his 
word), and was later the friend and lawyer of Walter Sisulu. After 
graduation and a year as president of the students’ representative 
council, Harold began work on an LLB, which he completed in 1952.

Being an attorney was something that paid the bills rather than a 
vocation, but Harold was good at his job and one of the few lawyers who 
took political cases. He was also involved in re-establishing the 
communist party (the SACP), and helped purchase Lillieslief Farm in 
Rivonia, which became the headquarters of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK). After 
the arrest of members of MK’s high command in 1963, Harold was also 
captured, but, together with Arthur Goldreich, escaped from detention, 
eventually managing to flee the country. Mandela said of this 
achievement, which made headlines around the world: ‘It was an 
embarassment to the government and a boost to our morale.’

In exile in London, Harold was joined by AnnMarie, who he had married in 
1955, and their three children. He spent a year working for the 
movement, another reading sociology books at the London School of 
Economics, and a third teaching extra-mural students. He then held 
sociology lectureships at Bradford University, North London Polytechnic, 
where he was based from 1970 to 1974, and, finally, Essex University.
In 1991, following the unbanning of political organisations, he took a 
position at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), where he became a 
professor and director of the Education Policy Unit. Here he played an 
important role in developing the government’s higher education policy. 
He died from a heart attack in 1996, and O’Meara claimed that he ‘worked 
himself to death.’

In terms of his publications, it is possible to discern three periods: 
roughly 1970-78, 1978-88, and 1988-96. In the first, the major thrust of 
his work emphasised economic determinants of social change and the 
importance of class; in the second his focus was more on political 
determinants and the nature of the state; and in the third he shifted 
his attention to educational policy. In the second, he made sympathetic 
use of Nicos Poulantzas, who he had criticised in the earlier period, 
and one sympathetic critic was moved to comment that Harold came ‘close 
to detaching political struggle from any anchorage in the forces and 
relations of production.’ Whereas the polemical thrust of the first 
period was directed mainly against liberal and orthodox SACP writers, 
the second can be interpreted as, principally, a critique of left-wing 
Marxists, who argued that the struggle against capitalism and apartheid 
were inextricably linked. Harold’s third period, begun in exile, starts 
with critiques of apartheid education, moves through policy papers, and 
ends with criticism of the new government.

The key work of the first period is undoubtedly his seminal ‘Capitalism 
and Cheap Labour Power’, published in 1972. O’Meara may be correct when 
he writes that this was ‘probably the most influential and widely-cited 
theoretical text ever written on South Africa.’ Its impact should be 
understood within the context of a ‘photocopying culture’, in which 
tatty British seminar papers were widely circulated among student 
activists. ‘1968’, which in South Africa lasted well into the 1970s, 
produced a generation of radicalised students thirsting for new ideas, 
and Harold’s article fitted the times; especially so after the 1973 
strikes in Durban, which, in a very practical way, underlined the 
importance of class struggle. The principal achievement of the second 
period was Harold’s only book, Race, Class and the Apartheid State. This 
makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the state, and 
should be required reading for post-graduate political sociology 
students. For me, the most interesting output from the third period are 
Harold’s final papers, partly because thay provide an inkling of where 
he was moving politically.

I turn, now, to my three comments.

First: History

The primary problematic for radical sociologists - and this was true for 
Harold – consists of developing an understanding of how societies 
change. In addressing this challenge they must, necessarily, consider 
the relationship between sociology and history. E. H. Carr, an historian 
interested in generalisation, concluded: ‘The more sociological history 
becomes and the more historical sociology becomes, the better for both.’ 
In contrast to this blending approach, Harold was keen to keep history 
at arm’s length. His sociology was a largely theoretical undertaking 
that made use of history, but saw it as a distinct activity. In 1985 he 
published a short article, which Michael Burawoy calls his ‘praxis 
statement’, in which he contrasted structural analysis with studies of 
consciousness, associating the former with his own work, that is 
sociology, and the latter with history. This approach is consistent with 
the cheap labour article and also, though less obviously, with his book.

