Introduction
The historiography of South Africa's white working class is largely concentrated in a rich literature on the early twentieth century, tracing white workers' position and role in a racially organized society, as well as the cultural expression of their class position in their everyday lives.Footnote 2 Landmark events, such as the great industrial strikes of 1913 and 1922 and the election of the labor-friendly Pact government in 1924, often serve as orientation points in these studies.Footnote 3 The rise of Afrikaner nationalism during the 1930s and 1940s saw sections of the white working class incorporated into a nationalist class alliance that eventually brought the National Party (NP) and its apartheid policy to power in 1948. This not uncontested process involved what Dan O'Meara calls an “ideological assault” on class divisions between Afrikaans-speaking whites, aimed at replacing workers' class identification with identification with the volk.Footnote 4 “By the late 1940s,” O'Meara notes, “most white workers had been persuaded that potential competition from cheaper African labor posed a greater threat to their interests than did the bosses.”Footnote 5 In exchange for workers' political support, the NP expanded social welfare and introduced race-based job reservation policies. White workers' alignment with the ruling party on cultural and racial terms meant that they also accrued the social privileges of belonging to the white “master” race.Footnote 6 These developments compounded the delegitimation of working-class identification in the postwar years.Footnote 7 By the 1960s, the NP's policies, in conjunction with rapid economic growth, had transformed the social structure of the Afrikaner population. Afrikaner capital had been strengthened, and most Afrikaners elevated to the ranks of the managerial and middle classes. The ideal of the classless volk had seemingly been realized.Footnote 8
From this point on, the working class discussed in the historical literature seems to be uniformly black.Footnote 9 The historiography privileges developments in black nationalist politics and civil resistance, including the role of African labor and youth in the liberation struggle. In terms of Afrikaner politics, the scholarship centers on the ideological tensions that plagued the NP from the 1960s. Although some historians acknowledge the class dimensions of these divisions, there is no sign of the sustained engagement with working-class politics and identity that is characteristic of scholarship on the early twentieth century. Rather, the embourgeoisement of Afrikaners is credited as an important contributing factor to the abandonment of apartheid.Footnote 10 Consequently, most scholarship dealing with the Afrikaner experience in the post-apartheid context unproblematically offers middle-class views centered on Afrikaners' sense of dislocation and “identity crisis” under black majority rule.Footnote 11 Discursive analyses are often central to this literature—most notably, sociologist Melissa Steyn's work on the discursive strategies employed by English- and Afrikaans-speaking whites, respectively, to preserve their materially and socially superior position after apartheid. Steyn identifies a number of discourses resistant to transformation—or “white talk” strategies—among Afrikaners, which she reads as reflecting their post-1994 loss of political power and their resultant “ethnic anxieties.”Footnote 12 This scholarship offers a rich and critical view of whites in post-apartheid South Africa, but displays a preoccupation with race relations while paying little attention to issues of class.
In sum, the notion of midcentury embourgeoisement has left white workers marginalized from scholarship dealing with the second half of the apartheid era, and analyses of white experience in post-apartheid South Africa have continued to unproblematically focus on the middle class, offering a narrative of post-apartheid “crisis” and “anxiety.” Such a concern with the negotiation of white and Afrikaner identity at the expense of other factors such as class or gender does not do justice to the dynamics within South African society.Footnote 13 Rather, this results in the homogenization and sedimentation of narratives along racial and ethnic lines, while the emphasis on post-1994 change obscures the fact that white workers were being confronted with industrial democratization as far back as the late 1970s.
This paper seeks to return South Africa's white working class to the historical narrative of late twentieth-century South Africa by reinserting class into a debate dominated by race.Footnote 14 To do so, it tracks the response of the Mineworkers' Union (MWU) to industrial reform since the late 1970s, through the economic and political policy shifts of the 1980s, to South Africa's ensuing political democratization beginning in the 1990s. It shows that the union resisted change throughout the period under investigation—but that its discursive strategy evolved in response to contextual changes. The union moved from deploying an industry- and class-specific discourse in the early 1980s towards a more ethnic-centered discourse, which would appeal across class divides, by the early 2000s.
Clearly, this is not an argument for a return to the class-analytic approaches of the socialist tradition, which have, since the early 1980s, been undermined by structural and social changes in production, the crisis of socialist politics, and the cultural and intellectual critiques of, for example, feminism and postmodernism. Rather, following Eley and Nield, I employ the concept of the “working class” “more as a cultural and political postulate ... than as a demonstrable social fact.”Footnote 15 Such an approach brings “the universalizing claims of class analysis down to the ground” by understanding class as a perpetual project-in-the-making “through a dialectic of discursive labor and actually existing forms and relations.”Footnote 16
Hence I adopt a discursive-analytical approach for exploring the MWU's interpretation and representation of change, how it sought to discursively negotiate white workers' position within a transforming economic and political order, and what this reveals about white working-class experience during this period. Other scholars interested in representations, perceptions, and experiences have similarly chosen to harness “working class” as a dynamic concept useful for evoking those who share the experience of social inequality and power struggles—or, in Selina Todd's words, those who share the “deeply held desire” for “autonomy from politicians, employers and landlords,”Footnote 17 be they household servants in 1910 or unemployed IT consultants in 2010.Footnote 18 The case study presented here demonstrates how a discursive analysis can uncover the power dynamics and subjectivities of class even in the absence of structural information and analyses, and in a changing labor context that complicates the categorization of economic activities and obscures the details of the relations of production.
