(All areas not classified as urban are designated rural.) Definitions of "urban" vary from year to year - see the background and comparability sections - but the term generally denotes all cities and incorporated places of 2,500+ inhabitants. It is one of the most used geographic variables and one of the most problematic. The study concludes with a comparative overview of Communist and Trotskyist strategies and tactics in the face of common objective constraints.URBAN indicates whether a household's location was urban or rural. It analyzes the theoretical frameworks which socialists used to explain the articulation of class and color and compares them to the actual conditions of working class development and political consciousness in South Africa. The study then focuses on the interaction between socialist theory and practice and the movements for non-collaboration, black unity and African self-reliance which flourished from the 1930s through the 1950s, and it examines their internal class dynamics to explain why radicals failed to maintain the initial mass support mobilized by these movements. This racial pattern of development laid the basis both for the turbulent labor struggles of the early twentieth century and for the racial policies promoted by different social classes, notably white labor and capitalists, and institutionalized into state policy. It challenges functionalist explanations which attribute racial policies and practices to the influence of particular classes or groupings, demonstrating instead that the roots of the racially-divided working class lay in the racial pattern in which the processes of proletarianization and urbanization unfolded. The study begins with an historical analysis of the origins and development of the racially-divided working class. This study considers various hypotheses concerning segmented and divided labor markets to identify those factors which illuminate the policies and practices of South African socialist groupings. South Africa's industrial capitalist system and urban working class would seem to provide the basis for the development of a proletarian-based socialist movement, but historically there has been no sustained working-class mobilization on a socialist program. This dissertation demonstrates the existence of a broad and varied socialist movement in South Africa and examines its attempts to mobilize a social base across color lines in a rigidly divided society.
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