Ethnographic evidence versus theoretical models: reminiscences and reflections on a linear proletarianisation model for Southern Africa

Abstract

Conceptualising what was seen as the proletarianisation of Southern Africa’s working people was a significant analytical preoccupation of the social sciences in the 1970s. Considering that the region’s political economy was dependent on migrant labour, anthropologists and others sought to understand the relationship between labour-sending and wage labour–utilising facets of what was described as the regional social formation. On the coat-tails of abstract neo-Marxist theory, debate hinged around whether the relationship was constituted by an “articulation of modes of production” or was characterised as a single capitalist mode; whether the working population constituted diverse classes (or class fractions) or a single proletariat, albeit fractured by people’s multifold life experiences. Based on the author’s reminiscences, the article records how 1970s ethnographic analyses revealed the inappropriateness, at one level, of a teleological model of proletarianisation — a point also demonstrated by subsequent ethnographers of the region. Yet, as the article argues, at another, global level, contemporary experiences of precarity and marginality reveal how capitalism continually produces a linear but bifurcating process that alienates working-struggling people from the means of production and social reproduction.