The Hidden Cost of Industrialization: Reflections on the Emergence and Reproduction of the African Industrial Working Class in Southern Africa (original) (raw)
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The Southern African Working Class: Production, Reproduction and Politics
Socialist Register, 2009
is probably the world's most extreme site of uneven capitalist development. 1 Inequality within and between the region's countries is severe, with race and gender domination largely undisturbed by the post-colonial experience, with the environment taking enormous strain, and with South Africa-and its 40 million of the region's 102 million citizens-responsible for 130billionofSouthernAfrica′s130 billion of Southern Africa's 130billionofSouthernAfrica′s160 billion in 1998 output. Yet, while it is logical to anticipate an uneven, fragmented evolution of working-class power and political strategy, given the area's different modes of class struggle, levels of consciousness, organizational capacity, militancy, and relations with political parties and other social forces, developments in one country do act as major reference points for others. Southern Africa's rich radical traditions-including once-avowed 'Marxist-Leninist' governments in Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Angola, and mass-movements and powerful unions-owe much to revolutionary socialism and nationalism, yet this never gave rise to an explicit regional class project. Drawing upon a legacy of regional class formation that goes back to the nineteenth century, can a coherent, cross-border vision emerge to counteract the unevenness? Will 'globalization' provide this opportunity, given the 1999 upsurge in international working-class consciousness in reaction to the multinational corporate agenda, and a new round of parasitic South African corporate investment in the region? Or will fragmentation prevail, as already reflected in a late 1990s upsurge in South African working-class xenophobia?
nu.ac.za
This paper seeks to site Africa in general and what remains Occupied Azania (here on referred to as Republic of South Africa-RSA) in particular as cases in point of examining whether the Marxist construct of class remains relevant in the struggle for total liberation from the fetters of Colonial Capitalist Mode of Production which continues to nurture the white supremacist ideology and gross socioeconomic disparities among Africans across the continent. (Hall, S (1977): Marx's Theory of Class., pg 17) Class, class relations and class struggle are central concepts in all of Marx's work. 'men' are always pre-constituted by the antagonistic class relations in which they are cast. Historically they are always articulated, not in their profound and unique individuality, but by the 'ensemble of social relations'-that is as the supports for class relations. (Marx, K: Grundrisse1968, pg 265) Capitalism produces and reproduces itself as an antagonistic structure of class relations; it divides the population again and again into antagonistic classes. It is the material and social relations within which men produce and reproduce their material conditions of existence. Marxist analysis maintains that social classes are NOT the basis but the result of prior distribution of the agents of capitalist production into classes and class relations, and the prior distribution of the means of production such as between the 'possessors' and the 'dispossessed'. The historical incorporation of Africa and its non-capitalist systems into an evolving capitalist mode of production has resulted in even more complex set of class relations. The predominate mode of production in most of Africa remains the Colonial Capitalist Mode of Production; no class analysis of Africa is complete without considering this basic fact. In all regions on the continent, social class formations survive only as long as they complement colonial relations of production.
1997
The core of my thesis is to present a Marxist interpretation of the process of industrialisation in South Africa. I do so with the view that previous discussions on the process of industrialisation and its effects on the South African political economy have tended to obscure class relations in favour of race relations. The reason that this has occurred is that the dominant tradition in Marxist studies on South Africa has been located within a structuralist framework derived essentially from the French school of Marxism. The methodology of the structuralist Marxists has been such that it has led them to develop analytical tools that have focused on race rather than class as the predominant contradiction within South African society. An inadequate application and interpretation of Marx's labour theory of value has led Wolpe to develop his cheap labour thesis which has proven to be both problematic and inadequate as an aid to understanding the particular form of industrialisation i...
The Demise of Socialism, the Triumph of New Capitalist Social Order and Modern Slavery in Africa
The Demise of Socialism, the Triumph of New Capitalist Social Order and Modern Slavery in Africa By Muhammadu Mustapha Gwadabe Department of History Ahmadu Bello University Abstract The trade in slaves around the world has a very long history, but the arrival of the Europeans on the West Coast of Africa marked a new phase in the African slave trade. First in search of the land of gold along the shores of Africa, the Portuguese before the middle of the 15th century graduated into the export of African captives back to Lisbon where they were sold into slavery. The establishment in the New World of European plantations for the large-scale production of sugar, cotton and tobacco, and the enormous profit derived from it necessitated the continued search and trade in slaves, which for year’s dawn negatively and disastrously on the economy and society of the people of Africa. Through the efforts of the religious and humanitarian groups in Western Europe and the Americas the trade in slaves was challenged as inhuman and iniquitous, which forced the British Parliament in 1807 declared the trade illegal for British subjects. Yet, it took long before the trade came to an end among the French, Americas, Spanish and the Portuguese slavers. It took the British the posting of its military Preventive Squadron (Navy) that rescued about three thousand slaves on a yearly basis, to check other European countries interested in continuing with the trade. It was this effort also that checked the activities of the African coastal chieftains who were accustomed to the ready profit of the slave, and were reluctant to abandon the sale of their own people. It is the view in this paper that the British effort at the abolition of the slave trade was in view of the revolution they attained in the science and technology of production, which made the use of human labour in production of limited relevance. It is going to be shown also that it was the attainment of similar state of economic development by other European countries that made the abolition of the trade practicable, and marked the commencement of the colonisation of Africa and other parts of the world. Soon, a new challenge developed which produced forces against colonisation; for socialism and western democracy. Close to the end of the twentieth century the socialist world was challenged to collapse and disintegration, which marked the end of the cold war politics of bipolarity. Since then the international environment became preoccupied by forces of western democracy and capitalism, globalisation, and economic crisis especially in most Third World countries. In most parts of Africa this development was followed by varying attempts to make ends meet, including trafficking of young girls, and other forms of modern slavery. This paper is going to argue that there is a relationship between modern slavery in Africa, and the collapse of Socialism and the triumph of Capitalist new Social Order.
Rethinking labour in Africa, past and present
African Identities, 2009
The study of labour in Africa has undergone important transformations over the last 20 years. Following a period of intense scrutiny from the 1950s to the 1980s, research on working classes, labour unions, capitalist expansion and proletarianisation in Africa experienced ...