The Southern African Working Class: Production, Reproduction and Politics

Abstract

Southern Africa is probably the world's most extreme site of uneven capitalist development.1 Inequality within and between the region's countries is severe, with race and gender domination largely undisturbed by the post-colonial experience, with the environment taking enormous strain, and with South Africa-and its 40 million of the region's 102 million citizens-responsible for $130 billion of Southern Africa's$160 billion in 1998 output. Yet, while it is logical to anticipate an uneven, fragmented evolution of working-class power and political strategy, given the area's different modes of class struggle, levels of consciousness, organizational capacity, militancy, and relations with political parties and other social forces, developments in one country do act as major reference points for others. Southern Africa's rich radical traditions-including once-avowed 'Marxist- Leninist' governments in Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Angola, and mass-movements and powerful unions-owe much to revolutionary socialism and nationalism, yet this never gave rise to an explicit regional class project