Precarious Liberation: Workers, the State, and Contested Social Citizenship in Postapartheid South Africa (review)

Precarious liberation is one of the few works that considers South African labour history across the divide of 1994, the year Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (anc) came to power after a decades long liberation struggle. As such, the book emphasizes continuities between apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, at least in the realm of labour relations. In particular, Barchiesi remarks upon the “similarities between the work-centered citizenship discourse of the anc [in power] and the racial state” that preceded it. (61) Yet the anc’s valorization of wage labour as the path to dignified citizenship rings hollow in the face of “radical labor constituencies, massive poverty, and vast inequalities” besetting the post-apartheid social order, Barchiesi suggests. (61)

Barchiesi’s book emphasizes the paradox that in post-liberation South Africa, “trade unions had gained significant political and policy influence” (xvi) at the very moment that waged employment began to decline for the black working class. Jobs in the heavily unionized (and militant) metal and engineering sector, for example, declined from 385,000 to 255,000 during the 1990s; privatization and tight state budgets weakened the position of organized municipal workers in the same period. “Community contracting” of services undercut public sector unions while converting the poor into informal entrepreneurs. Meanwhile, Congress of South African Trade Unions (cosatu) unions representing these workers found themselves torn over whether “to contest social policies or manage them in the hope of decent deals for the rank and file.”(159)

Moreover, workers who once fought employers on revolutionary terrain found their unions less able to do battle when “a pro-business stance adopted by a government they voted into power brusquely reversed comfortable narratives of progress.”(237) Like the North American Congress of Industrial Organizations (cio) during the 1940s, cosatu discovered that incorporation into a governing coalition and a contractual labour relations regime can undermine shop-floor power.

In neoliberal South Africa, Barchiesi argues, waged work cannot serve as a realm of freedom because “its degraded material conditions are excruciatingly at odds with its persistent idealization in governmental mythology”(199) and traditional leftist teleology. Wage levels, even for the steadily employed, fail to lift workers out of poverty; the social wage has been eroded; and “the casualization of work has slowly undone the gains of three decades of workers’ struggles.”(76) As a consequence the ‘work-citizenship” nexus preached by both the anc and cosatu holds less and less meaning for masses of South Africans entering the labour market.

Yet, at the same time, “the deeper waged employment has decayed into a condition of precariousness and immiseration, the more prominent work and job creation have become as governmental responses to social problems,” Barchiesi maintains. (93) Precarious Liberation closely examines three dimensions of this sapped “work-citizenship nexus,” (24) the linking of social citizenship to employment and production. He begins with the “official discourse” linking employment with citizenship, suggesting more continuity between racist and liberatory regimes than one might imagine. Second, he looks at how South African trade unions – particularly the anc-aligned cosatu – inadvertently reproduced the category of work as the primary vehicle of “social redemption”(28) by placing the proletariat at the centre of its revolutionary discourse. This, he claims, marked a radical break from previous forms of African resistance to capitalism, which often had emphasized efforts to blunt proletarianization. Under apartheid Africans “were destined to experience work and citizenship as disconnected and mutually excluding spatial entities.”(41) In response, the liberation movement “elaborated a narrative that placed waged work at the core of resistance and social redemption,” a focus Barchiesi believes ultimately led down a neo-liberal cul-de-sac. (45) Finally, Barchiesi’s detailed ethnographic research among black municipal and industrial workers in Johannesburg and its industrial satellites allows him to consider how workers themselves feel about precarious work in post-apartheid South Africa. Here, he concludes that “workers did not perceive wage employment...