I would like to propose a third position. Whilst ‘blending’ should be 
encouraged, it does not disaggregate the different time frames within 
which change occurs. At one extreme, we have great epochal transitions, 
and, at the other, individual actions. There is, I think, a case for a 
division of labour between historical sociologists and historians 
working from one end of this continuum. However, there are also 
overlaps, and these are especially important for researchers interested 
in political change (including Harold, and also myself). Let me mention 
two matters here. First, there is ‘contingency’, meaning, in practice, 
that a structuralist argument is insufficient to explain a particular 
phenomenon. This might be interpreted as a chance occurance requiring a 
specific, historical explanation, or it could provide a basis for some 
new generalisation. Secondly, there is ‘balance of forces’, an 
assessment of which is critical for the development of strategy and 
tactics. Such assessments can be highly complex, since they not only 
involve weighing different factors - some structural, some linked with 
agency - but also an appreciation of changes in the weights of those 
factors. So, then, I am suggesting that, in grappling with certain key 
issues, the sociologist needs to bring structure and agency together, 
and must, in a certain sense, become an historian.

Back to Harold. My proposition is that, in developing a theoretical 
position that downplayed the significance of history – that is, the 
interaction between structure and agency (and, indeed, between economic 
structure and other varaibles in his first period, and between the state 
and others in the second) – Harold’s analysis was weakened, resulting in 
conclusions that were inadequate.

I want to substantiate this critique by drawing on some of my own 
research. The first example relates to another of his first period 
writings, his 1976 article on the ‘white working class’. In my view this 
provided a powerful response to those writers who separated workers into 
two classes along racial lines. Starting from an orthodox Marxist 
position he argued for a singular working class that included black and 
white workers. However, he excluded white miners, whose primary role as 
supervisors meant they should be regarded as members of the ‘new middle 
classs’. So far, so good. But there was a problem. This was reflected in 
Harold’s unwillingness to ‘spell out the South African class structure’, 
arguing that concrete class analysis was still required. The difficulty 
was, it seems to me, that an explanation of racial division within the 
working class was necessary, as was shown by blacks and whites striking 
separately. A possible way of handling the dilemma would have been to 
introduce E. P. Thompson’s notion of ‘class experience’, a concept that 
provided a link between class structure, on the one hand, and class 
culture and consciousness on the other. That is, an input from social 
history would have assisted in resolving a theoretical problem.

My second example comes from the ‘cheap labour’ article. His analysis 
here rested on two claims. First, he says that, in the early decades of 
the twentieth century, South African capitalism prospered because the 
cost of reproducing mining labour was subsidised by subsistence farming. 
Secondly, by the 1930s, capitalism had undermined this rural economy, so 
that it became necessary to buttress the system using the new forms of 
domination associated with post-1948 apartheid rule.

Here, I have two observations, one relating to each of his two claims. 
Firstly, the development of a cheap labour system, which I want to 
distinguish from the mere employment of oscillating migrant labour, was 
more ‘contingent’ than he assumes. For the system to work, strict rules 
limiting permanent settlement on the mines were required, but when these 
were introduced, in 1908, it was at the behest of the police, and 
against the initial opposition of the Chamber of Mines. Here 
‘contingency’ might have been useful as an argument, though the bans 
were not contingent in the sense of a chance happening, but rather a 
result of a desire to maintain order around the mines. That is, they 
were politically rather than economically motivated, not something that 
could have been incorporated within Harold’s frame of analysis.

Secondly, an explanation for the move from segregation to apartheid must 
be very much more complicated than that he presented. My own account 
highlights two factors. The first was that Jan Smuts’s labour policies 
produced unrest among black workers and opposition from white workers, 
and that, taken together, these undercut his support among white voters. 
This, again, is a contingent explanation, and again it is one resting 
upon a largely-political dynamic. The second was that, in contrast to 
Harold’s assessment (though also that of other writers), capitalist 
development was highly uneven, and that, even in manufacturing, there 
was substantial dependence on migrant labour. This exacerbated divisons 
within the ruling class, making it difficult, if not impossible, for 
Smuts to resolve the crises that had developed. Again contingency was 
important, though this time it was rooted in economic considerations 
that Wolpe had not considered.

The implications of these points are considerable, for if the migrant 
labour system and the coming of apartheid were both, to a significant 
degree, contingent on political dynamics, then perhaps, too, it was 
possible to delink white domination and cheap labour; that is, apartheid 
could be ended without the overthrow of capitalism.

