EDITORIAL OBITUARY
                        FOR HAROLD WOLPE
       Harold Wolpe was a revolutionary thinker in the best sense of the term.
  Although his early work occurred in the context of, and alongside, other
  important Marxist writers on South Africa such as Martin Legassick and Rick
 Johnstone, it was his pathbreaking article in Economy and Society (1972) that
 gripped the imagination of left intellectual analyses of South Africa. That article
 entrenched a new discourse of class and modes of production in writing about
 South Africa. In that sense Harold was very much the father of the New Left
 critique that emerged as the dominant analysis of the 1970s. Although his roots
 were in the communist movement he assimilated the new wave of Western
 Marxism and decisively broke with the S ACP analysis which still privileged race
 in the analysis of South African capitalism.
      His significance as a writer on South Africa lay less in the empirical richness
 of his analysis than in the importance of introducing a new set of conceptual
 prisms through which to view the concrete problems of the society. Most of the
 left intellectuals who succeeded him and built their reputations partly in critique
 and empirical reworking of the relationship between race, class and the
 articulation of modes of production, stood on his shoulders whilst doing so. In
 this most important sense, Harold was a revolutionary thinker of our time.
      Wolpe was at his best when presenting generalised critique. It is a great pity
that the last few years of his life were so tied up with attempting to assist in the
formulation of education policy that he had little time to do what he was best at
- radical critique and conceptual questioning of the theoretical foundations of the
way we were viewing South Africa. His last published piece, in the previous
issue of Transformation, saw him return to this role as he began questioning the
way in which the RDP was conceptualised in the current transition. This is what
he was best at, and it is a great pity that he was unable to devote his last years to
reflecting on the transition he had struggled so hard for.
      Harold was not just an important thinker, he was also a very human being -
he was a mensch who had a wonderful sense of humour. There was a time to be
serious and a time to laugh; a time for critique and a time to tell jokes. And if he
was good at abstract critique, he was even better at relating a down to earth funny
story. The last time some of us spoke to him and commented how good he looked


for his age, he wryly retorted: Mike the picture of Dorian Gray, good on the
outside, but rotting on the inside'.
    We all owe you, Harold. At least for some time, whenever we struggle with
coming to terms with what this transformation of South Africa is about, or when
we have to laugh at ourselves, we will remember you.
                                        Mike Morris, Bill Freund, Gerhard Mare,
                                            Vishnu Padayachee, and John Daniel
                                         *****
                             A Note from the Editors:
  This issue of Transformation was completed in December 1995 and supposed
to appear in the first week of January. Unfortunately a technical problem resulted
in a delay that was beyond our control. Please note that it is still dated 1995.