Prospects for the Development of a Black Business Class in South Africa

In: The journal of modern African studies: a quarterly survey of politics, economics & related topics in contemporary Africa, Band 34, Heft 4, S. 661-686

Abstract

Thegrowth of business classes in Africa has attracted much interest since the 1980s when, in the context of severe economic malaise, the impact of the state on development was subjected to critical reappraisal.1Out of this emerged a consensus that the abysmal economic record of the 1960s and 1970s could, to a large degree, be ascribed to the debilitating effect of an overstretched and swollen state. Official development thinking took this argument the furthest: at the core of the problem, it was asserted, was the expansion of the state's rôle from the preferred minimalist function of providing the legal and macro-economic regulatory framework for capital accumulation, to a more profound intervention in the productive process. As a remedy, the state would have to be restrained from usurping the primary rôle which the market's invisible hand ought to be playing.2