Revisiting White Labourism: New Debates on Working-Class Whiteness in Twentieth-Century Southern Africa

Duncan Money,Danelle Van Zyl-Hermann

doi:10.1017/s0020859021000407

Duncan Money, Danelle Van Zyl-Hermann

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1017/s0020859021000407

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Abstract

AbstractThis article is a contribution to and reassessment of the debate about the concept of ‘white labourism’ hosted in this journal in 2010. White labourism is a concept formulated by Jonathan Hyslop to describe an ideology combining an anti-capitalist critique with racial segregation that he argued was dominant in a transnational white working class in the British Empire in the early twentieth century. The debate about this concept has focused on the appeal and extent of this ideology in South Africa during the early twentieth century. In light of recent scholarship on Southern Africa, we take a longer-term perspective to critically examine the concept and the debate. Specifically, we make three interventions into this debate: we consider the role of white workers outside British imperial networks; we examine how radical and revolutionary ideas disappeared from white-working class politics in the mid-twentieth century; and we reassess the connection between transnational flows of people and ideas. Racial divisions in the working class and labour movement in Southern Africa were persistent and enduring. We argue that racial segregation had an enduring appeal to white workers in Southern Africa, and the sources of this appeal were more varied and locally rooted than simply transnational migration to the region.

Highlights

The term ‘white working class’ has become commonplace in recent years: a convenient, though poorly defined shorthand ostensibly explaining the rise of xenophobic nationalist politics in Europe and North America in the wake of the financial crisis.As readers of this journal will be keenly aware, this term has a history and – especially among historians of Southern Africa – evokes a period and a set of meanings quite different from present-day connotations
White labourism is a concept formulated by Jonathan Hyslop to describe an ideology combining an anti-capitalist critique with racial segregation that he argued was dominant in a transnational white working class in the British Empire in the early twentieth century
Duncan Money and Danelle van Zyl‐Hermann role of white workers outside British imperial networks; we examine how radical and revolutionary ideas disappeared from white-working class politics in the mid-twentieth century; and we reassess the connection between transnational flows of people and ideas

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The term ‘white working class’ has become commonplace in recent years: a convenient, though poorly defined shorthand ostensibly explaining the rise of xenophobic nationalist politics in Europe and North America in the wake of the financial crisis. The solidarity with white workers in South Africa expressed in Hyde Park had soon waned, and the British labour movement turned its attention to the miners’ strike in British Columbia, Canada – a dispute, Kenefick claims, “fought strictly along class lines” Hyslop responded to both Van der Walt and Kenefick by conceding the existence of anti-racist and syndicalist politics among white labour activists. He argued that anti-racist and syndicalist ideologies remained restricted to radical labour activists and did not have “any substantial impact on the membership of the white trade unions, or [on] the British emigrant working class more broadly”. We challenge this imperial framework and extend the chronological focus to re-evaluate transnational connections and highlight the local

WORKERS AND IDEOLOGIES OUTSIDE BRITISH IMPERIAL CIRCUITS

OF POLITICAL RADICALISM