The Mineworkers' Union
Founded in 1902, the all-white, blue-collar Mineworkers' Union became prominent for its defense of race-based job reservation in the mining industry. The MWU's membership covered non-artisanal underground employees—those whites at the lowest end of the skills and supervisory hierarchy, who worked in the production process directly alongside black workers. By the 1930s, newly proletarianized, often unskilled Afrikaners constituted the overwhelming majority of the MWU's approximately 12,000 members.Footnote 19 In 1948 mining constituencies played a decisive role in bringing the NP to power, and throughout the first decades of apartheid, South African businesses and the NP government benefitted from the industrial discipline and political loyalty of white workers, while those workers in turn enjoyed the protection and benevolence of the state and employers.Footnote 20
Historically, MWU members played a central role in the underground production process. White miners—as the only miners entitled to hold certificates of competencyFootnote 21 —were responsible for blasting, as well as supervising the unskilled and semiskilled African workers carrying out the physical processing work. This changed beginning in the early 1960s, as technological advances in mining techniques led to the erosion of white miners' skills and the reorganization of the racial division of labor in the underground production process. This change saw uncertified African workers increasingly take primary responsibility for blasting, while whites retreated to supervising the process. By the late 1970s, therefore, MWU members' role in the underground production process had progressively diminished. This rendered them completely dependent on racially discriminatory legislation for safeguarding their superior position and privileges in relation to African miners. In addition, their mining-specific skills bound them to these precarious positions: MWU members—in contrast to craftsmen and maintenance workers in the mining industry—did not have a trade, making employment outside mining unlikely. This exacerbated the economic vulnerability of these white miners.Footnote 22
The 1970s saw the fortunes of the world economy turn as postwar growth gave way to an international economic crisis. In South Africa, too, the 1970s saw economic growth and stability replaced by stagnation and inflation which would last until 1994. The year 1973 marked the outbreak of widespread industrial disruption throughout South Africa as black workers struck over low wages, mounting unemployment, and poverty. This stimulated increased worker militancy and the growth of unregistered African trade unions.Footnote 23 Forced to acknowledge the damaging effect of apartheid policies to the country's economy, the government appointed a Commission of Inquiry into Labor Legislation to investigate South Africa's industrial relations system. It soon became clear that the Commission would recommend the complete removal of job reservation and was considering the recognition of African trade unions. These prospects represented grave threats to white workers whose job security depended on discriminatory policies and put the MWU on a confrontational path with the government. Distressed by the prospect that its members could be replaced by black workers if such reforms were implemented, the MWU resorted to strike action on the eve of the release of the first part of the Commission's report in 1979. The strike was intended to demonstrate the indispensable role white miners played in the industry, but it collapsed after a week and only served to prove that white workers were incapable of successfully mobilizing against reform.Footnote 24 To be sure, the declining importance of white miners in the production process and the declining number of whites in the industrial labor force overall meant that white workers' political and economic significance had diminished accordingly.Footnote 25
The implementation of reforms beginning in 1979 marked a definitive break in the NP's historical partnership with the MWU—and indeed with many other sections of the white working class who could now no longer rely on state protection. The MWU proceeded to align itself with right-wing politics. The union was able to delay reforms in the mining industry by obstructing negotiations on the removal of job reservation, but in 1987 legislation reserving blasting certificates for whites was finally removed.Footnote 26 The union responded by stepping up its recruitment drive to extend its scope beyond mining to steel, chemical, distribution, and other miscellaneous industries. With the government rapidly abandoning social apartheid and moving toward political reform amid widespread social unrest, the MWU's goal of creating a “super white trade union” seemed to resonate widely, and its membership grew to some 44,000 in 1992.Footnote 27 This period also saw the MWU move further into the fold of right-wing politics, supporting efforts toward the formation of an independent Afrikaner volkstaat (people's state). But the white right was deeply divided and lacked feasible political alternatives. The first democratic elections and the inauguration of a black majority government under the African National Congress (ANC) in 1994 rendered the MWU an anachronism from a bygone racist era.Footnote 28 According to Wessel Visser's organizational history of the MWU, the union struggled to respond to this new political and economic landscape—it was financially and ideologically bankrupt and “stagnated” as of 1994.Footnote 29
