Mobility, Extraction and the Commons: Rethinking Liberation and Working-Class Politics in South Africa

 

(Part 2 of a Critique of the SACP’s “Conference of the Left”)

South Africa’s contemporary political crisis cannot be understood simply through the language of corruption, failed governance or incomplete economic transformation. The deeper crisis lies in the unresolved structures of extraction, accumulation and exclusion that survived the democratic transition itself and continue to shape the organisation of wealth, power and everyday life.

Much contemporary Left discourse still operates within an assumption that political liberation was fundamentally achieved in 1994, while economic liberation remained incomplete. This framework increasingly obscures the extent to which the post-apartheid settlement left the material foundations of power largely intact. While formal apartheid ended and democratic rights expanded, the structures of land dispossession, extractive accumulation, financial concentration and spatial inequality remained deeply embedded within South African society.

The result was not full democratic transformation, but a constrained and negotiated form of liberation in which sections of the liberation movement became incorporated into existing systems of accumulation and governance.

Frantz Fanon warned precisely of this danger. In The Wretched of the Earth, he argued that post-colonial transitions often produce national elites that inherit the state while leaving the underlying economic structures of domination largely untouched. Rather than democratising social power, the post-colonial state frequently becomes the administrator of scarcity, accumulation and social management on behalf of a new political elite integrated into global systems of capital.

This contradiction is particularly visible within South Africa’s extractive economy.

Historically, mining was never peripheral to South African capitalism. The mining industry shaped the development of the state, migrant labour systems, racial segregation, territorial dispossession and the organisation of cheap Black labour across Southern Africa. The relationship between extraction, finance, energy and state power formed the material foundation of both apartheid and industrial accumulation.

Importantly, this system always depended upon uneven development.

Mining capitalism concentrated wealth, infrastructure, energy systems and economic opportunity within specific centres of accumulation while simultaneously producing underdevelopment, dispossession and labour reserves elsewhere. Across the region, millions of people were displaced from land, pushed into poverty and compelled to move toward centres of extraction and economic survival.

Migration was therefore never external to the system. It was one of its conditions.

This remains true today.

Under contemporary capitalism, wealth, infrastructure, investment and economic opportunity continue to develop unevenly. Some territories become sites of concentrated accumulation while others experience abandonment, ecological destruction and collapsing social reproduction. Increasingly, critical scholars and social movements have described many of these abandoned and exploited territories as “sacrifice zones”, spaces and communities systematically exposed to environmental degradation, extraction, pollution, dispossession and infrastructural neglect in order to sustain accumulation elsewhere. Mining regions, informal settlements, abandoned rural economies and ecologically devastated communities across Southern Africa increasingly reflect this condition. These zones are not accidental by-products of development but structural features of contemporary capitalism, where certain populations and territories are rendered disposable in order to secure wealth, energy and stability for others. Under such conditions, people inevitably move toward centres of survival, mobility and economic possibility.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s analysis of Empire becomes important here because it helps illuminate how contemporary systems of power increasingly operate through interconnected networks of corporations, finance, security structures, states and political elites(and in South Africa, criminal cartels) rather than through singular national centres alone. While states continue to exercise sovereignty, including the legitimate regulation of borders and migration, Hardt and Negri’s insight is that contemporary economic systems (both legal and illegal), increasingly transcend national boundaries in ways that individual states alone cannot fully control. Capital, finance, commodities and labour all move across borders through highly interconnected global systems, while the conditions that compel migration are often produced by the very organisation of the global economy itself. Uneven development concentrates wealth, infrastructure and economic opportunity in certain regions while producing poverty, instability, ecological destruction and social collapse elsewhere. Extractive industries, conflict economies, debt regimes and regional inequalities frequently displace populations or undermine local systems of survival, forcing people to move in search of work, security and economic possibility. In this sense, migration is not simply the result of weak borders or failed governance, but emerges structurally from the unequal and interconnected nature of contemporary capitalism.

Within this system, human mobility acquires profound political significance.

Hardt and Negri argue that the movement of people across borders, territories and labour systems contains a potentially disruptive and even revolutionary force because mobility exceeds the fixed categories through which power seeks to organise labour, citizenship and political belonging. Migrants destabilise rigid boundaries between insider and outsider, national and foreign, formal and informal labour. Human movement exposes the artificiality of territorial and economic enclosure.

This is precisely why mobility becomes increasingly politicised under conditions of crisis.

As South Africa’s post-apartheid settlement enters deeper instability, growing political energy is directed not toward confronting extractive accumulation, concentrated corporate power or structural inequality, but toward policing and criminalising movement itself. Migrants, artisanal miners, informal workers and precarious populations increasingly become framed as threats to social order, development and national stability. This dynamic is not confined to mining regions alone. Across urban South Africa, similar forms of exclusion and criminalisation increasingly shape the governance of cities, informal settlements and township economies. Street traders are displaced in the name of urban renewal, informal settlements are securitised and periodically demolished, homeless populations are treated as threats to investment and tourism, and migrant-owned businesses become targets of both state harassment and popular violence. Urban space itself increasingly becomes organised around enclosure, surveillance and exclusion, where access to housing, transport, infrastructure and economic opportunity is tightly regulated in ways that protect property, investment and elite accumulation while marginalising those surviving through informal and precarious forms of life. In this sense, the policing of mobility and informality operates not only through borders and mining systems, but through the everyday management of urban life itself.

