Movements, protests and a massacre in South Africa

Abstract

The Marikana Massacre of August 2012 exposed the most unstable configuration of forces in post-apartheid South Africa, forged through entrenched social and economic inequalities, ecological degradation, indebtedness and corruption. Dissent against prevailing power relations had arisen over many years, with impoverished communities registering thousands of ‘service delivery protests’, seemingly without either resolution or maturation into durable social movements. However, the critical missing linkages between trade unions and urban communities were finally found in Rustenberg, 100 km west of Johannesburg, in a strike which fused labour, social, gendered, environmental and other interests. In the months following the Marikana, it became apparent that some sought to weave a genuine national revolt of the sort witnessed in 2011 across North Africa. However, this challenge to the elite political economy faced extreme difficulties, with fragments of populist, post-nationalist and working-class politics remaining isolated from the largest trade union, Communist Party and nationalist forces within the working- and middle classes.