To be fair to Harold, in 1970s he could not possibly have incorporated 
historical research that was not undertaken until much later. Moreover, 
in good measure, my criticisms about politically-rooted contingency are 
ones that could have been incorporated within the analysis advanced in 
his book (which was published in 1988). Focusing on the state, this 
argued bluntly: ‘the capitalist economy and the system of white 
domination stand in a contingent relationship.’ This opened up the 
possibility, at some point in the future, of apartheid being dismanted 
whilst preserving capitalism intact (albeit in a weakened form). 
However, because the book shifted so sharply in the direction of 
political structures, problems remained. So, he would, I suspect, have 
had difficulty integrating the economic aspects of my analysis of 
apartheid’s genesis. Interestingly, perhaps, the periodisation that the 
book presents is one that starts in 1948.

More significantly, the book retains Harold’s continuing interest in 
theory at the expense of history, producing blindspots in relation to 
agency. Whilst not as pronounced as in his first-period writings, this 
flaw is implicated in the problematic nature of the book’s conclusion:

there are two reasons why a negotiated settlement with the regime seems 
not possible [he presumably means ‘not possible’ in the near future]. 
The first relates to the narrow limits of the possible demands of the 
liberation movement as set out in the Freedom Charter. The second 
relates to … the possibility [that] negotiation would be undermined by 
its continued control of the army and security forces.

I will return to this prognosis, which was clearly wrong (though no 
commentators I know got it right). Here it will suffice to note that, as 
an account of balance of forces it is primitive, and that it hinges on a 
very restricted and idealistic notion of agency, the demands of the 
Freedom Charter. Only eight months after the book’s completion in 
February 1987, and prior to its publication, Harold was a participant, 
with Thabo Mbeki, in the first of a series meetings that would pave the 
way to a negotiated settlement. Harold himself had become an agent of 
change. He would have had to revise his analysis, and maybe, in time, 
his separation between sociological theory and historical practice. But, 
by the end of 1987, he had more pressing and interesting concerns.

Now my second comment: Internationalism

My case here is much easier to make. Intellectually, Harold was a 
nationalist. His entire body of work, so far as I am aware, focused on 
South Africa. Occasionally there are references to, for instance, Latin 
America, but these are used in support of a theoretical proposition 
rather than a component of new analysis. International influences are 
present at an abstract level, where theory is not examined critically in 
the light of its own historical context. From the early 1970s, Immanuel 
Wallerstein was making important theoretical break-thoughs in the study 
of social structures, doing so through an understanding of the 
world-system. Back in 1956, that most imaginative of sociologists, C. 
Wright Mills, was proclaiming: ‘the history that now affects every man 
[sic] is world history.’ And, of course, these assessments hark right 
back to Karl Marx’s 1848 call for ‘workers of the world’ to unite. This 
kind of international framing is simply not present in Harold’s work, 
and this is its most significant shortcoming.

As a general criticism, other writers have not, to the best of my 
knowledge, focused attention on this matter. There have been two partial 
exceptions. The first is Robin Cohen, who noted that ‘Wolpe misses the 
point that up to 1973 nearly 80 per cent of the African mine workers 
were from outside South Africa.’ His figure needs some qualification, 
since, before 1943, the majority came from within the country. However, 
this nuance strengthens the contention that the mines were addressing 
their labour problems by recruiting externally, so that, in terms of 
maintaining a supply of cheap labour, apartheid was not as critical as 
Harold assumed. Then there was Mahmood Mamdani’s argument that it was 
necessary to understand the form of political domination that operated 
in South Africa, and that this could be advanced through a comparison 
with colonialism elsewhere in Africa.

With respect to the weakness in Harold’s 1988 prognosis, already quoted, 
part of the problem lies with an absence of international dimensions. 
These might have included the growing inability of the South African 
economy to compete internationally, especially with other newly 
industrialised countries; the impact of solidarity, and, eventually, 
pressure on the regime from western allies; and, on the other side, 
pressure on the ANC from a weakened and détente-oriented USSR.

Attempting to distinguish between local and international dynamics 
requires a comparative approach to history and sociology. There have 
been many revealing studies using South Africa, or some aspect of South 
Africa, as a comparator, but I would like to give four brief examples 
taken from my own work.

