The community strike: From precarity to militant organizing

Abstract

How do insecure layers of the working class resist when they lack access to power and organization at the workplace? The community strike represents one possible approach. Whereas traditional workplace strikes target employers and exercise power by withholding labor, community strikes focus on the sphere of reproduction, target the state, and build power through moral appeals and disruptions of public space. Drawing on ethnography and interviews in the impoverished Black townships and informal settlements around Johannesburg, I illustrate this approach by examining widespread local protests in South Africa. Insecurely employed and unemployed residents implemented community strikes by demanding public services, barricading roads and destroying property, and boycotting activities such as work and school. Within these local revolts, community represented both a site of struggle and a collective actor. While community strikes enabled economically insecure groups to mobilize and make demands, they also confronted significant limits, including tensions between protesters and workers.

Contesting neoliberalism: Mapping the terrain of social conflict

“…These changed patterns of dissent are in part connected to changes to the composition of the working class that have occurred as part of the global trend of neoliberal restructuring. Within the advanced capitalist democracies, this includes the emergence of a casually employed precariat, an increasing proportion of whom are educated to the level of tertiary education (Paret 2020; Standing 2011). It also includes a shrinking (and ageing) industrial working class (Van Neuss 2018).…”

The South African labour movement

“…A sustained critique of trade unions and models of organizing has dominated labour sociology in South Africa. There has been focus on 'new' social movements around commodification of public services, which was seen as a shift from labour politics, and befitting changing working class composition (Naidoo and Veriava, 2005;Desai, 2002;Levenson, 2017;Paret, 2018;Alexander, 2010). Indeed, Scully (2016) argues that the site of 'reproduction' is more apt ground for politics than cite of production under conditions of precarity, as declining wage income should predict that working class people battle around matters related to households.…”