The world recapitulated in miniature

One wonders if the protester who spraypainted Smuts’s statue up there in London knew what world-historical role the man played in delivering him the slogan he sprayed.

If you are a bit of a political theory nerd, you may be aware of Nick Land, a former Marxist, who has become one of the world’s most notorious reactionary bogeymen. A lot of his work is extremely eccentric, and I could never could get into Land’s crazier stuff, but when he opened his first collected writings, Fanged Noumena, with this passage, he effectively presented the skeleton key to the entire global system. At the time (1897), he was still a Marxist. But that should not blunt the point made here:

“For the purposes of understanding the complex network of race, gender, and class oppressions that constitute our global modernity it is very rewarding to attend to the evolution of the apartheid policies of the South African regime, since apartheid is directed towards the construction of a microcosm of the neo-colonial order; a recapitulation of the world in miniature. The most basic aspiration of the Boer state is the dissociation of politics from economic relations, so that by means of ‘bantustans’ or ‘homelands’ the black African population can be suspended in a condition of simultaneous political distance and economic proximity vis-a-vis the white metropolis. This policy seeks to recast the currently existing political  exteriority of the black population in its relation to the society that utilizes its labour into a system of geographical relations modelled on national sovereignty. The direct disenfranchisement of the subject peoples would then be re-expressed within the dominant international code of ethno-geographical (national) autonomy.

World opinion discriminates between the relation South African whites have to the blacks they employ, and the relation North American whites, for instance, have to the Third World labour force they employ (directly or indirectly) , because it acknowledges an indissoluble claim upon the entire South Mrican land-mass by a population sharing an internationally recognized national identity. My contention in this paper is that the Third World as a whole is the product of a successful – although piecemeal and largely unconscious – ‘bantustan’ policy on the part of the global Kapital metropolis. Any attempt by political forces in the Third World to resolve the problems of their neo-colonial integration into the world trading system on the basis of national sovereignty is as naive as would be the attempt of black South Africans if they opted for a ‘bantustan’ solution to their particular politico-economic dilemma.

The displacement of the political consequences of wage labour relations away from the metropolis is not a n incidental feature of capital accumulation, as the economic purists aligned to both the bourgeoisie and the workerist left assert. It is rather the fundamental condition of capital as nothing other than an explicit aggression against the masses.”

The one flaw in this passage is thinking that this was the final form – soon afterwards, both South Africa and the West would see their borders slammed open (in fact, the process had already begun in SA, when the Group Areas Acts ceased being enforced in the mid-80s). Another detail is that it isn’t “capital” that sought to geographically dissociate labour, but democracy – workers used to be nationalists, trying to use nations as closed shops in which to bargain for better conditions. The poll taxes Smuts imposed on the Bantustans in the early Union era were designed to destroy Boer labour prices, and populism pushed back – the presence of limits to migrant labour in our past and the West’s present exist only to preserve political stability long enough to make the creation of a universal capital market captive to a single system of global governance an inevitability.

The West is going through our 1920s now, but is basically on the same timeline. What Land captured was the inexorable logic of capital’s acceleration, how it devours borders, identities, and sovereignties in pursuit of endless growth, all under the watchful eye of supranational overseers. In South Africa, we’ve lived this script already; a laboratory for the global governance model that subordinates nations to the dictates of international finance and technocratic control.

Both white South Africa and the Western world blew their doors open to mass migration at roughly the same time (mid-80s for us, mid-90s for the West). This wasn’t coincidence; it was engineered experimentation. The delay gaves everyone time to test the limits of demographic engineering, to see how far you can push a society before the cracks show, all while maintaining the facade of progress under global institutions like the UN and IMF.

But to grasp the full analogy, we must look at the destruction of the Boer economy in the Anglo-Boer War. The deliberate scorched-earth policy by the British Empire that mirrored the broader American imperial strategy of breaking off and buying up the industries of European colonies, before subjugating the nominally independent nations through coercive trade- and treaty-processes to integrate them into global capital flows under specific conditions.

The British conquest of the Cape began this chain: the initial takeover in 1795, formalized in 1806, disrupted the fragile autonomy of the Dutch settlers. This led to the Great Trek in the 1830s, as Boers fled northward to escape British rule, settling in the low-density interior (mid-19th century estimates based on backwards projection of the 1911 census put the total population of what is now South Africa at around 2 million). But the British followed, driven by the discovery of diamonds in 1867 and gold in 1886. The Boer War (1899-1902) was the climax, creating a single economy linking the landlocked mines to the ports, and forcing Boers into the mines. The instigation of the war was pushed by a network of public and private agitators called the Round Table Group, funded by Lords Rothschild and Rosebury. It soon merged with the Fabian Society in the 1920s, and is still represented by Chatham House, a highly influential trans-Atlantic thinktank linked to the Council on Foreign Relations.

