Labour

Work

-any productive activity

-generally necessary to live

Labour

-relational and systemic

-productive activity that someone is doing for the benefit of someone else

‘The African miner is a miner’ (Gluckman 1955)

-studied industrialization in Northern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and Nyasaland (Malawi) Copperbelt

-should expect fact that tribal Africans live in a town and participate in activities of industry, commerce and general urbanism to exert dominant pressure on their behavior

-in Copper Belt instituted Tribal Elder system in mining compound, failed with widespread strikes starting 1935, unionisation, insisted Tribal Elders abolished

-in mines worked in departments and work gangs, new forms of affiliation

Declarations of dependence (Ferguson 2013)

-in Southern Africa wage labour became important foundation of male personhood, disrupted hierarchy between senior and junior men

-culture of working in the mines paternalistic and personalistic, continued to imply belonging to someone

-after Apartheid as in Ngoni days the insecure and unattached will accept subordination in exchange for membership

-ultimately better to be subjugated that not subjugated at all

Ngoni snowball state (Ferguson 2013)

Who: Ngoni State of Nguni-speaking peoples

Where: Southern Africa

When: 1820s

What: 1820s in midst of grave political disorder and violence Nguni-speaking refugees headed north and raided neighbors as they went. At same time some people came of their own volition from great distances with goal of being taken captive. Captured men entered at bottom of pecking order but could found new segments with descendants, wives, followers. Leaders always at risk of losing their power if followers left to join their rivals or found their own polities, acted as check on power.

Significance: After Apartheid ‘snowball state in reverse’: throwing people off as it goes along

Dislocation (Harvey and Krohn-Hansen 2018)

-dislocation: unevenness of transnational capitalism’s unfolding, ways in which both places and persons are reconfigured by movements of capital

-incl spatial movements but also other senses of disruption incl sentiment of feeling out of place as things move and change around you

-means of going beyond concepts of dispossession and/or disorganization

-new way to think about effects of global capitalist system and labour relations, bringing kinship, personhood, affect, politics, and sociality back into the frame of capitalist value creation

Wageless Life (Denning 2010)

-under capitalism only thing worse than being exploited is not being exploited

-understandings built upon wage labour cannot account for the reality lived by most of the world’s population: those without wages

-insists that we should decentre wage labor in our conception of life under capitalism

-proletarian≠ wage labor but dispossession, expropriation, and radical dependence on the market

M-Pesa ‘Human ATMs’ (Park 2020)

Who: Niyawira, M-Pesa agent

Where: Kenya

When: Fieldwork in 2014

What: M-Pesa: mobile-to-mobile money platform, customers transfer money electronically and later withdraw it another kiosk. M-Pesa agent’s job to move money in and out of the system. Commission based, long hours, lack of protections. Have to work to build and maintain social and material networks which are uncompensated. Data gathered central to Safaricom’s new technological innovations, led to launching M-Shwari savings and loans service based on user behavior.

Significance: Treated as machines (human ATMs) but expropriation of affective labour of M-Pesa agents allows Safaricom to innovate and make more money

Women’s experience in South African Mines (Benya 2017)

Who: Female miners

Where: South Africa

When: 2004-2010s

What: During apartheid mines created ‘world without women,’ even hired male nurses for compounds. From 2004 committed to attaining a 10% quota in mining within 5 years. Jobs in the mines attractive with better pay and house than other ‘female’ jobs or even other traditionally male sectors. However In training women not allowed to drill, told to watch rather than learn by doing, miss out on informal learning between men on breaks. In mines face sexual harassment daily, reporting it does little.

Significance: Enduring hypermasculinity of mining culture. Legacies of colonialism

Tamrat’s refusal of work (di Nunzio 2022)

Who: Tamrat, a working class Ethiopian ’steel fixer’ (tradesman who positions and secures steel rebars in concrete construction projects)

Where: Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

When: 2013-2016

What: In 2000s Addis Ababa construction boom, Tamrat always had work usually for foreign-owned construction companies but severely underpaid, fired repeatedly for union organizing. October 2015 fired again, decided not to look for work, instead pieces together informal moneymaking to get by. Refusing work way of disengaging his sense of self from what he regarded as the source of his oppression

Significance: in Marxist autonomist theory refusing work first step towards breaking moral nexus between work, entitlement, and citizenship that constrain revolutionary change. In Ethiopia: more about poor people’s adverse incorporation through work, can be ordinary, individual, and often invisible

Creating permanence on South African/Zimbabwean border farms (Bolt 2013)

Who: Mapermanent workers

Where: Grootplaas Estate: citrus farm on the Zimbabwe-South Africa border

When: 2000s

What: Employ seasonal laborers as well as smaller permanent workforce ‘mapermanent’, live in simple housing on farm. Seasonal workers: uncertain residency status, live in fear of soldiers off compound, hard work, austere conditions. Mapermanent: farmers reliant on them, supervise seasonal workers, better housing. Make homes into their own with gardens, furniture, etc. Form relations among themselves, with soldiers, and sense of domesticity through relations with seasonal worker women.

Significance: Ultimately permanence provisional b/c home property of their employers, farms emphasize flexibility and risk aversion as key to operating within global market yet rely on mapermanent

Wealth in People (Guyer 1995

-wealth-in-people: developed in 1970s by Miers and Kopytoff

-idea that humans could be explicitly valued in material terms in Africa

-many person-thing conversions about acquiring and consolidating direct controls over people

-context where indirect controls through land, capital, and threat of superior force limited  (opposed to in Europe for ex)