TRANSFORMATION 7 (1988)                                                   REVIEW
REVIEW of:
    Glenn Moss and Ingrid Obery, eds., South African Review, 4,
(Johannesburg, Ravan Press, 1987), xxiv + 599 pp.
                                                               Bill Freund
     The South African Review continues to mature as an in-depth annual,
compiling contemporary material on South Africa. The 1987 sections are
divided as follows: resistance, 'states of emergency', labour, international
relations, state restructuring and political economy. This volume has grown
far longer than any of its predecessors and deserves to be indexed, as it will
be used to some extent as a work of reference. Two broad themes stand out:
the increasingly intense impact of state emergency powers at dampening
popular resistance and the message, underscored by the introduction, of a
generalised, organic crisis from which the regime, in turn, will find no genuine
respite. Some articles are more perceptive than others with regard to the
fundamentally altered political situation that transpired from the middle of
1986. Most contributors exaggerate the contradictions in the forces that
sustain the status quo and downplay the contradictions in the resistance. On
the second issue, it will be increasingly necessary to reconsider the issue of
crisis. That South Africa could not continue effectively in the way that was
dominant from the 1950s to the 1970s is almost universally accepted but that
the ensuing crisis is genuinely insoluble for the Nationalist government
and/or South African capitalism, seems less clear early in 1988.
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