First, through a comparison of South African and US labour movements 
during the second world war, I realised that I had overlooked a key 
factor affecting worker militancy in the former. This was the impact of 
generational difference, with new female and black workers far more 
likely to strike than the well-established white men, whose unions had 
accepted the priorities of Smuts’s government. The role of generation in 
shaping history is an issue worthy of further attention.

Secondly, following from a comparsion of black and white miners in 
Alabama and Transvaal, it was possible to advance an argument about the 
siginficance of the US Civil War and Anglo-South African War in shaping 
labour relations.

Thirdly, together with a collaborator, I investigated pass laws in South 
Africa and China. The analysis highlighted the fact that the racialised 
form of the laws in this country was a key factor in unifing black 
opposition to apartheid across class lines. It also helped explain rapid 
economic growth in China.

Finally, recent work on coal miners in South Africa and India has shown 
that, by the 1930s, daily pay in India was about half that received by 
South Africa’s workers. The concept of ‘cheap labour’ which involves a 
comparison with white South African labour, is parochial, and, in my 
view, it should now be disgarded.

When Wallerstein visited South Africa in 1996 he noted ‘a certain 
parocialism and South African exceptionalism.’ I have no reason to think 
he was wrong, and this is what one might expect given the intensity of 
struggle in the country, and, perhaps, also the impact of academic 
boycotts. However, it is unfortunate that Harold, the country’s leading 
sociologist, had not bucked the trend. Had he lived he may well have 
done so. Internationalising our analyses in such a way that we do not 
lose the comparative advantages gained from drawing on local experience 
is, perhaps, the biggest challenge facing South African sociology today.

So, to my final comment: Intellectuals

In his praxis statement, Harold argued:

the priorities defined at the political level became also the priorities 
of social research. But, and this is the fundamental point which cannot 
be overemphasised, not as conclusions but as starting points for 
investigation.

It is this ‘fundamental point’ that makes Harold so admirable. He was 
relevant, rigorous and courageous, and his bravery was not just about 
challenging the apartheid state, it was also, and more impressively, a 
willingness, where necessary, to stand up to his own comrades. He was 
the kind of gutsy, engaged intellectual that many of us would like to 
be, but few accomplish.

But what does one make of his first principle, the need for agendas to 
be politically determined? It will be recalled that earlier I noted that 
Harold contrasted structure and consciousness, associating the former 
with theoretical research and the latter with history. He also presented 
the study of consciousness in another way, one that underlined his 
rather dismissive approach to history. ‘To a considerable degree,’ he 
argued, ‘the national liberation movements through their organisations 
and through the activities of other organsations are well aware of what 
we might call the level of consciousness.’ That is, researchers should 
limit themselves in two ways: avoid theory that is not politcally 
driven, and do not touch ‘consciousness’ (which is usually more concrete 
and hence controversial).

The problem with this approach is most apparent if we return, once more, 
to the conclusion in Harold’s book: a negotiated settlement ‘seems not 
possible’. This conclusion rested in large part on his sense of the 
liberation movement’s ‘bottom line’, which he detailed as ‘the 
dismantling of the giant corporations’, ‘radical redistribution’ of 
land, and ‘massive redistribution of resources in education, welfare, 
housing, health and so forth.’ Clearly he got it wrong and, doubtless, a 
range of factors was at work, but a key one relates to his ‘praxis’. If 
one regards ‘the organisations’ as the solution, rather than a potential 
problem, why analyse them, especially if, a priori, you have ruled out 
any need to study consciousness? The book contained a compelling 
methodological argument against ‘analytical closures’ that existed in 
the writings of others, but Harold himself had an analytical closure, a 
very damaging one, he was unwilling to analyse his own party.

I need to clarify my position here, for I am not arguing against 
sociologists developing agendas on the basis of movment priorities. On 
the contrary, if one wants to practice research in the interests of the 
poor and exploited this must be done. But there are certain conditions. 
First, we should not mistake organisations for classes and mass 
movements, even though they may be related. In Harold’s case, ‘the 
organisations’ were separated from the masses by illegality and exile, 
the SACP was relatively small (not a mass party), and the ANC was a 
multi-class organisation containing diverse interests. Secondly, 
intellectuals should be left to formulate their own research questions, 
though this might be done in consultation with movement leaders and 
activists. This may produce some useless research, but it is the only 
guarentee of developing theories in which the ‘sociological imagination’ 
can be applied to a changing world that exists beyond the priorities of 
the movement. Thirdly, researchers should be prepared to study agency 
and consciousness, not only for their inherent value, but also because 
this can point a way to new theory. Marx, for instance, came to an 
understanding of class through direct experience of workers’ organisations.

