Marx, labour and emancipation in South African sociology: a preliminary rethinking

Abstract

In a university and disciplinary environment where knowledge is increasingly commodified, this paper sketches a reconstruction of the mature Marx’s analysis of capitalism. I argue that his understanding remains methodologically powerful and helps to ground sociological analyses of the present. While accepting that there are good grounds for questioning the relevance of Marx in the wake of the South African political transition and the Post‐Fordist transformation of labour, this interpretation departs significantly from how Marx has generally been interpreted by sociologists and other social scientists in the country by foregrounding the commodity as the starting point of his social critique. Indeed, I argue that ‘class’ and ‘workplaces’, long a focus of radical sociologists, are on their own inadequate to grasp Marx’s concept of capitalism. Finally, drawing on the Frankfurt School, I suggest the importance of a critique of labour and the recognition of contradiction as the starting point of an emancipatory project.

Keywords:

• Marx
• labour
• critique
• emancipation
• South Africa
• sociology

Acknowledgements

Versions of this paper were presented at the South African Sociological Association 2008 Meetings and at the Wits Anthropology Seminar. In particular, I thank Paul Stewart, Kelly Gillespie, Lennox Olivier and Pierre du Plessis for generous and critical comments. Any interpretative and factual errors are my own.

Notes

1. In South African sociology, studies of industrial labour remain dominant, despite significant scholarship in development, race and the environment. At the 2008 South African Sociological Association Meetings, for instance, 11 panels were devoted to ‘industrial sociology’ and seven each to ‘development’ and ‘environment and natural resources’, despite the meetings’ explicit theme of the environment. There were no panels explicitly on social or sociological theory.

2. Rob Lambert, an established industrial sociologist, claimed during the 2008 South African Sociological Association meetings that the growth of industrial sociology signalled an increase in concern about justice for workers. I am more sceptical and am interested precisely in how capitalism subsumes activity or, to use a phrase of Adorno’s, converts possibilities for liberation into their opposite, more precise mechanisms for the extension of systemic alienation through the logic of bureaucratic domination.

3. Keith Breckenridge (2004) has shown that the search to understand the origins and character of the South African working class (to some extent inspired by the hegemony of a traditional Marxist reading) led social historians in 1980s and 1990s into rural South Africa and eventually away from a coherent notion of working class identity altogether. Shireen Ally (2005) has argued that these radical articulations depended upon a certain silencing of race and racial privilege.

4. ‘[T]he epoch that produces this standpoint [of the independent individual] is also that of the … most developed social relations. The human being in the most literal sense … an animal which can only individuate itself in the midst of society. Production by an isolated individual outside society … is as much of an absurdity as is the development of language without individuals living together and talking’ (Marx 1973, p. 84).

5. Patrick Murray (2000, p. 28) suggests: ‘Capital is not a work in economics – ‘Marxist economics’ is a misnomer – rather Capital is what Marx says it was, a critique of economics. The heart of this critique comes to this: economics pretends to do what cannot be done, to provide a scientific account of the production and distribution of wealth in utter abstraction from historically specific social forms’.

6. Kracauer comments on ‘radicalism’ in Weimar Germany: ‘[I]n Germany … a young radical intelligentsia has developed that … comes out quite vigorously … against capitalism. To the superficial glance, it seems to be a serious opponent of all powers that do not, like itself, strive for a reasonable human order. But even if its protests might be sincere and often fruitful, it makes protesting too easy for itself. For it is usually roused only by extreme cases … without appreciating the imperceptive dreadfulness of human existence. It is driven to the gesture of revolt, not by the construction of existence itself, but solely by its most visible emissions. Thus it does not really impinge on the core of given conditions, but confines itself to symptoms; it castigates obvious deformations and forgets about the sequences of small events of which normal life consists – events as whose product those deformations alone can be understood. The radicalism of these radicals would have more weight if really penetrated the structure of reality … How is everyday life to change, if even those whose vocation is to stir it up pay it no attention?’ (Kracauer 1998 [1929], pp. 100–101)

7. ‘One could no more imagine Nietzsche in an office, with a secretary minding the telephone in the anteroom, at his desk until five ‘o clock, than playing golf after the day’s work was done. Only a cunning intertwining of pleasure and work leaves real experience still open, under the pressure of society. Such experience is less and less tolerated. Even the so‐called intellectual professions are being deprived, through their growing resemblance to business, of all joy … No fulfillment may be attached to work, which would otherwise lose its functional modesty in the totality of purposes, no spark of reflection is allowed to fall into leisure time, since it might otherwise leap across to the work‐a‐day world and set it on fire. While in their structure work and amusement are becoming increasingly alike, they are at the same time being divided ever more rigorously by invisible demarcation lines. Joy and mind have been expelled from both’ (Adorno 2006 [1951], p. 130).

8. Ari Sitas (2004) is one South African sociologist who has addressed the relationship between labour and aspiration (or ‘daydreams’ in his terms) in a manner that does not mechanically reduce the latter to the ‘truth of the workplace’. Another approach, which does not give primacy to the production line and discerns a local critique of labour based on the distinction between ‘work’ and ‘labour’, is J. Comaroff and J.L. Comaroff (1987).