Dockworkers or “Docked” Workers?
- Dockworkers or “Docked” Workers?
In Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area (2018) Peter Cole explores and compares the black internationalism and leftist politics of dockworkers in South Africa and the United States. In this exciting and ambitious new study, which won the 2019 Philip Taft Labor History Book Award, Cole traces the radical traditions of these workers in important port cities on two continents as workers challenged state racism, navigated the dramatic onset of containerization, and deployed boycotts in solidarity with social justice struggles in other countries. In this robust exchange Cole, who also wrote Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive- Era Philadelphia (2007), debates his new book with Alex Lichtenstein. Like Cole, Lichtenstein has written extensively about working-class issues in both US and South African contexts.
Dockworker Power is quite an achievement, since you manage to discuss — and compare — workers’ struggles on the docks in two very distinctive environments: San Francisco Bay and Durban, South Africa. Let me begin by challenging your account of the dockworker experience in South Africa. Following the essential work of David Hemson, a crack labor organizer in the 1973 “Durban Moment” as well as the first scholar to write about the history of Durban’s dockworkers, you treat these African workers as incipient waterfront proletarians.1 But, as you know, more recent work — that of Ralph Callebert in particular — throws doubt on the proletarian experience and consciousness of casual African workers on the Durban docks. Callebert insists that their “livelihood strategies . . . continued investments in and attachments to a rural economy” in the nearby Natal hinterland.2 You treat casualized dock labor in Durban as the source of proletarian resistance to workplace exploitation; Callebert sees it instead as the means by which African workers could resist proletarianization altogether. Who is right? [End Page 129]
Quite an achievement, indeed, especially for someone formally trained as an Americanist who chose to go far outside of his comfort zone (and training) in imagining this project. Ten years on, I hope I’ve created a book that contributes to meaningful conversations among historians of South Africa, of the United States, and of the world. I’ve learned a great deal in deploying comparative and transnational methods as well as global labor history.
Your question is an excellent one. As you note, Hemson’s work remains the starting point for the history of Durban dockers and their role in the long struggle against apartheid. I do remain convinced by his claims that they played a central role in making Durban the center of the struggle in the early 1970s, reigniting a largely quiescent domestic opposition due to earlier repression. (They also were pivotal in Durban during the 1940s and 1950s.) Callebert’s recent scholarship has directly challenged some of Hemson’s other claims — namely that Durban dockers, born and raised in rural “homelands,” became not only working-class radicals but also urban in their identities. Callebert makes a very convincing case that, actually, these dock-ers never shed their rural identities. He documents how they maintained close ties to their rural homes and, to a man (in this all-male workforce), retired to rural areas. I don’t, however, see Callebert’s argument as entirely undermining all of Hemson’s or my claims. First, Callebert intentionally investigated workers who began their career before 1960 and ended his book in 1959; so, what might be true for earlier generations was, I strongly suspect, far less the case for subsequent ones. Second, I’m unconvinced that maintaining rural ties, along with engaging in small-scale trading as some did, meant that they were not militant on the job. Far from it. Hemson was arguing, in a more dogmatic Marxist fashion, that these dockers were proletarianized by their work and urban experience. That’s not my claim nor my game. Even if Durban dockers, in other words, retired to rural homes, their actions on the job — including repeated work stoppages over many decades — very much should be seen as part of the black and working-class struggle against apartheid. Of course...
