Capitalism and Crime: Brechtian Economies in <i>The Threepenny Opera</i> and <i>Love, Crime and Johannesburg</i><sup>1</sup>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1999, nine years after Nelson Mandela's release, the Johannesburg-based, formerly Marxist Junction Avenue Theatre Company premiered its first post-apartheid play, Love, Crime and Johannesburg – a rewriting of Brecht's Threepenny Opera. This article asks to what use the South African group puts Brecht's play and theatrical method, in the postcolonial and neo-liberal moment of the 1990s and 2000s. What does the play suggest about historical and contemporary relations between crime and capitalism, crime and apartheid, and capitalism and apartheid? Does it seek to emancipate itself from the Marxian view that capitalism and crime are aspects of one and the same condition that can be overcome only as a whole? What remains of the Brechtian conviction that theatre can be realistic only to the extent that it contributes practically to solving the problems it represents? I argue that the play exposes the discourse of “lawlessness” that has replaced “reconciliation” as the near-universal currency for articulating South Africa's post-liberation predicament. The play also foregrounds the accelerating displacement of the biogeography of apartheid by the post-urban topography of spectacular capitalism. Both tendencies efface history, concealing structures of domination that continue to shape the city and the country. While the play does not “estrange” or explain these structures, it points to a global economic dispensation that prevents the twin legacies of imperialism and apartheid from being redressed. In doing so, it may also accentuate its own incapacity to envision itself as part of a solution to the problem it analyses.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".