I just re-read William Hutt’s The Economics of the Colour Bar and found it even more fascinating the second time around. I consider it one of the most underappreciated books in labor history. Hutt was a professor of economics and outspoken opponent of apartheid who taught in South Africa for many years. In Hutt’s view, apartheid did not have its origins in capitalist exploitation (an idea which stems from the fact that the government was purportedly fighting the “communist” ANC). Rather, it was an outgrowth of white miners’ attempt to limit competition from black workers through the colour bar.
What really amazes me is that Hutt wrote this in 1964 - almost a decade before Edna Bonacich wrote the on theory of split labor markets and Gordon Tullock wrote his seminal article on rent-seeking. Additionally, it seems as if Hutt was unaware of Gary Becker’s book on discrimination which had come out a few years earlier.
Contrast this with American labor historians who had a lot of trouble coming to grips with labor’s racist past. Herbert Gutman, father of the new labor history movement in the United States, was famously accused of white-washing history by portraying the United Mine Workers as some sort of enlightened interracial worker’s organization. Shortly after his death, Herbert Hill, a former NAACP labor director, wrote a paper calling out Gutman in an obscure left-leaning journal. A lively (and sometimes very bitter) debate ensued among labor historians. In the decade that followed, several books (some great, some not so great) appeared including ones by Ronald Lewis (1987), Joe Trotter (1990), Price Fishback (1992), and Daniel Letwin (1998), and Brian Kelly (2001) reexamining race relations in American coal mines.
It’s a very intellectually stimulating debate indeed, but I’m afraid it obscures a very important research question: If Hutt is right then why did racial antagonisms lead to an official colour bar in South Africa but not in the United States? No doubt the United States had legal segregation in the form of Jim Crow, but it was to enforce social segregation rather than economic.
My guess (and it is only a guess right now) is that the difference lies in the ideologies prevalent among white citizens in the two countries. South Africa, at the time, had a stronger trade union movement while the United States was still relatively laissez faire despite the onset of the progressive era. It’s something I’m hoping to explore in a comparative historical course I’m taking in the fall, so comments are welcome.
- Josh McCabe
You can find a sumary of the book with generous extracts on line here.
http://www.the-rathouse.com/Revivalist4.html
Also a list of his books, overview of his career and extracts from other books, including a chapter from “The Strike Threat System”.
You should check out the debate between Bonacich and Burawoy over this very issue (Political Power and Social Theory, vol 2 from 1981).
Bottom line is that “Apartheid’s Genesis” (to use Philip Bonner’s phrase) is way too complex to be reduced to the preferences of racist white mine workers. More fruitful to look at the nature of the compromise between English and Afrikaners following the Boer War (Anthony Marx’s argument), as well as the specificity of the migrant labor system and its benefits for both mining capital and the National Party (Harold Wolpe’s argument).
Good luck on the course!
@Professor Sallaz: I dug that book out of the local library last night and its great. Thanks for the recommendation!
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