Background
Legassick was born in Edinburgh, Scotland.
(This book publishes Martin Legassick's influential doctor...)
This book publishes Martin Legassick's influential doctoral thesis on the preindustrial South African frontier zone of Transorangia. The impressive formation of the Griqua states in the first half of the nineteenth century outside the borders of the Cape Colony and their relations with Sotho-Tswana polities, frontiersmen, missionaries and the British administration of the Cape take centre stage in the analysis. The Griqua, of mixed settler and indigenous descent, secured hegemony in a frontier of complex partnerships and power struggles. The author's subsequent critique of the "frontier tradition" in South African historiography drew on the insights he had gained in writing this dissertation. It served to initiate the debate about the importance of the precolonial frontier situation in South Africa for the establishment of ideas of race, the development of racial prejudice and, implicitly, the creation of segregationist and apartheid systems. Today, the constructed histories of "Griqua" and other categories of indigeneity have re emerged in South Africa as influential tools of political mobilisation and claims on resources.
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Legassick was born in Edinburgh, Scotland.
He later completed his Doctor of Philosophy at the University of California.
In 1960 he became a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford. He then worked at universities in the United Kingdom and Tanzania, where he became active in the African National Congress and the South African Congress of Trade Union (SACTU) in exile. Together with Giovanni Arrighi, John South. Saul and others he developed an influential politico-economic analysis focusing on the contradictions engendered by the proletarianisation and dispossession of the Southern African peasantry.
According to Arrighi, "Martin Legassick and Harold Wolpe..maintained that South African Apartheid was primarily because the regime had to become more repressive of the African labour force because it was fully proletarianized, and could no longer subsidize capital accumulation as it had done in the past" They regarded their suspension as undemocratic.
They subsequently launched the Marxist Workers Tendency of the African National Congress. The Marxist Workers’ Tendency was affiliated to the Committee for a Workers" International, an international organisation of Trotskyist parties and the newspaper, The Militant. Legassick was expelled from the African National Congress in 1985.
In 1981 he left academia to become a full-time anti-apartheid activist. After the unbanning of the African National Congress in 1990 he was able to return home to Cape Town where he returned to academia.
He later became a prominent activist working with the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign, with Abahlali baseMjondolo, with the Mandela Park Backyarders and, more recently, the Democratic Left Front.
In 2007 he was involved in an exchange of open letters with the then National Minister of Housing in South Africa, Lindiwe Sisulu. In May 2009 he was arrested while supporting the Macassar Village Land Occupation near Cape Town. A dominant and consistent theme in Legassick"s political work is the building of "a mass workers" party".
(This book publishes Martin Legassick's influential doctor...)
In 1979, Martin Legassick, together with Paula Ensor, Dave Hemson and Rob Petersen, was suspended from the African National Congress for allegedly forming a faction. Towards Socialist Democracy, July 2007.
Foreign Investment and the Reproduction of Racial Capitalism in South Africa by Martin Legassick and David Hemson, January 1976.