ONE CLASS OR TWO? THE LABOUR RESERVE AND ‘SURPLUS POPULATION’ IN MARX AND CONTEMPORARY SOWETO

Abstract

This article revisits the concept of the reserve army of labour for a new angle on the argument that work restructuring has polarised the working class into a privileged strata capturing most of the surplus, and a marginalised underclass denied access to resources like jobs. It examines how work restructuring plays out in a residential, or reproductive, setting – in this case Soweto, South Africa's biggest township. Soweto emerges as a differentiated unity in our original data covering individual work histories and the employment profile of households, which was gathered from two rounds of interviews and a survey of 2 500 Sowetans. Individual work trajectories in the Soweto data are highly suggestive of Marx's description of a labour force constantly stirred by new forms of production. People dip in and out of work, and move amongst the worlds of work. The different worlds of work mingle at the household level through mutual, if strained, support, in most households creating a bridge between the worlds of work. But certain low-quality, makeshift forms of work cluster in a minority of households. The assortive pressures in the reserve army create the notion of two classes in Soweto – the poor and the rest – amongst residents. These same processes illustrate how surplus labour acts as a whip on the workforce which binds the fate of one ‘class’ to the other.