This set the stage for a unified state under globalist pressures, where national sovereignty was subordinated to international capital flows and imperial oversight. In fact, Jan Smuts’s grand philosophical work Holism and Evolution effectively argues that the evolutionary development of matter, life and consciousnessness has as its natural and cosmic goal the creation of a single global organism under the total control of the United Nations (he wrote the constitution of the League of Nations singlehandedly, one must recall).

Post-war, the British imposed poll taxes on black peasants (collecting more from them than the entire white population combined) to force migrant labor into the mines. This undercut the salaries of destitute Boers, who had been reduced to sharecroppers or urban poor after their farms were burned. The system of separate development, pioneered by Theophilus Shepstone in Natal in the 19th century, was formalized: reserves for natives, migrant labor for the mines, all to feed the gold fields captured by foreign interests like the Oppenheimers’ Anglo-American. This wasn’t just economic; it was a prototype for global governance, where local elites collude with international capital to manage populations as fungible resources, eroding territorial integrity in favor of open markets and cheap labor dependency.

The 1922 Rand Rebellion and the subsequent crackdown on the white labor movement echoes this perfectly, much like the Biden years in the US: state violence to crush nativist resistance. White miners, unionized and striking against wage cuts and the influx of cheap black labor, were met with aerial bombardments by Smuts’ government, killing hundreds. Trump, in this analogy, is a recapitulation of the Nationalist-Labour coalition that came to power in 1924 under Hertzog. That pact was a white-nativist backlash: Afrikaner nationalists allied with white socialists to protect jobs and culture from migrant undercutting.

They introduced some protections. Color bars in employment, state education for blacks (which didn’t exist under British rule), and attempts to limit foreign capital’s grip. But aspirations were watered down; continued migrant labor was allowed with temporary nativist safeguards, only to be reabsorbed into the system through the South African Party-National Party (SAP-NP) fusionism, forming the United Party (UP) in 1934. This was classic controlled opposition: genuine ethnic self-interest diluted by internationalist compromises, where the mines and global finance retained dominance.

Nationalists were allowed full control only in 1948, when it was too late to reverse the full-economy-spectrum cheap labor dependency. Apartheid was born as a compromise: segregation to appease voters, migrant labor to satisfy the Oppenheimers and foreign investors. But it was always temporary, an elite population management project. Ordinary people had no say; it was collusion between foreign-funded mining houses and the state. By the 1970s, the timer was ticking. Henry Kissinger’s 1969 memo on South Africa outlined the thinking: push for reforms, while building contacts with nascent black market liberals as a buffer against Soviet influence. 

The ’73 oil crisis and ’71 fiat dollar produced shocks to the global system, but none moreso than the Soviets, who had been running oil production to the limit, and now would see their economic growth constrained. A 1977 report by the CIA noted that cracks were already showing with the publication of the 1971 Five Year Plan, and that there was a hard cap to Soviet growth. The Italian communists published works calling for a pivot away from the Soviet economic model as early as 1976, indicating that at a certain level, people in power were aware the socialist system was not the future already. The USIA (a front for the CIA abroad) began infiltration in 1973, recruiting contacts for multiracial bridge-building, including FW de Klerk. The Soweto uprising in 1976, backed by US and UK intel via the Black Consciousness Movement (which was founded in the 50s by the British state-run Anglican church), triggered the pivot.

Kissinger met Vorster in late 1976, instructing him to wind down apartheid and embargo Rhodesia, while being allowed to continue so long as they pinned down the Soviets in Angola and restricted their ability to extract the oil. Reforms began in 1977: dismantling the color bar, ending support for Rhodesia (which fell in two years). The ANC, nearly dead, was revived with Soviet funding and military training from 1978. They eradicated rivals like the BCM and IFP through brutal violence, rendition, and torture – 20,000 killed in the “people’s war.” Sanctions and the Border War broke the state’s back; the USSR’s collapse sealed it. de Klerk finally lifted all apartheid laws after a call from Moscow alerted him that the USSR was done supporting liberation movements.

The ANC would continue violent resistance during negotiations for three years, but now they were covertly backed by Western countries like Sweden, while the US pushed free-market influence and black economic empowerment through the US-SA Leadership Exchange Programme. Local oligarchs like the Oppenheimers and Sanlam sought to co-opt ANC leaders with shares in essential capital, the first wave of BEE. The Oppenheimers would then draft the BEE legal framework in 2003, ensuring full elite entanglement.

