Queues Define the Working Class
by Sebabatso Manoeli
Mosa Phadi
In this episode, Mosa Phadi and I sit to discuss structural racism in South Africa. Despite twenty-six years of democracy, it is impossible to understand inequality in the country without understanding racial capitalism. In our conversation, Mosa highlights that South Africa is “built on cheap labour” – a reality that 1994 did not disrupt.
In this vein, we go on to discuss the proliferation of malls across the country, which are not only present among the middle class and the elite. Mosa strikingly notes the deleterious effect of homegrown multinational corporations to small-scale businesses. It still goes without saying, in 2020, that the players who are typically locked outside the formal economy continue to be Black people.
We talk about the irony of the over-reliance on essential workers (who tend to be Black) during the Covid-19 lockdown in the context of the economic exclusion experienced by many Black people in South Africa. She speaks movingly about the precarity of workers in the middle of the pandemic, and how the very same large corporations that rely on workers to keep their operations afloat in the pandemic, don’t deliver groceries and food to the neighbourhoods most workers live in. She expounds on this extractive relationship:
If you live in the townships, [grocery store chains] don’t deliver food to these areas. They only deliver food around the surrounding suburban areas. Because capital, white capital, says:
‘You’re not worthy.
You’re worthy of actually going outside and following those queues and endangering yourself.’
Mosa highlights that it is crucial for the poor and disenfranchised to “actually determine what type of change they want” and for her as a Black intellectual to bring “light to the plight of the poorest of the poor.”
For more, listen here.
SUBSCRIBE:
SOUNDCLOUD | SPOTIFY | APPLE PODCASTS | GOOGLE PODCASTS | STITCHER | PODCHASER | RADIO PUBLIC | TUNE IN
Mosa Phadi lectures in the Department of Sociology at the University of the Free State. She is co-editor of the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS) 2016 best non-fiction book Class in Soweto. She was the Programme Manager at the Ubuntu Dialogues programme based at Stellenbosch University, and in partnership with Michigan University. She is also the 2018 Fellow at the American Council for Learned Society’s African Humanities programme. Previously, she worked at the Public Affairs Research Institute (PARI), focusing on work that aims to rethink local government. Her own research interests focus on state theory, blackness in post-apartheid South Africa, class and Marxism.