The appointment of Flip Buys as general secretary of the MWU in 1997 marked a major change in direction.Footnote 30 As an academically trained intellectual, Buys was the first leader in the history of the MWU who was not himself a miner. He initiated Wenplan 2002 (“Winning Plan 2002”), a five-year strategy for reorganizing, modernizing, and expanding the union. Buys oversaw the expansion of communication infrastructure and training opportunities and the development of research facilities and financial services within the union.Footnote 31 In a first for South African trade unionism, the MWU established a division for individual members desiring labor protection, especially in response to trends toward outsourcing and subcontracting. Within two years, 8,000 unorganized individuals had joined the MWU, benefiting especially from its legal services and new call center. Expanding nationally, the MWU's membership profile evolved from predominantly semiskilled blue-collar workers toward technically trained workers in high-technology fields.Footnote 32 Meanwhile, the union distanced itself from party politics and repositioned itself as a civil society organization bargaining for the rights and cultural needs of minority groups in general and Afrikaans-speaking whites in particular. This involved opposing what it saw as instances of “discrimination towards the Afrikaans minority,”Footnote 33 such as affirmative action or the diminishing public use of the Afrikaans language. By its centenary in 2002, the MWU had been transformed into a labor movement offering a variety of services beyond the traditional scope of a trade union. To mark its “reinvention,” the MWU was renamed Solidarity in 2002. By then it represented some 120,000 mainly skilled and educated workers who were predominantly, but no longer exclusively, white. The union increasingly commanded a significant public presence, both in the labor arena and in a civil society capacity, claiming to speak specifically on behalf of Afrikaners and appearing to find wide acceptance in this regard.Footnote 34 Indeed, by 2000 it had become the largest Afrikaans-membership organization in South Africa.Footnote 35
In terms of categories within labor relations, the workers historically represented by the MWU could be identified as free wage workers—that is, free individuals who sold their labor power as a commodity. This narrow definition of the working class developed from Marx's assumptions about the capitalist mode of production and his view of labor power as an “object of trade.” However, Marcel van der Linden has recently argued that in reality, labor commodification takes a variety of different and transitional forms and that labor historians would do well to examine these gradations more carefully. For example, the freedom of “free” wage laborers may be restricted by employers in a variety of economic or non-economic ways.Footnote 36 Indeed, this was the experience of MWU members in the late 1970s: For example, when white miners struck in 1979 over impending labor reforms, the strike was broken when the Chamber of Mines threatened the strikers with permanent suspension and the withdrawal of all benefits, which included housing.Footnote 37 This demonstrates how benefits outside the immediate production process may act as economic controls over apparently “free” wage workers.Footnote 38 Other bonds or controls beyond the material or economic, including physical coercion or ties of kinship, may also constrain the wage laborer's freedom. Thus, to capture the fluidity and complexities of labor within capitalist reality, van der Linden introduces the broader concept of “subaltern workers” to describe the “large class of people within capitalist society, whose labor power is commodified in different ways” and who can be distinguished from “those who have more power” by the fact that they are forced to sell their productive capacity in order to live.Footnote 39
It seems reasonable to place the members of the MWU/Solidarity within this capacious (re)definition of the “working class,” and, indeed, van der Linden's formulation is compatible with Todd and Jones' use of this concept. But an inquiry into the exact positions and power of the MWU/Solidarity's members in the production process, and the resulting social relations, is not possible. It has been shown that the union's membership base expanded throughout the period of reform and transformation—first moving beyond the mining industry, attracting blue-collar workers from other traditional industries into the fold and then, upon the union's “reinvention” during the late-1990s, beyond these occupations and industries by adding unorganized individuals, white-collar workers, and even some professionals to its ranks. Except for the basic membership figures kept by the union's accountant, the MWU has no membership records available prior to about 2000—a fact attributed to the union's decentralized administrative system and lack of technological capacity prior to Buys' leadership. And, since 2000, members have not been required to provide occupational specifics when joining the union, which now relies on an external company to manage the administration of member services and collect membership fees. In 2011, Solidarity's leadership estimated that its membership profile was somewhere between 60 and 80 percent blue collar.Footnote 40
The growing diversity of the MWU/Solidarity's membership between 1977 and 2002, as well as structural changes to the economy, changing production methods, and crucially, changing labor policies, means that it is difficult to determine the extent to which the union's multifarious membership would have been “free” or bound in economic or noneconomic ways. We have already noted the general absence of structural analyses on the changing position of white workers within the South African economy during the period of reform and transformation, making this a problem that extends beyond just the MWU/Solidarity.
