Given our analysis, it is necessary to explore the particular meaning of class relations and their interaction with social movements in Africa. The emphasis of this study is on the diversity of social movement activism and organization on the continent. There is perhaps a tension between this and the authors’ assertion that the African urban working class has been central to the historical development of social movement activity on the continent. The question immediately arises as to how this class relates to labor organizations such as trade unions, particularly given the decline in formal-sector employment in many countries in the last two decades. Recent studies arising from or influenced by the anticapitalist movement have sought to replace the Marxist idea of working-class agency with alternative formations based on broader or less defined movements or coalitions for progressive or radical change.
This study’s account of how the African working class should be understood corresponds to what Hal Draper called “the main body of the proletariat plus those sections of the population whose life situations in society tend to be similar.”51 The reason for distinguishing between these two categories is that the distinct work situation of the proletariat (strictly, its relation to the means of production) tends to put it in a position to provide leadership to other allied social strata. This is because the work done by the proletariat provides a form of collective organization and puts in its hands economic levers that are crucial to the functioning of society.
Marx also described “the communal revolution as the representative of all classes of society not living upon foreign [alienated] labor”—in short, all those do not live by exploiting others.52 This corresponds closely to those we identify as the popular classes—a wide “African crowd” including the lumpenproletariat of the shantytowns, unemployed youth, elements of the new petit bourgeoisie, laid-off workers, and university students.
It is among these popular classes that the strictly defined working class, for the reasons already stated, has the potential to provide leadership. As Claire Ceruti and Leo Zeilig argued in 2007, “The dynamic reality of class struggle on the continent reveals a working class, albeit reformulated, playing a central role both in the movement for democratic change and in the narrowly defined ‘economic’ struggles that punctuate daily life on the continent.”53
Other studies of class in Africa also draw attention to this important distinction between the working class and its popular allies:
Let us consider the composition of these “popular forces” to which we allude in our discussion of class struggle in contemporary Africa. They may include not only the urban and rural working classes (consisting of those who have little or no control or ownership of the means of production and only their labor to sell, whether in the formal or the informal sector) but also other categories, including on the one hand those whom Marx referred to as “paupers” and on the other small peasants and tenant farmers, “independent” craftsmen and artisans, small retailers and petty commodity producers, and members of the “new petty bourgeoisie” (sometimes called “the new middle classes”) generally including the lower echelons of the public sector. Not only do these various social categories constitute, in effect, the relative surplus population . . . they often share a consciousness of their interdependency and common vulnerability.54
Such an analysis allows for a constantly shifting constellation of popular forces that nevertheless frequently relies on the organizational capacity and political hegemony of the more “classic” African working class. Of course this class has itself been transformed, along with the political economy of Africa, but transformation does not necessarily mean defeat or redundancy.55
E. P. Thompson makes a similar distinction that is rarely highlighted in accounts of his work: “Class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs.” But even here, where Thompson is talking about the subjective formation of class consciousness, he is quite clear about which “common experiences” he is discussing: “The class experience is largely determined by the productive relations into which men are born—or enter involuntarily.”56 Without the reference to productive relations, there is no way to develop a stable notion of class—since, after all, people’s consciousness or loyalties may fluctuate drastically.
It is possible to maintain a dynamic view in which the working class is continually formed and reshaped along with its “penumbra” of other popular classes, all the while developing a unique consciousness and tradition rooted in its experiences of these changes. Indeed, this cross-sectional view is crucial to understanding the longitudinal and historical dynamics of interaction among all these popular forces.
It is of course true that many observers now see the possibility of the African working class achieving or leading emancipatory change—or limited social reform—as slight or even extinguished. Mike Davis’s study of the apparently fragmented and broken proletariat of the global south, Planet of Slums, raises germane questions about the role of class in a world transformed by “market reforms” since the 1970s.57 Davis charts the growth of urbanization without industrialization, indeed in a context of deindustrialization in many countries, coupled with falling agricultural productivity in rural areas. The political consequence is that, in the absence of a formally constituted proletariat, class struggle is replaced by “myriad acts of resistance” that emerge from a chaotic plurality of “charismatic churches and prophetic cults to ethnic militias, street gangs, neo-liberal NGOs and revolutionary social movements.”58 Davis is right about the culprits of the recent underdevelopment on the continent, but wrong about the working class. His argument presumes an earlier homogenous and self-conscious Western working class that, in the real slums of nineteenth-century Manchester or 1930s Chicago, was in practice always riven by divisions: respectable artisans versus the unskilled, men versus women, the employed versus the unemployed, white versus black. It is tempting to ask when, even at great moments of working-class action, there has ever been a “monolithic subject.” Indeed, our concept of the social movement in general refutes any notion of a single monolithic agency having existed in the past or arising in the future.59
Actual class reconfiguration, and how it has manifested itself in the “myriad acts of resistance” in the global south, does not, however, suggest a working class entirely dislodged from its historical agency. It is undoubtedly true that that a combination of rural and urban in the formation of the working class characterized the process of “proletarianization” in most parts of Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—from migrant labor in the mines of southern Africa in the 1900s to oil extraction and processing workers in the Niger Delta since the 1970s. Similarly, recent research on Soweto, a large South African township now incorporated into Johannesburg, suggests a community not of slums and shack dwellers, but rather of integrated communities of the formally employed, semi-employed, informally employed, and unemployed, commonly within the same household or neighborhood.60 As a consequence, household members may be simultaneously engaged in and supportive of conventional industrial action organized by trade unions and community-based service delivery protests initiated by social movements. There is, therefore, no division between labor-based struggles and “myriad acts of resistance”—they are in practice mutually reinforcing. Indeed, in South Africa, both types of actions have reached unprecedented levels in recent years (see chapter 4). There is, of course, the danger that, without progressive political leadership, working-class anger can become focused on the wrong enemy: for example, in the outburst of xenophobic violence in South Africa in 2008. Nevertheless, the potential cross-fertilization of these struggles—community and workplace—does not live only in the minds of activists, but expresses the real household, and wider community, political economy of contemporary urban South Africa.
As this volume makes clear, South Africa is in many respects different from much of the rest of the continent. Although we cannot easily generalize from the experience of Soweto, our own research suggests that a mix of formally and informally employed households in diverse urban spaces can also be found in cities and towns in much of the rest of the continent (though perhaps in different proportions). The picture of “complex coherence” resembles the shantytown (bidonville) evoked by Fanon,