After 1988, Harold continued to focus his research on a polical 
priority, education. Now, however, there was a difference from his 
praxis position. For the first time he became involved in empirical 
research, giving him contact with the people he had championed from 
afar, and forcing him to grapple with thorny problems and political 
obstacles. In his two final articles, both published in 1995, one senses 
some frustration. In the first, on institutional transformation, he 
concludes by arguing: ‘[the] critical and radical thrust of the 
university [specifically UWC] should be implemented through a strong 
intellectual development which does not only serve an instrumental role 
– [an] Institute of Social Theory … is one example.’ He clearly wanted 
to move beyond his policy work to play a more critical role as an 
intellectual. In the second, an analysis of the Reconstruction and 
Development Programme (RDP), he is more trenchant. He argues that the 
programme, rather than articulating a vision for ‘incremental changes’ 
that produce a ‘revolution in the social order’, takes, as its starting 
point, ‘a consensual model of society …that permits starkly different 
and contradictory goals to be accommodated’. He says that the RDP White 
Paper ‘represents a very significant compromise to the neo-liberal, 
“trickle down” economic policy preferences of the old regime’, and 
concludes with a quote from two other analysts, who suggest that, for 
the poorest 60-70 per cent, the RDP ‘will deliver little or nothing for 
many years to come.’

Of course we cannot know how Harold would have developed his thinking. 
But would he have supported the GEAR policy that was introduced only two 
months after his death? I doubt this very much. Would he have identified 
himself with the SACP and COSATU against the government? I think so. I 
feel, too, that he might have sympathised with the following assessment 
advanced by his old friend, the Rivonia trialist and principal author of 
the Freedom Charter, Rusty Bernstein: ‘It [the ANC] has impoverished the 
soil in which ideas leaning towards socialist solutions once flourished, 
and allowed the weed of “free market” ideology to take hold.’ What we 
can say with confidence is that whatever our criticisms of Harold, we 
are very much the weaker for the loss of his towering intellect. Oh, 
that we now had him and his Institute of Social Theory to help us 
undertand our contemporary world!

Lastly, then, something about that world, and how it might affect our 
conclusion

Our ideas are shaped by the time and place of our existence. For Harold, 
the key factors were, I think:

1. His location in exile, with his disconnection of sociology and 
history reflecting his separation from South Africa.
2. His over-riding commitment to a struggle that was, necessarily, 
national, and thus to theory and methodolgy that were geographically 
bounded. And,
3. His identification of liberation organisations as the main agent of 
change, producing a praxis that was insufficiently critical.

Ours is a different world. First, we are not working under the 
constraints of exile and tyranny, and detachment from lived experience 
no longer makes any sense practically or theoretically. Secondly, with 
the ending of apartheid, South Africa has become far more integrated 
into the world economy and global culture. Comparative research has 
become more important and relatively easier to practise. And, thirdly, 
the main liberation organisation has become a governing party, and 
radical researchers must look elsewhere to locate agents of progessive 
change.

I would like to expand on the second of these points. Globalisation has, 
I have argue elsewhere, entered a new phase. Firstly, growing inequality 
is apparent almost everywhere. In South Africa, with increased 
unemployment, more than 50% of the labour force now survives on less 
than R500 per month. Meanwhile, the head of Shoprite Checkers, Whitey 
Basson, receives about R5 million a month. Secondly, the US economy is 
experiencing a long-term decline, and is becoming increasingly dependent 
on loans from other countries. Its political hegemony is being 
undermined and we can expect growing instability. Thirdly, the 
combination of inequality and wars has produced counter-hegemonic 
politicisation on a mass scale (notably in Latin America). This has 
increasingly gained an international dimension (key events being Seattle 
and the unprecedented international protests against the invasion of 
Iraq in 2003).

