This paper aims to explore the specificities of South African capitalism before and after democratic change in 1994. It draws on the growing European literature on the varieties of capitalism. Marxist, institutionalist and structuralist approaches are introduced and eclectically drawn upon in order to describe and assess the South African case, both historically and in the
contemporary period. Throughout, the paper tries to get to grips with the relationship between the democratic state and various factions of capital old, new, black and reconstituted. South African capitalism is less different from the old model than most would have hoped for not long ago. It is dominated by a powerful mineral-energy complex whose principal actors now play on a global economic stage; it has, more generally, assumed an increasingly global character, in contrast to a long period of South Africanisation going back at least to the founding of the Anglo-American Corporation in 1917; corporatist institutions exert less influence over economic and social policy than was originally envisaged; capital has found new and different forms of cheapening labour power; and, despite talk of changing the racist structure of post-apartheid capitalism, corporate control and decision-making still rests with the old guard male and white.
