The ‘Voucher Strike’: Workers’ Political Subjectivities in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Abstract

The article presents an anthropological case study of workers’ forms of thinking and subjectivity as they appeared at Autofirst, during a strike which took place in December 1998, in South Africa. After conceptualizing my approach as a ‘post-classist’ analysis following the work of the French political anthropologist Sylvain Lazarus and presenting my methodology, I focus on the problematic word ‘happy’ and its meaning in the specific subjective sequence. I show how the interviewees’ prescriptions that ‘a happy worker is a quality worker’ and that ‘the worker should be happy’ as much as management, are indications of the workers’ own logic and vision on what is possible in the factory in terms of relationships between management and workforce, during the early post-apartheid period. I contend that a ‘classist’ vision of capital and labour would not allow us to comprehend the issues at stake in the strike and in South African industry as a whole at that particular moment in time. Finally, I demonstrate the sequential existence of the factory as a place of engagement and of communication between 1995 and 1998, in contrast to the ‘apartheid of speech’ which, from the workers’ point of view, had previously characterized it.