Precarious Liberation , livre ebook

SUNY series in Global Modernity
                     
Arif Dirlik, editor

Precarious Liberation
Workers, the State, and Contested Social Citizenship in Postapartheid South Africa
FRANCO BARCHIESI

Cover image: still from William Kentridge, Monument (1990); 16mm animated film transferred to video; collection of the artist, courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg; © William Kentridge. reproduced from William Kentridge: Five Themes (2010) by permission of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Co-published for the South African market © 2011 University of KwaZulu-Natal Press Private Bag X01, Scottsville 3209 South Africa E-mail: books@ukzn.ac.za Website: www.ukznpress.co.za
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2011 State University of New York
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Barchiesi, Franco.
Precarious liberation : workers, the state, and contested social citizenship in postapartheid South Africa / Franco Barchiesi.
p. cm. — (SUNY series in global modernity)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-3611-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-3610-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-86914-215-5 (Univ. of KwaZulu-Natal Press : pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Working class—South Africa. 2. Wages—South Africa. 3. Democratization— South Africa. 4. South Africa—Politics and government—1994– I. Title.
HD8801.B37 2011
305.5'620968—dc22
2010032063
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To my mother, Cesira, the memory of my father, Ugo, and to Miranda, with gratitude

Si vous êtes pris dans le rêve de l'autre, vous êtes foutu.
(If you are caught up in someone else's dream, you are lost.)
—Gilles Deleuze, Qu'est–ce que l'acte de création ?

Illustrations
Maps
1. Gauteng Metropolitan Area
2. Research Sites for the Book
Tables
5.1 Seniority and Job changes of interviewed Workers
6.1 Remittances and Family Support Networks of respondents
6.2 Impact of Social Provisions expenditures on respondents' Wages
6.3 Respondents' housing conditions and expenditures

Map 1. Gauteng Metropolitan Area

Map 2. Research Sites for the Book
Preface
I would not have written this book without a ruthless reassessment of the reasons and the myths that brought me to South Africa. Over the past twenty years i have studied the contribution of workers' struggles to antiapartheid popular opposition and the transition to representative democracy. Eventually I realized that my early work, mostly focused on labor organizations and workplace identities, did not adequately problematize the relationships between employment and emancipative politics. In conceptualizing this project I chose, therefore, to look at work and production as objects of contrasting images with which the postapartheid state, labor ideologies, and ordinary workers' discourse represent citizenship and articulate social claims.
Soon after the first democratic elections of April 1994 I moved to Johannesburg, where for six years I have taught in the Department of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand. At the time I was mostly attracted to the triumphs of black workers' struggles, which I had already taken as the subject of undergraduate research in my native Italy. I found the decisive impact of radical class-based mobilization on South Africa's liberation enormously inspiring as an alternative both to labor's slow demise in liberalizing Europe and to its subordination to nationalist regimes in postcolonial Africa. The South African events of the 1980s and early 1990s titillated my early activist and theoretical practices within operaista (“autonomist”) Marxism, which posited the capacity of workers' struggles to shape social relations independently from the dialectics of production and the requirements of organization. The South African labor movement shone as an example of militancy that, originating from the wage relation, subverted and transcended it to ignite a broader revolutionary transformation.
Once in South Africa, therefore, I started investigating black working-class politics by situating unionization within complex and multilayered material, symbolic, and discursive practices. By then most trade unions were clearly aligned with the African National congress (ANC), the leading force of national liberation, which rose to power in 1994 and has held it firmly ever since. A new entity, “postapartheid South Africa,” emerged from majority rule, a liberal democratic constitution reputed to be the most advanced in the world, and the prospect to heal past traumas through reconciliation and human development. As its antithesis the government postulated the “legacy” of apartheid and its challenges, which media and scholarly parlance embodied in specific problem populations grappling with poverty and vulnerability: the rural landless, the urban unemployed, the shack dwellers, the maladjusted youths. Liberal democracy considered these subjects as potentially unmanageable for two reasons: their fiscally unsustainable expectations and their alleged disruptive propensities rooted in a “culture” of entitlement. In official discourse, therefore, work, production, and a morality of personal responsibility heralded the political incorporation of democracy's unruly antithesis despite enormous social disparities. Becoming a worker was supposed to be the purest, most virtuous expression of citizenship. Liberal commentators, social scientists, and leftist critics agreed that “jobs” were the unquestionable solution to the country's social ills. They therefore vilified demands not subordinated to labor market participation and reified the poor's agency into abstract statistical categories—“active” and “disillusioned” jobseekers, structurally unemployed, informal microentrepreneurs, non-working populations—predominantly defined by occupational status.
In 1996 the government adopted the Growth, employment and redistribution (GEAR) strategy, which turned the ANC's developmental agenda toward market-driven globalization. Now in power, the liberation movement shifted its focus from resistance to economic profitability, political stability, and the disciplining of social radicalism. Whereas in the past wage labor had laid foundations for solidarity against exploitation, post-1994 policies reemphasized its status as a commodity and a factor of production responsive to the requirements of national competitiveness. Organized labor continued, nonetheless, to glorify employment and advocate job creation as an avenue to socialism, even if the political hegemony of the ANC translated liberation into a non-class nationalist narrative of progress and modernization. Meanwhile, multitudes of destitute, unemployed, and working poor were left outside decent jobs and the social dividends of democracy and began to articulate their grievances into mounting collective dissatisfaction with the ANC government.
I was then part of the editorial staff of a small magazine, Debate: Voices from the South African Left , busily discussing how, under the imperatives of economic liberalization, a democratic transition can simultaneously enable political participation and constrain the range of claims brought before its institutions. As crucial allies of the new ruling party, trade unions had gained significant political and policy influence precisely when labor and production, which historically underpinned their redemptive discourse, constantly deteriorated and failed to materialize their promises. Black workers continued to question the democratic experiment with insubordinate desires for social justice, but The relationships between production-based identities and political liberation appeared increasingly ambivalent and fragile.
In 1998, with such questions in mind, i started researching this book. Most left and labor supporters of the ANC were then confused by the party's embrace of macroeconomic orthodoxy, and recurrent accusations of “neoliberalism” flew. Amid their acrimonious exchanges, the government and organized labor continued to share, nonetheless, the view that joblessness is the main cause of poverty and that waged employment is the cornerstone of progressive policy responses. My initial hypothesis, on the contrary, somehow reflected the minority view in South African social sciences that employment relations indeed decisively contribute to marginalization and vulnerability. I consequently chose to investigate black unionized formal employees in mostly male occupations, a group that mainstream analyses tended to assume as relatively better-off.
A vast sociological literature has strictly identified the truly disadvantaged in the “new South Africa” with subjects outside the economically active population. My research started to show, instead, that even many wage earners suffered from employment situations that did not translate into once-expected social advancement. Factory workers' biographies