>From Jo'burg, your argument looks quite convincing, at a time when
the SA president is conjuring up various justifications for letting
the masses die of HIV-AIDS instead of giving each HIV+ pregnant
woman a $12 antiretroviral shot to increase the chance to 50%+ of
non-transmission...(another story)... but below we defend your broad
line of argument, comrade Mark:
> From: "Mark Jones" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> ... People still do not get this,
> because either they think that I am wrong to argue that capitalism
> 'requires' and 'summons into existence' a surplus population, or they think
> that in nay case, peasants or unemployed people in places like Zimbabwe
> (unemployment = 50%) or S Africa (unemp = 30+%) are structurally and
> functionally NOT part of the global capital labour pool, the so-called
> 'reserve army'. I've just been arguing this on M-Fem with someone who lives
> in Southern Africa and argues this way. I tried to explain that he is wrong
> and that the unemployed and underemployed are indeed part of the 'surplus'
> population available to capitalism
Not just "available to" but created by...
The Production, Reproduction and Politics of the Southern
African Working Class
by Patrick Bond, Darlene Miller and Greg Ruiters
forthcoming in Socialist Register 2001:
The Global Working Class at the Millennium
London, Merlin Press and New York, Monthly Review Press
...
To understand the region's working class in the
21st century requires considering, even briefly, its
formation in the late 19th. There we find durable
aspects of class-race-gender-environmental power
serving a process of capital accumulation in
Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban, Port Elizabeth,
East London, Kimberley, Harare (nee Salisbury),
Bulawayo, Lusaka, the Copperbelt, Blantyre,
Gabarone, Maseru, Windhoek, Luanda and Maputo
(nee Lourenco Marques), and often flowing from
there to London, New York and Lisbon.
There are, of course, huge differences and gaps
between these corporate headquarters (and key
branch plant locations) as sites of accumulation.
Nevertheless, over the course of the past century or
so, diverse regional connections were forged through
trade, transport and communications links, customs
unions, South African corporations' regional
investment strategies, conflict over natural resources
(especially water), and labour migration. Early
commercial imperialism had been codified by the
`Scramble for Africa,' the Berlin conference of 1885
at which national boundaries were demarcated by
Britain, Portugal, France, Germany and Belgium.
Today, the Southern African Development
Community (SADC) comprises both strong and frail
nation-states: Angola, Botswana, the Democratic
Republic of the Congo (DRC), Lesotho, Malawi,
Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa,
Seychelles, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and
Zimbabwe. (The large, well-populated but
impoverished island of Madagascar also belongs,
geographically, but is generally excluded due to its
isolation and Francophone heritage.) For the
purposes of this essay, we mainly consider the
capital flows, labour movements and regional
linkages within the ten most southern, mainland
countries (i.e., omitting the DRC, Mauritius,
Seychelles, and Tanzania).
The partial, disarticulated proletarianisation
witnessed in the main SADC countries occurred
initially through mining and related industries, not
only on South Africa's Johannesburg reef, but also
in patches of Zimbabwe (termed `Southern
Rhodesia' from until 1965 and then `Rhodesia' until
1979) and the copper fields of Zambia (`Northern
Rhodesia' until 1964). Of greatest interest, of
course, is the fate of indigenous black African
people under the compulsion of new wage-labour
disciplines.
Yet even earlier, many white workers in and
around the Kimberley diamond mines, Johannesburg
gold fields and railways imported European
traditions of trade unionism and mutual aid (e.g.
building societies) as early as the 1880s, and by the
1910s a brand of imported `communism' (racist and
sexist) flared brightly prior to the famous 1922
white mineworkers' strike (`Workers of the world,
unite for a white South Africa!'). In the wake of
effective state repression, a coopted white Labour
Party then allied with other disaffected social layers
within the South African government, as did a
similar group of unionised white artisanal populists
in Southern Rhodesia just to the north. A `whites-
only' welfare state--providing job creation
programmes, pension schemes, health benefits,
housing and the like, especially to Afrikaners who
represented `the poor white problem'--emerged in
both these rapidly-industrialising countries during
the 1930s. With the impressive rise of inward-
oriented manufacturing and development-finance
systems, many white workers evolved into middle-
class managerialism, while black workers found
labour markets increasingly attractive as local
growth raised black wages in relation to white
wages by an unprecedented (before or since) 50%
during the 1930s-40s.