Xenophobia therefore cannot be understood simply as irrational prejudice or moral failure. It increasingly functions as a political technology for managing crisis.

Rather than confronting the structures that produce unemployment, poverty and social collapse, political discourse redirects anger downward toward vulnerable populations competing for survival within conditions of deepening abandonment. In this sense, the regulation of movement becomes inseparable from the protection of entrenched systems of accumulation and unequal access to economic opportunity.

This political logic is deeply revealing because South African capitalism has always depended upon regulating African mobility. Pass laws, labour compounds, territorial segregation and migrant labour systems were all mechanisms for controlling the movement of Black labour while protecting extractive accumulation.

Contemporary xenophobic politics increasingly reproduces elements of this logic under democratic crisis conditions.

This makes the silence and contradictions within sections of the contemporary Left particularly significant.

Historically, communist and working-class analysis in South Africa understood mining capital, migrant labour systems and monopoly accumulation as central to understanding racial capitalism itself. Yet within the contemporary Conference of the Left process, mining and extractive accumulation are strikingly marginal despite their continued centrality to inequality, ecological destruction and social exclusion.

Equally concerning is the broader accommodation of xenophobic discourse emerging across the political spectrum, including within sections of the governing alliance itself. At a moment when formations such as MK, ActionSA and the Patriotic Alliance increasingly mobilise exclusionary anti-migrant rhetoric, the failure of sections of the Left to consistently confront these politics raises serious questions about the extent to which contemporary progressive politics remains willing to challenge the underlying structures of extraction and social fragmentation.

The language of “illegal foreigners,” “criminal syndicates” and “illegal miners” increasingly functions to criminalise vulnerable African populations while obscuring the deeper political economy of unemployment, mining wealth extraction, municipal collapse and elite accumulation.

This becomes even more important when considering the transformed nature of labour and class composition in South Africa today.

Much of the contemporary Left, and NUMSA in particular, continues to rely on an increasingly outdated and intellectually shallow conception of the working class rooted in the historical experience of industrial wage labour. Despite presenting itself as the most advanced expression of socialist politics in South Africa, NUMSA’s analysis still privileges the formally employed industrial worker as the primary revolutionary subject while treating the unemployed, informal workers, migrants, precarious populations and broader survival economies as politically secondary or analytically peripheral.

This framework no longer adequately explains how capitalism actually functions in contemporary South Africa.

The problem is not simply that millions of people are excluded from stable wage labour. The deeper problem is that NUMSA’s analysis continues to operate as though productive activity only acquires political significance once it is formally incorporated into industrial employment and trade union structures. In doing so, it reproduces a narrow economistic understanding of labour inherited from an earlier phase of capitalist development while failing to grasp the transformed composition of exploitation under contemporary conditions.

Yet vast sections of South African society remain deeply embedded within systems of production and accumulation even while excluded from formal employment.

Informal traders sustain township economies and commodity circulation. Artisanal miners continue extracting value from abandoned and marginal mining systems. Care work reproduces labour power daily. Migrant networks sustain regional economies and systems of survival. Informal settlements subsidise urban labour reproduction under conditions of state failure. Waste reclaimers, transport operators, street vendors and countless precarious workers continue performing socially necessary labour that sustains both formal and informal accumulation.

These populations are not marginal residues external to capitalism, nor are they simply a passive reserve army waiting to be absorbed into industrial production. They are constitutive of how contemporary capitalism functions.

NUMSA’s inability to fully theorise these realities reveals the limits of a political framework still anchored in twentieth-century industrial categories despite operating within a society increasingly defined by informality, exclusion, indebtedness, mobility and precarious survival. The classical image of the reserve army of labour waiting outside the factory gates no longer adequately captures the realities of contemporary South Africa because exclusion itself has become productive. Informality has become structural. Precarity has become normalised.

This has profound political implications.

If exploitation increasingly operates through diffuse forms of social reproduction, mobility, informality and precarious survival rather than stable industrial incorporation alone, then emancipatory politics cannot remain grounded exclusively in centralised state ownership and industrial labour frameworks inherited from earlier periods of capitalist development.

This is where the limitations of traditional nationalisation politics become increasingly visible.

NUMSA is correct to argue that political liberation without economic transformation leaves underlying systems of inequality and exploitation largely intact. However, the question confronting South Africa is not simply whether ownership is private or state-owned.

The deeper issue concerns the social organisation of value itself.

