Amandla! magazine | Issue 84

ANALYSIS

H

OW DID THE END OF APARTHEID

affect South Africa’s white

workers? An excellent question.

And the answer can go a long

way towards explaining some of the more

virulent politics evident today. But the

question is rarely asked because – so the

assumption goes – there are hardly any

white workers in the true sense; South

Africa’s working classes are black. The

historical privileges of race continue to

shape the contours of the country’s social

and economic landscape. They mean that

whites were never subject to the

exploitation and precarity suffered by their

black compatriots.

Right?

Race and class

How race colours class has

long been a hot debate. In

the 1970s and 1980s, leftist

academics and labour

activists reflected on the

prospect of a workers’

revolution in apartheid

South Africa and why it was

unlikely white workers would

support such action. They

concluded that those whites

working in mines or factories

weren’t workers at all –

rather, they were a “labour

aristocracy” in alliance

with the bourgeoisie. They

were a “nonworking class”,

detached from the bulk of

South Africa’s proletariat

by the elevated status they

enjoyed in exchange for their

support for the racial state

and the interests of capital.

In the 1990s and 2000s,

with labour movements

across the globe in retreat, a

more nuanced take emerged.

While white workers’

privilege was certainly real compared

to the black working class – it was now

argued – this privilege was non-existent

relative to wealthy whites.

Origins of white workers’

privilege

To understand where this would

leave white workers in 1994, we must

understand how this came about in the first

place. It goes back to the birth of industrial

capitalism, amidst South Africa’s mineral

revolution of the late 19th and early 20th

century. The mining industry is where

the foundations of South Africa’s racial

capitalism and its concomitant labour

policies and social relations were laid.

This is also where impoverished, landless,

unskilled whites, leaving the countryside

in the wake of the South African War and

the ravages of the rinderpest, entered the

mines and became proletarians.

To be sure, this was a white man’s

state, built on the exploitation and

economic vulnerability of African migrant

workers. But it did not automatically

translate into security for white workers.

The compound system, labour migrancy

and the pass laws rendered black labour

much cheaper and more easily controlled

than white labour. This gave capital every

incentive to seek to substitute black

workers for white. In addition, mining

interests dominated the state.

This context of intense class struggle

was fundamental to the formation of white

working-class identity: white workers,

Jeremy Krikler has argued, came to define

themselves in relation to what they were

not: rightless, wageless, racially-despised,

unfree blacks.

The 1922 strike

The perpetual threat of displacement

animated conflicts between white workers,

capital and the state in the first decades

of the 20th century. It came to a head in

1922. In response to moves by the Chamber
      of Mines to replace 2,000 white miners
      in semi-skilled work with cheaper black
      labour, a major strike broke out in the gold
      and coal mines. It was soon backed by a
      general strike throughout the Transvaal.
      The strike turned into an armed revolt
      as 22,000 workers challenged the power
      of mine owners and the legitimacy of the
      state that supported them. Prime Minister
      Smuts deployed the army against the
      strikers and battles between armed strikers
      and state forces took place throughout
      central Johannesburg.

At its height, aerial bombardment,

machine guns and tanks were deployed

against the workers. By mid-March, the

eight-week strike was crushed. Over 200

people had been killed, 600 wounded,

thousands arrested and four hanged for

treason.

The white labour movement was

defeated. But in the 1924 general election,

white workers used their political power

to oust Smuts and install a labour-friendly

WHAT ABOUT

WHITE WORKERS?

By Danelle van Zyl-Hermann

The mining industry is where impoverished, landless, unskilled whites,

leaving the countryside in the wake of the South African War and the

ravages of the rinderpest, entered the mines and became proletarians.