Steven Friedman. 2015. Race, Class, and Power: Harold Wolpe and the Radical Critique of Apartheid

Abstract

Steven Friedman. 2015. Race, Class, and Power: Harold Wolpe and the Radical Critique of Apartheid. Scottsville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. 368 pp. Steven Friedman's Race, Class, and Power: Harold Wolpe and the Radical Critique of Apartheid is an exquisitely well-written account of the intellectual debates that engulfed South Africa from the 1970s to the early 1990s. Friedman is a South African public intellectual, former journalist, trade unionist, and Director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy at Rhodes University and the University of Johannesburg. His book consists of twelve chapters, which can be divided into three broad thematic sections. The first is a biographical account of Harold Wolpe (1926-1996). Wolpe, a Jewish South African Marxist-inspired intellectual, was a member of the South African Communist Party (SACP). He famously escaped from a Johannesburg prison in 1963, sought refuge in Swaziland, and then fled to Britain, where he eventually taught at Essex University from 1975 until he returned to South Africa in 1990. The second part is a theoretical discussion of Wolpe's works and the debates it stimulated. The final portion situates Wolpe's writings within its political zeitgeist, and his attempts to construct a post-apartheid society. Friedman argues that Wolpe's texts, centered on reconciling class and labor, are important avenues to understand South African history. However, he cautions the reader against dismissing Wolpe's works as products and relics of infantile Marxism. Consequently, Friedman insists we rigorously apply the dialectical method between Marxist and non-Marxist thought to fathom and "transcend" the South African intellectual, political, and social realities (p. 277). In doing this, Friedman uses three methodological approaches. The first is grounded in interviews with Wolpe's colleagues--friends and foes--and students. The second is a deep engagement with Wolpe's texts and other scholars' works about Wolpe. Finally, Friedman uses Wolpe's numerous published materials to trace the evolution of Wolpe's intellectual positions, and its juxtaposition to his political activities and academic growth. In 1969, at the Institute for Commonwealth Studies (ICS) in London, Shula Marks, a well-respected South African Marxist historian, and Wolpe, established a seminar called "Societies of Southern Africa in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries." This seminar, according to Friedman, became a well-known "battleground" between Liberals and Marxists for interrogating each other's ideas and methods (p. 48). …