On Wednesday, 09 May 2024, the University of Johannesburg (UJ) welcomed Professor Patrick Bond, an esteemed scholar in Sociology, to its Professorship. The inauguration ceremony presided over by Professor Sarah Gravett, Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Research and Internationalisation (acting) marked a significant moment not only for the University but for the broader academic community.

Professor Bond, who is also Director of the Centre for Social Change in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Humanities chose to give his inaugural lecture on extreme uneven development, a lecture aptly titled; “Extreme Uneven Development: Financial Volatility, Deep Capitalist Crisis and Super-Exploitation in South Africa and the World”. This piece forms part of an upcoming book he has penned.

While Professor Bond was formerly inaugurated years ago, this occasion marked his inaugural lecture at UJ.

Speaking about the significance of professorial inaugurations, Prof Gravett stated that the ceremony has its roots in the medieval University, and that it serves multiple purposes.

“The first, is that it is an expression of welcome into the circle of colleagues who are already professors, and secondly, it provides a platform for professors to display their expertise in the discipline and showcase their research,” she said.

Prof Gravett added that the ceremony also acknowledges the impact that Prof Bond’s work has had on broader society.

In attendance was the Faculty of Humanities Executive Dean, Professor Kammila Naidoo, discussant Professor Samantha Ashman and other members of the University community-friends and colleagues of Prof Bond.

Extreme Uneven Development

Professor Bond’s lecture discussed South Africa’s case as a space for Uneven Development, and what the causes for this could have been.

“Why does South Africa, from the late 15th to early 21st centuries, present such excellent case material for the broad theory known as “uneven development,” explicitly unfolding within the vagaries of global capitalism? Analyses of South Africa’s economic sociology have, since the early 1900s, regularly sought out understandings of various forms of racialised uneven development,” he said.

Prof Bond shared that to assess the systems of “value transfers” the place to be focus, would be on the logic of a “settler colonial” version of  “racial capitalism”.

“This exceptionally distorted economy was and still is grounded in “extractivism,” via what Ben Fine and Zav Rustomjee defined as a “Minerals-Energy Complex”: vast amounts of climate-destructive coal-fired electricity used to dig and process non-renewable natural resources, deploying migrant labour with all that implies for gendered, spatially dislocated social reproduction (as Ann-Marie Wolpe taught). Prof Bond his lecture to expand further on this idea.

A lifetime of education through space and time

Prof Bond currently serves as Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Director of the Centre for Social Change. His origins are both Irish and British, from a birthplace in religiously divided Belfast. His formative years were in the United States, specifically Alabama, during the Civil Rights Movement. His mother – now resident here – was a social worker in an African American orphanage, and his late father worked with NASA on developing the moon rockets built in that state’s 3IR oasis of Huntsville.

Before joining UJ in 2021, Patrick held professorships at UWC, Wits, UKZN and the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, when he was also a sovereign-debt researcher based in Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s Washington office in 1995.

He directed UKZN’s Centre for Civil Society from 2004-16, where he learned much more about social resistance to oppression, including post-apartheid access to AIDS medicines, environmental justice movements, and unfulfilled rights to housing, water and sanitation, electricity and free higher education.

Over the past two decades, he has lectured at more than 100 universities including the Islamic University of Gaza and Birzeit where he advised on the established of their social-science doctoral programme. His publications include the most cited work in South African social science: Elite Transition: From Apartheid to Neoliberalism, and several books on international political economy, climate change and the BRICS, where he has explored the subject of the ‘sub-imperial’ location, in which Western corporate power assimilates even those with profound grievances and sound critiques.