It may seem new to claim that the patterns of pre-1994 South Africa remain deeply embedded in the new order. But the persistence of the past was anticipated during the negotiation period of the early 1990s, in the writings of a theorist whose concerns seem to be the polar opposite of Douglass North’s.

Harold Wolpe never quoted North in his work. Nor did he ever use the term ‘path dependence’. This is hardly surprising, for Wolpe was a Marxist who is credited with the first analysis of apartheid as a product of the capitalist system. He was also a committed member of the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the ANC, whose strategic thinking his academic work was meant to assist. But his writing on education and his final journal article – on the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), the development flagship of the 1994 Government of National Unity – warned that a new order would not automatically follow majority rule and hinted that the post-1994 government's thinking could ensure the survival of the old. This work shows how a thinker very different from North discerned that political change would not necessarily bring new social and economic patterns.

Wolpe's work is illuminating for another reason too: it proposes a cure for path dependence which is not usually associated with revolutionary analysis. The most obvious response to realising that the political change of 1994 has left intact many patterns of the apartheid era is to insist on sweeping changes. These should presumably be imposed by an elected governing party which entered the new era committed to a ‘national democratic revolution’ (NDR), a society which destroyed all remnants of racial minority rule. Wolpe devoted considerable theoretical attention to NDR and we would expect him to urge a militant programme to achieve it – which is how some of his admirers read his critique. But closer reading shows that, for Wolpe, the way to change the patterns of the past lay in negotiating compromises between key economic and social interests.

His analysis offers a diagnosis and a proposed cure, both of which may have been ahead of their time. It took two decades for the diagnosis to gain wide currency. The proposed cure is yet to achieve this, but negotiation is the only workable way out of path dependence and so it too may yet win acceptance.