History demonstrates that nationalisation alone does not necessarily democratise wealth, participation or social power. Across the world, many post-colonial and revolutionary societies nationalised mines, land and strategic industries while retaining bureaucratic centralisation, elite administration, ecological destruction and exclusion of ordinary communities from meaningful democratic control.

Even contemporary capitalist states already contain significant forms of public ownership through sovereign wealth funds, state-owned enterprises and public investment structures. South Africa itself possesses extensive forms of state-linked ownership and developmental institutions. Yet inequality, exclusion and concentrated power persist.

This reveals the deeper problem: ownership alone does not resolve enclosure.

Mining wealth is never produced by capital alone. Extraction depends not only upon labour, but also upon communities, ecological systems, public infrastructure, social reproduction, unpaid care work, migrant networks and the broader social conditions that sustain economic life itself. Communities absorb environmental destruction, infrastructural pressures and social dislocation while receiving only marginal participation in the wealth generated through extraction.

Under capitalism, however, the benefits of collectively produced wealth remain enclosed within systems of shareholder ownership, elite accumulation and bureaucratic administration.

This is where MACUA’s demands become politically transformative.

MACUA’s call for the socialisation of profits moves beyond both neoliberal privatisation and classical state-centred nationalisation. It challenges the deeper capitalist assumption that wealth belongs primarily to capital ownership and only secondarily to those who sustain the social conditions of production.

The demand for the socialisation of profits recognises that wealth is collectively produced and socially maintained. It therefore insists that communities, workers and society itself possess legitimate democratic claims over the wealth generated through extraction.

This points toward a politics of the commons.

The commons should not be understood simply as public ownership in the narrow statist sense. Rather, it refers to the democratic socialisation of power, participation and collective life itself. It implies shared stewardship over land, water, ecological systems, mineral wealth and the social conditions through which life is reproduced.

Against both neoliberal capitalism and bureaucratic statism, the politics of the commons seeks to democratise not only ownership, but the very organisation of value, participation and social power.

This is ultimately the deeper political question confronting South Africa today.

The crisis is not only inequality. It is a crisis of enclosure.

Land, mineral wealth, mobility, ecological systems, urban space and democratic participation increasingly remain organised around exclusion, accumulation and managed scarcity rather than collective democratic life.

Xenophobia emerges within this crisis because movement threatens systems built upon unequal access to resources, territory and opportunity. The policing of mobility therefore becomes inseparable from the protection of existing economic arrangements.

Against this logic of enclosure, the movement of people contains a potentially democratic and disruptive force precisely because it exceeds the rigid territorial and political boundaries through which power seeks to organise labour, belonging and accumulation.

The challenge confronting South Africa is therefore not simply the redistribution of wealth within an already liberated political order. It is the democratisation of social life itself.

It is precisely here that the failures of significant sections of the contemporary Left become impossible to ignore.

The SACP, despite its historical role in anti-apartheid struggle and working-class mobilisation, has become deeply compromised through its long integration into the governing alliance and the structures of the post-apartheid state. Rather than consistently confronting the material realities of extraction, inequality and elite accumulation, it has too often functioned as an ideological defender of a political settlement that has left the broader structures of racial capitalism fundamentally intact. In doing so, it has increasingly lost its organic connection to the lived realities of the majority of poor and precarious Black South Africans.

Similarly, while NUMSA and the broader Conference of the Left process correctly identify the failures of neoliberalism and the unfinished character of economic liberation, they remain constrained by an increasingly narrow and industrial conception of the working class itself. Their political imagination continues to privilege the formally employed industrial proletariat while treating broader precarious populations as secondary or peripheral to revolutionary politics.

This becomes particularly visible in the language repeatedly used to describe the unemployed, informal workers, migrants, artisanal miners and precarious communities as “non-proletarian masses.” The terminology is revealing. It reflects not only an analytical limitation, but a subtle political distancing from the very populations who increasingly constitute the majority experience of contemporary capitalism in South Africa.

For millions of people, capitalism is no longer encountered primarily through stable industrial employment, but through exclusion, informality, indebtedness, migration, criminalisation and precarious survival. Yet these populations remain deeply embedded within systems of production, circulation and social reproduction. They sustain economies, reproduce labour power, maintain communities and absorb the social costs of extraction and abandonment.

To treat them as somehow adjacent to the “real” working class is to fundamentally misunderstand the transformed nature of capitalist accumulation itself.

It is within this disdainful and almost othering posture toward the precarious and excluded that strands of the contemporary Left’s political misdirection become most visible. By failing to fully align themselves with the broader social realities of the working class in its contemporary form, sections of the Left risk reproducing new hierarchies of political legitimacy while remaining trapped within outdated organisational and theoretical frameworks inherited from an earlier industrial era.

The revolutionary potential of South Africa today lies not only within the factory or the union structure, but within the broader struggles over mobility, land, ecology, informal survival, social reproduction and democratic participation that increasingly define everyday life for the majority.

Nothing about us, without us.