This controlled demolition (1977-1994) established a universal government here, where national identities are managed into irrelevance. South Africa became an empirical test for post-national governance: proving that kinship, culture, and territory don’t matter, only the technocratic machine and its fungible tokens. Helen Zille has often said something similar, and indeed, she helped shelter MK operatives in the 1980s, and has always worked for either Soros (the Open Society Foundation) or the Oppenheimers  – they, after all founded the DA, first by gaining control of the SAP after unification, both through donations and direct participation. The SAP itself was founded in 1896 in the Cape Colony, to contain and neuter Afrikaner nationalism under Fabian Socialist leadership, and played the same role through the mid-century. The Oppenheimers funded, staffed and launched the successor Progressive Party in 1977 as Vorster was laying the shape-charges on the foundations of apartheid, before rebranding it as the DP and then DP after the edifice fell.

While Kissinger was dismantling the last vestiges of European colonialism abroad, the US was busy engineering the precursors of what we call “woke” at home, promoting Critical Theory and postmodernist thinkers as a way of containing the left and dragging them away from orthodox Marxism, while suing their ideas to dismantle Christianity and nationalism in domestic institutions. These ideas are now baked into every institutional global governance, and the laws of every Western nation, and form the basis of the South African Constitution.

As I’ve argued before, if the present system falls the wrong way (say, through successful partition like a Cape or Zulu independence, or Afrikaner-mutualist enclavism) it spells doom for the global mission. That’s why liberals like Helen Zille side with Charterists against ethnonationalists; Pretoria or bust, even if it drags the continent down. The DA’s embrace of UN SDGs in their manifesto is telling: backdoor racial quotas, central planning, all to align with global governance.

The ANC has been a darling of the international system both under Mbeki (who ran the apparatus under Mandela), and under Ramaphosa, with only a single power faction moving against them – Trump and Israel. Zuma kicked out the old trans-Atlantic oligarchs, and replaced them with Indian newcomers. Ramaphosa uprooted the Guptas, and now Rothschild Capital is driving all the country’s energy and infrastructure partnerships again, just like in the days of Rhodes, Milner and Beit.

Today’s right-wing populists in the West, even if they get what they want in the next decade, face the same doom as the 1948 Nationalists: permitted limited wins only after demographic shifts and entanglements with bodies like the BIS, G20, WTO, UN and IMF, and grand international private funds, make reversal extremely difficult, if not impossible. Trump may build walls or tariffs, but the labor dependency is baked in, just as migrant flows were here post-1913 Land Act. Can the population stomach a real cut in quality of life in exchange for having an actual future for their children?

I think we’ll reach the 1977 point globally in a generation, if not sooner. Forces of international capital and supranational institutions drive toward a unified, borderless model, with a captured and planned economy easily milked by well-placed and permanent public-private partnerships in tech, finance, and infrastructure, much of which is either monopolised or cartelised already.

South Africa’s ability to cope with this situation represents a real issue. Partition could have worked a century ago, but cheap labor trumped it. It can work now, but can never produce the beauty and prosperity that was once possible. Orania can’t save all Afrikaners either, yet no one builds Orania 2.0. Too expensive, too much work, too risky. The Cape has existed thrice as long as South Africa, Zululand nearly twice; they have greater existential rights. But global governance abhors such precedents, and liberals and Charterists (ANC/EFF/MK) dominate, sidelining them. Christianity or conservatism? Secondary to race and economics; if values drove votes, the ACDP would rule. Instead, only 4% of black voters choose the DA. Litigation by Solidariteit, Afriforum, Sakeliga buys time against expropriation. But without a will to wield actual power over territory and capital, we are all just buying time before the great greying of the world beneath an eternal Isengard.

Just like everyone strives towards or against the influence of the United States, almost everyone here wants to control South Africa, to “unite” it. Somehow they think that by putting on the ring of power, they can defeat evil. But in act, it is that noble lie of unity that serves to further the system itself. The point is to break the ring of power. But then, Tolkien doesn’t say what happens after Sauron is defeated. He left that job to George RR Martin, and he had no idea either.

Jan Smuts, who was a key architect both of the South African system and the global one, came up under the post-Hegelian school of English Idealism, and in a way, completed the system of German Idealism in his 1926 work. But by then such philosophical projects were old hat – all the practical pieces were in place. The system of values of the Enlightenment, born out of centuries of convulsive experiment, find their total form in the modern system of global governance and public-private partnership.

But unless it is broken, it will end in extractive oligarchy and universal serfdom, and all of this will be academic.