The General Meeting: Exploring the Alienation and Agency of Workers in a Collective Structure

The broader aim of this paper is to explore the role of the general meeting in the development of the workers movement under apartheid. The role of worker collectives in general, and the general meeting of workers in workplaces and unions in specific, is crucial in understanding the dynamics of this historical period. The declining role of the general meeting over time, and its virtual absence today, is equally crucial in understanding contemporary developments in the workers movement. In focussing on the general meeting, this paper draws on concepts of alienation and worker agency to illuminate the dynamics of this working class collective structure. Under capitalism workers are forced to live and work in conditions of alienation. Despite this and sometimes because of this, workers exercise agency in responding and seeking to change the conditions in which they are forced to live. The paper explores this contradiction that is central to capitalism, focusing on the individual and collective ways in which workers are alienated from one another and from their own capacities. It examines the consequences of these everyday experiences and the specific kind of agency that workers develop in responding to and struggling against the everyday manifestations of alienation that workers are forced to encounter under capitalism. Specific focus here is on the collective agency that workers recurrently express through organised collective action - a collective agency they were able to express, protect and develop through organisation, in the shape or structure of the General Meeting.