Labour ex machina: Race, work, and statecraft in South Africa

This dissertation investigates South Africa’s post-union labour politics, the post-apartheid transformation of race, and the economics of “corruption” in the industrial manufacturing and construction industries. The ethnographic narrative arc of this dissertation explores the emergence of a novel form of non-unionized and grassroots labour activism, which has emerged in the secondary sector of Durban out of organized crime groups linked to the patronage systems of the ruling African National Congress (ANC). I take the conflict I trace between these non-union labour activists, industrial manufacturing companies, and the so-called ‘mafia’ groups that run much of the city’s construction industry as a lens to understanding an ongoing and fundamental transformation in the economics and governance of South African capitalism. Referring here to what seems like a period in South African politics marked by an intensification of elite criminality—the use of violence and intimidation as tactics of elite class struggle—I situate this development as emergent from the ruins of South Africa’s neoliberal transition after the end of apartheid in 1994. In doing so, the dissertation provides readers with a bottom-up account of these new forms of governance—a view of South Africa’s patronage and “mafia”- machine politics from the perspective of these labour activists—to account for the dynamic relationship between this intensification of elite criminality, South Africa’s ongoing political crisis and economic stagnation, and the transformation of the country’s race politics. My dissertation provides a unique perspective on the politics of decolonization in South Africa through an investigation into a twin process of post-colonial class formation: of a “working class” emerging as self-conscious through labour activism and of an elite class forming through its recourse to organized crime and patronage systems. The perspective provided here explores the social and democratic consequences of the decline of union-based workers’ politics. Insofar as the unions were a key vehicle for the democratic and anti-apartheid politics of the 20th century, their institutional decline after the 1994 transition has paved the way for the emergence of increasingly uninhibited and criminal forms of elite class struggle. This dissertation explores how, under these conditions, new forms of resistance in Durban has emerged from below to offer a “check” on elite criminality in the form of working-class struggle.