How, in the process, were indigenous African
people disenfranchised and (partially)
proletarianised? Once the colonial spoils were
divided at Berlin, the British monarchy mandated
their Cape governor, Cecil John Rhodes, and his
British South Africa Company (BSAC) to control a
vast area north of the then-`Transvaal Republic'
(stretching from Lesotho to Johannesburg to the
Limpopo River) which until 1902 was the domain
of white `Boers' (mainly peasants of Dutch and
Huguenot descent dating to Cape Town's original
1652 settlement). The British military not only beat
back resistance from both the region's Africans
(intermittently, but most decisively during the 1890s
in Southern Rhodesia) and Afrikaners (in the South
African-Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902). White
settlers commanded nature, surveying and
commodifying land throughout the British colonial
region, accompanied by railroads, telegraphs, roads
and bank branches thereby giving birth to the socio-
political construct of Southern Africa. Using
traditional techniques to strip land from indigenous
peoples--`hut taxes,' debt peonage systems and fees
for cattle-dipping and grazing, as well as other more
direct forms of compulsion--the settlers drew
African men from the fields, into the mines and
emerging factories. Similar imperatives were
introduced in Portuguese-controlled Mozambique
and Angola, and in Namibia when as the German-
run former South West Africa (until World War I).
But these mainly aimed at fostering an extractive
(rather than settler-oriented) economy via control of
plantation labour.
It took more than geopolitical influence and
investment, however, to shape a regional working
class. Racialised capitalism throughout Southern
Africa also came to depend heavily, in its stage of
primitive accumulation, upon extraordinarily `cheap'
migrant labour and various forms of extra-economic
coercion. The Johannesburg mining houses soon
organised a Chamber of Mines in order to establish
recruitment offices in far-flung parts of South Africa
(especially the Zululands and the Xhosa people's
Transkei) as well as in Lesotho, Mozambique,
Swaziland, and the territories now known as
Botswana, Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe, thereby
forming the `South African' proletariat. Northern
Rhodesia's transnational-corporate-controlled copper
mines and various Southern Rhodesian enterprises
also followed the migrant labour model. Foreign
migrants, a minority in the South African black
community, were not welcomed. The Transvaal
African Congress_s Selby Msimang, for example,
requested that all Malawians be expelled because
they were taking jobs as domestic workers away
from that local black women.
The system relied, quite simply, upon an extra
subsidy--from household production by the migrant
workers' families back home on the land--that
allowed wages to be set well below the cost of
reproduction of labour power. In short, white capital
and states in the region spent next to nothing on
black education in rural areas, on black workers'
and their families' health care, and on black
workers' pensions. The subsidy was derived in part
from exhausting the ecology of the `bantustan'
(homeland) labour reserves, where land and water
were degraded over time due to overpopulation
pressure subsequent to many millions of people
being forcibly removed from `white' parts of South
Africa and Rhodesia. But the subsidy was also and
mainly provided by rural women, whose
superhuman role was all the more poignant because
they virtually never saw the production process
itself; without jobs they were denied pass-books,
and without pass-books they were denied access to
the white settlers' major cities, even for conjugal
visits. To find male workers at home in the rural
areas for only a couple of weeks a year was not
uncommon. Locked within mining or factory
compounds the rest of the time, migrant workers
were generally confined for most of the 20th
century to overcrowded hostels (with 16 men
assigned to sleep in a single room), segregated not
only from far off white suburbs but also fragmented
along ethnic lines.
Migrant labour remains a core element of the
surplus extraction process today, but with
remittances from cities now perhaps balancing the
residual articulation with precapitalism. One
indication of how badly South African capital
required cheap immigrant workers was the 1986
decision of then apartheid ruler PW Botha to expel
several hundred thousand Mozambican workers as
part of his regional destabilisation initiative, which
was reversed after pressure from the Chamber of
Mines, whose members today require 200,000
foreign workers for gold production alone.
Over the course of a century, resistance by black
workers to this diabolical system has been often
violent and decisive, but sporadic.
MORE
Patrick Bond ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
home: 51 Somerset Road, Kensington 2094 South Africa
phone: (2711) 614-8088
work: University of the Witwatersrand
Graduate School of Public and Development Management
PO Box 601, Wits 2050, South Africa
work email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
work phone: (2711) 717-3917
work fax: (2711) 484-2729
cellphone: (27) 83-633-5548
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