disciplines in society. He says that disciplines are there to illuminate problems of fragmented social existence and, in doing this, social scientists assume that it is for the benefit of ‘uncomprehending ordinary people’. The assumption made by social scientists then leads to the bourgeois epistemology of subject-object relation. Mafeje clinches his argument by saying: ‘If the function of bourgeois social science is to increase the awareness (or false consciousness) of uncomprehending objects, then when the people have become comprehending subjects, there will be no need for social science.’23
Mafeje’s argument is not entirely convincing. This is an issue distinct from the critique of (bourgeois) social science. The non-disciplinarity that would emerge from transcending disciplines would still constitute social science. Marx was concerned with the ordering of society and social relations (the subject matter of social science) rather than biological or natural sciences. The paradox of the charge of Eurocentrism against functionalist-positivistic social science is that Marxism is itself fundamentally Eurocentric. The problematic that it sets itself is mainly Europe; speaking specifically to the European conditions – even if it could be appropriated (with considerable modifications) for the revolutionary projects in the (former) colonies.
In order to understand where Mafeje was coming from, one has to read him outside of the text. In other words, context is crucially important. In his search for alternatives, Mafeje was also limited by his background and environment. The issue is not whether Mafeje succeeded or failed in the very difficult task he set for himself. The point is to follow his line of thought and to see what insights African social scientists may garner from him in the quest for knowledge decolonisation. For a Unity Movement-trained Marxist such as he was, their internationalist outlook would have prevented him from adopting what he called an Africanist or even nationalist perspective on these issues. As far as he and the Unity Movement were concerned, to be Africanist or nationalist is to be reactionary.24 He said at one point, for example: ‘In the name of international socialism Pallo Jordan and I were trained to think that “nationalism” was narrow-minded, bourgeois, and, therefore, reactionary.’25 If the sociology of knowledge is to be taken seriously, then this biographical detail and the context in which Mafeje wrote ought to be fully appreciated and not seen as a rationalisation of his argument.
Mafeje championed Marxism insofar as it does not recognise disciplines. Thus, according to him, even claims to Marxist anthropology or Marxist sociology are self-contradictory. Equally, Marxism cannot be interdisciplinary without being self-contradictory. The difficult question, then, is what the role of disciplines is in the social sciences. The answer is usually that the social sciences make complex sociopolitical issues apparent to uncomprehending laypeople. This is Mafeje’s representation of it. The social sciences could well be for comprehending subjects. Most scholarly works are addressed to other scholars, in much the same way that the Grundrisse and Das Kapital are addressed to intellectuals, not the peasant or the factory worker (the complexity of scholarly writing had to be diluted in pamphlets to make it more comprehensible to the literate among the masses). According to Mafeje, the crux of the problem of the social sciences lies in their bourgeois epistemology of subject-object. Although it is said that the role of the social sciences is to increase the awareness of the unknowing objects, it is unlikely that this is so, for even when people become comprehending subjects, the social sciences still exist. In the final analysis, Mafeje argues, the role of the social sciences is politics and therefore ideological: ‘Participation in the making and execution of decisions by either “knowing subjects” (experts, advisors and consultants) or liberated objects is a political process. Then Marxist theory which advocates revolutionary politics and which denies separation between subjects and objects, between theory and practice, between value and fact, and between science and history comes [into] its own. At the most fundamental level, it is the best anthropology that there is and the best candidate for future society.’26
Thus, ‘if dialectical materialism is a theory of history, then historical materialism is its methodology’.27 Marxists are acutely aware of the distinction between theory and practice – hence the idea of praxis. The fact that practice informs theory or vice versa is no reason to suppose that Marxism denies separation between the two. Although Mafeje declares that Marxism ‘is the best anthropology that there is’, he is willing to subject it to critical scrutiny when its categories do not adequately address the concrete cases they are meant to address.
On idiographic and nomothetic inquiry
In his essay ‘On the Articulation of Modes of Production’, Mafeje is concerned with understanding at least five important issues. The first is a question: Does idiographic inquiry yield deeper insights into societal processes than nomothetic inquiry?28 He raises this issue specifically because he wants to understand whether traditional disciplines such as history and anthropology (both of which are idiographic) are the best candidates accounting for societal processes vis-à-vis Marxism, which makes nomothetic claims such as ‘the theory of modes of production’. Mafeje’s second issue is the mode of production as a unit of analysis, a worthy substitute for such concepts as tribe or nation, both of which are used by historians and anthropologists.29 The third issue is that since Marxism tends to treat culture as purely a superstructural phenomenon (which has little influence on the base that produces the necessities of life), what is the relationship between cultural relativity and meta-theory? The fourth important issue asks what (if world history and anthropological philosophies are necessarily Eurocentric and therefore inadequate and unacceptable) counter theories one can generate from the global South. Finally, Mafeje’s fifth issue, also a question, asks what – in an otherwise imperialist world – is the responsibility of the social scientist? These questions speak not only to the problem of theory, but also to the sociology of knowledge. Mafeje proposes to approach the general through the particular, and herein lies the genius of his approach. In grappling with these questions, Mafeje discusses the works of two Marxists, Harold Wolpe and Michael Morris, who wrote about South African capitalist relations and specific mechanisms of labour reproduction in the twentieth century.30 In their attempts to understand South African conditions, they deployed Marxian categories such as class, mode of production, production relations, forces of production and social formation.
Mafeje wants first to clarify what it is that the two writers meant by these concepts, and then to understand how such concepts explain the concrete conditions they are meant to explain. Although he wants to clarify, he is equally concerned to comprehend the applicability of the concepts and their usefulness in different conditions. This is so because while the concepts seem theoretically reasonably precise, substantively they need further clarification. Wolpe, following Ernesto Laclau, made a distinction between a mode of production and an economic system, of which he sought to understand the constituent elements – capitalist modes of production, the African redistributive economies and the system of labour tenancy. For Mafeje, the latter two concepts were a deviation from Marxism and empirically unreliable.
For Morris, on the other hand, a mode of production was an articulated combination/structured combination or, more precisely, a determinate structure. On this score, a mode of production is combined precisely because modes of production do not follow one another sequentially, with one replacing the other; nor is a mode of production produced by movement or changes within it. To argue as Morris did is to ignore the Marxian dictum that the struggle is the motor of history. For Mafeje, this led to a theoretical confusion because there can be no theory of articulation between modes of production. According to Morris, contradictions occur in class struggles within a given social formation, not between modes of production or within a mode of production – but an argument of that sort abandons dialectical materialism altogether. Morris’s thesis, Mafeje argues, could only be valid if class struggle (which is concrete) is used to mean the same theoretical or abstract construct (mode of production) used to explain it. In other words, a mode of production is a theoretical concept to explain the sociopolitically concrete. In Morris’s account, however, the two are used somewhat interchangeably. According to Mafeje, Morris’s thesis cannot be valid ‘unless the material conditions of class struggle are accorded the same theoretical/logical status as the mode of production to which they refer. In orthodox Marxism this is provided for in the concept of “contradiction” within a mode or between modes of production.’31