While progressive coalitions continue to oppose neoliberal restructuring around the world, organizing on the left remains fragmented and the underlying unity of diverse working class struggles undertheorized. Overcoming these theoretical and practical obstacles is an urgent task in the face of both renewed attempts by states and capital to ensure stability and deepen market penetration into the remaining untouched corners of working-class life, and threats to unity generated within the left by narrow understandings of class and identity.
Post-apartheid South Africa is no exception to this ongoing neoliberal restructuring of contemporary capitalism nor to the fragmentation of working-class struggle. In opposition to the maintenance of a neoliberal macroeconomic trajectory following apartheid South Africans have almost continuously organized in their workplaces and communities to realize the better life for all promised to them after 1994. While community protest has intensified over the last decade—with a parallel upturn in labour organizing—it has taken on a less focused and fragmented form relative to earlier mobilizations. Moreover, despite the deep solidarities and alliances formed between unions and communities in the struggle against apartheid, organizing around production and reproduction has remained relatively distinct since its end. There remain, however, concerted efforts to draw together and articulate protests around access to the basic necessities of life with labour and student movements with the explicit goal of uniting the working class to struggle against capitalism.
Based on extensive fieldwork conducted between 2015 and 2019, this dissertation analyzes one instance of this organizing work through a case study of the Housing Assembly, an organization struggling around housing and related services in Cape Town. It asks what role understandings of capitalism and class and their relationship to social relations of oppression play in organizing the working class today. My research explores how the Housing Assembly uses a strategic learning process of organizing to raise critical consciousness and build genuine solidarities and grassroots organization to engage and contest the state and capital around access to housing and water. This learning process starts from the daily lived experience of the working class to build a concrete critique of the political economy of housing and services restructuring which conceives of these struggles around social reproduction as class struggles within a capitalist totality rather than as discrete, bounded, or local. The production and utilization of knowledge by the Housing Assembly plays a key role in this organizing process, linking the subjective experience of everyday working-class life with the relational construction of political, economic and social relations which lie beyond it.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/40072 |
| Date | 15 January 2020 |
| Creators | Murray, Adrian Thomas |
| Contributors | Spronk, Susan |
| Publisher | Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
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