Worker Militancy in South Africa: A Sociospatial Analysis of Trade Union Activism in the Manufacturing Sector

Abstract

The independent trade union movement has become increasingly significant in the popular struggle against racial capitalism in South Africa, yet it has so far attracted comparatively little attention from geographers in the region. One of the concerns of this paper, then, is to consider ways in which the spatial configuration of South African industry affects workers' organisations. In this context, the focus centres upon strike activity in the manufacturing sector. From an analysis of the changing composition, fortunes, and strategics of the trade union movement since the 1950s—substantially reviewed here—it can be seen how such activity is influenced by factors at work within the state apparatus and within the unions themselves, and is indicative of the everchanging relationship that exists between these two. Our major objective here, though, is to demonstrate how certain spatial and temporal variations in strike action may also be related to particular developments in the structure of South African capitalism. The forces underpinning the emergence of a spatial/sectoral division of labour and the contradictory imperatives driving industry towards the centralisation and decentralisation of capital are the developments under review.

Review Essay

“…What has been referred to as 'political ecology' has been shaped by Marxism and by geographers; and it stands centrally located in current debates in rural development, agro-forestry, the political economy of resource use, and so on (see also Blaikie and Brookfield, 1987;Richards, 1985). But this absence can be replicated throughout World Capitalist Development: what of the work by RDGs on agrarian differentiation (Johnson, 1982;Weiner et al, 1985;Wisner 1977), on environmental degradation and patterns of accumulation (Hecht, 1985;Grossman, 1984), households, labor markets and industrialization (Christopherson, 1983;Browett, 1986;Storper, 1984;Sutcliffe and Wellings, 1985), the theories of the state and rural development (Andrae and Beckman, 1985;Watts, 1984), cultural control of resources and gender (Carney, 1986;Spiro, 1981;Momsen and Townsend, 1987), migration (Crush, 1982), farm labor (Swindell, 1985) trade (Harriss, 1979), food and famine (Hewitt, 1983;Cutler, 1983) and not least the vast body of work by non-Anglophone and Third World geographers themselves (see the journal Hdrodote; Bruneau, 1480;Wolde, 1984).10 I do not wish to engage in a bibliographic battle (indeed Corbridge's depth of scholarship is very impressive), neither to infer some sort of cozy Marxist consensus because we can quite legitimately ask (i) in what sense are these geographers radicallMarxist (some are clearly not), or (ii) whether there are significant theoretical distinctions to be made within this corpus (which there most certainly are). But this research certainly falls within the circumference of RDG as loosely drawn by Corbridge; more fundamentally it is characterized, and shaped, by a direct and organic engagement with Marxist development theory and should, in my opinion, be situated within the radical problematic which has sustained it.…”