Workers, wages and livelihoods: Linking workplace and community struggles in post-apartheid South Africa

The paper explores a significant area of study on workers, wages and livelihoods, interrogating reproductive capacity of capitalism in post-apartheid South Africa and possibilities for class struggle on shop floor and in communities. The paper is based on ethnographic research with Dunlop workers, premised on a claim that wage income is the locus around which livelihoods (forms of reproduction) are mobilised across rural-urban divide. The paper asserts that the crisis in South Africa is not necessarily a crisis of accumulation, but a crisis of reproduction (subsistence and survival). Furthermore the paper looks at complexities in how concrete economic, political and social conditions of workers and their households as well as concrete class struggles play out on shop floor and in communities in everyday life.