Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-hc48f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T20:48:22.988Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

6 - Discursive labour and strategic contradiction

Managing the working-class roots of a declassed organisation

from Part II - White workers and civil society mobilisation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 April 2021

Danelle van Zyl-Hermann
Affiliation:
Universität Basel, Switzerland
Get access

Summary

The previous chapter showed how the Solidarity Movement sought to declass its trade union past in favour of a historical and ideological narrative emphasising Afrikaner cultural unity and the politics of race. Yet profoundly classist attitudes, stereotypes, and prejudice, which contradicted the Movement’s official framing, persisted among its leadership. This chapter uncovers these sub-narratives. It argues that they reveal the discursive labour and strategic contradictions deployed by the Movement’s executives to manage the working-class roots of their organisation and reformulate working-class identity in such a manner as to serve the new social alliance their Movement represents, and to use it as a vehicle for advancing ethnic and racial interests in the wake of the demise of the racial state. This included the leadership’s deployment of class distinctions in terms of education, respectability, political attitudes, and morality to legitimise their own position and agenda. These findings attest to the persistent presence of deep class-based prejudice and tensions within the white population, begging a revision of existing scholarship on post-apartheid Afrikaner identity construction and homogeneous white subjectivities.

Type
Chapter
Information
Privileged Precariat
White Workers and South Africa's Long Transition to Majority Rule
, pp. 241 - 263
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×