Alongside these changes there has been a decline in the post-modernist 
theorisation that, within sociology, probably provided the dominant 
paradigm in the later decades of the last century. It was recently 
demonstrated that sometime in the late 1990s the concept simply dropped 
out of use, and, as Alex Callinicos argues: ‘the debate has moved on, 
less because of some decisive theoretical refutation … than because the 
worldwide rebellion against globalization has changed the intellectual 
agenda.’

Within this debate, we in South Africa have the opportunity to make a 
significant contribution. This is an ambitious claim but in my view it 
is time to be ambitious. Mostly, we will fall short of our objectives or 
get things wrong, but, unless we in the South strive to be heard, the 
social sciences will continue to be dominated by people with ideas 
shaped by proximity to the world’s rich. Waning US hegemony will impact 
on the confidence of its intellectuals, and we, like our counterparts in 
India can Brazil, can be influence the way people think, not only here, 
but internationally too.

The main requirements for this are, I believe, threefold. First, we 
should relate theory to lived experience here in South Africa. Secondly, 
we should extend our theorisation by means of international comparison. 
And, thirdly, like Harold, we must be meticulous, courageous and 
committed to social change.

Baie dankie, ngiyabonga, kealeboha, thank you.


Harold Wolpe: a select bibliography

Wolpe, H. 1970. ‘Some Problems Concerning Revolutionary Consciousness.’ 
Socialist Register.
Wolpe, H. 1970. ‘Industrialisation and Race in South Africa’. In S. 
Zubaida (ed). Race and Racialism. London: Tavistock Press.
Wolpe, H. 1972. ‘Capitalism and Cheap Labour-Power: From Segregation to 
Apartheid’. Economy and Society 4(1): 431. Reprinted in Beinart, W. & S. 
Dubow. Segregation and Apartheid in Twentieth Century South Africa. 
London: Routledge.
Wolpe, H. 1975. ‘The Theory of Internal Colonialism – The South African 
Case’. In I. Oxaal, T. Barnett & D. Booth (eds). Beyond the Sociology of 
Development. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Wolpe, H. 1976. ‘The “White Working Class” in South Africa’. Economy and 
Society 5.
Asad, T. & H. Wolpe. 1976. ‘Concepts of Modes of Production’. Economy 
and Society 5.
Legassick, M. & H. Wolpe. 1977. ‘The Bantustans and Capital Accumulation 
in South Africa’. Review of African Political Economy 7.
Wolpe, H. 1978. ‘A Comment on ‘The Poverty of Neo-Marxism’. Journal of 
Southern African Studies 4(2).
Wolpe, H. (ed). 1980. The Articulation of Modes of Production: Essays 
from Economy and Society. London: Routledge.
Wolpe, H. 1985. ‘The Liberation Struggle and Research’. Review of the 
African Political Economy 32.
Wolpe, H. 1985. ‘The Liberation Struggle and Research’. Review of 
African Political Economy 32.
Wolpe, H. 1985. ‘Political Strategies and the Law in South Africa: 
Analytical Considerations’. Journal of Southern African Studies 12(1).
Wolpe, H. 1986. ‘Class Concepts, Class Struggle and Race’. In J. Rex & 
D. Mason (eds). Theories of Race and Ethnic Relations. Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press.
Wolpe, H. 1986. ‘National and Class Struggle in South Africa’. In 
Africa’s Crisis. London: Institute for African Alternatives.
Wolpe, H. 1988. Race, Class and the Apartheid State. London: James Currey
Wolpe, H. 1988. ‘Race and Class in the National Struggle in South 
Africa’. In M. van Diepen. (ed). The National Question in South Africa. 
London: Zed.
Wolpe, H. 1995. ‘The Debate on University Transformation in South 
Africa: The Case of the University of the Western Cape’. Comparative 
Education 31(2): 275-292.
Wolpe, H. 1995. ‘The Uneven Transition from Apartheid in South Africa’. 
Transformation 27.
Wolpe, H. 1996. ‘Capitalism and Cheap Labour Power in South Africa: From 
Segregation to Apartheid’. In Beinart W. & S. Dubow. Segregation and 
Apartheid in Twentieth Century South Africa. London: Routledge.

I am grateful to Lauren Basson for her assistance in preparing this 
bibliography.