Whither the State? Corruption, Institutions and State-Building in South Africa

In South Africa, the relationship between class formation and the post-Apartheid State is proving valuable in the study of the performance of public-sector organisations, the study of the political elite and service delivery protests. In these cases, the focus is on struggles over who can get hold of the instruments and resources of the state and use them for their own purposes. Such an analysis proceeds too quickly in South Africa. The difficulty lies not with the idea of class formation or with the notion of political society; it lies with the understanding of the state. The state is conceived as if it were a formed entity, an object that is either captured or that works efficiently. This paper focuses on the state itself. It considers how talking and acting on corruption invoke mutually exclusive conceptions about the state, such that the ‘struggle against corruption’ is also a political struggle about the form of the state.