How, then, can we know what impact the scrapping of protective legislation reserving blasting certificates for white miners had on the MWU's members, or what the consequences of affirmative action policies have been for the white blue-collar workers who made up the bulk of the MWU's membership in the 1990s? Adopting a discursive-analytical approach enables us to answer these questions in terms of the MWU's representation and experience of change. Approaching issues of class in this way opens up a space for politics and provides insight into the power dynamics of class. Drawing primarily on an analysis of the MWU's in-house publication, originally called Die Mynwerker/The Mineworker, Footnote 41 as well as archival and interview material, the following analysis traces how the MWU's members negotiated the economic and political changes with which they were confronted, and what this reveals about white working-class identity and politics during the period of reform and transformation.
Baas or Klaas? The MWU's Response to Industrial Reform
The Afrikaans expression baas en Klaas (“master and servant”) denotes a class relationship of power while also signifying a racial hierarchy.Footnote 42 According to Jeremy Krikler, “it is a well-known fact that for much of the twentieth century, black people generally addressed white men … as Baas (master). This undoubtedly arose from the fact that master-servant relations ubiquitously shaped the relations between the races.”Footnote 43 In the baas-Klaas power constellation, therefore, baas was the only conceivable position for whites to occupy; to be Klaas would be deeply humiliating. “White workers in South Africa would never use the term Baas to address their employers,” Krikler continues. “Baas was so inescapably a term denoting a member of a master class and race that no white worker could possibly use it.”Footnote 44
But the MWU's newspaper proves otherwise. Unexpectedly, beginning in 1984, the baas-Klaas trope crops up quite often in reference to the relationship between white employers and white workers. In a speech in January 1984, for example, MWU president Cor de Jager warned employers not to attempt a return to the mining relations of the early twentieth century, when mine magnates were “baas” and miners were “wit Klaas,” with the latter being worked like slaves. Notice that De Jager deemed it necessary to qualify Klaas with “white,” indicating the distortion of the idiom. It is thanks to unions such as the MWU, De Jager continued, that “inhumane conditions” had been eradicated, and that baas and Klaas were now both “simply employees” earning a salary. In fact, De Jager added, the “white-collars” could learn a great deal from the “pick-and-hoe guys” and should be prepared to engage with blue-collar workers on an equal footing—together, they should be partners with equal interests in the industry.Footnote 45
De Jager's statements reveal more than simply the expected antagonism between workers and employers characteristic of labor relations—they point to white miners' perceptions of their own position vis-à-vis that of white mining capital within the changing economic landscape of the early 1980s. A brief overview of the MWU's newspaper in the years leading up to these statements shows that none of this indignant rhetoric appeared even a decade earlier. Rather, in a typical statement in 1973, general secretary Arrie Paulus testified to the “fine spirit of cooperation”Footnote 46 that existed between the union and employers. This relationship rapidly turned sour in 1976, as the business community pressed government more urgently for reforms in the wake of the urban unrest that began in June that year in Soweto. The MWU's newspaper shows that the union reacted with suspicion to the appointment of the Commission of Inquiry, its rhetoric growing increasingly antagonistic towards its erstwhile government partners. The union warned employers and officials not to tamper with protective legislation and sought to give substance to these warnings when it struck in anticipation of the Commission's recommendations in March 1979. As noted, the strike fizzled out when the Chamber of Mines threatened MWU members with permanent suspension and the withdrawal of all benefits. Soon thereafter, the government accepted the Commission's recommendations. Paulus condemned this as “the greatest act of treason against the white workers of South Africa since 1922”Footnote 47 —a reference to the Witwatersrand general strike-turned-insurrection of 1922, when the government sided with employers against the workers by deploying the army to crush the strike. Indeed, during his 1981 presidential address, De Jager accused the NP of no longer being the same party that miners had helped bring to power in 1948.Footnote 48 The MWU maintained this resistant rhetoric but was unable to offer much actual opposition. Only in the mining industry was it able to actively oppose the reform process by frustrating negotiations on the phasing out of job reservation.
It was in this context, as the mining industry was placed under increased pressure to implement reforms, that the baas-Klaas trope emerged in 1984. By using a distinctly racialized idiom to express his outrage at being treated like a “white Klaas,” De Jager was not only highlighting the violation of the nationalist class alliance through the exploitation of white workers, but also signaling the threat this posed to economically vulnerable white miners' racial identity. In the eyes of the MWU, the white reformist government and employers were pushing white workers into the inferior position of Klaas—a position of competition and equality with blacks that was, at the same time, a position of inferiority vis-à-vis other whites. This reveals the centrality of protective measures to bolstering MWU members' “thinned collective insistence on racial and class superiority,”Footnote 49 as did Paulus' statement in 1986 that the “liberalist Chamber of Mines and Government” was trying to “rob the white mineworker of his identity, namely the blasting certificate.”Footnote 50 “We have stated before,” Paulus fumed on another occasion, “that the employer in the mining industry should not act as though he is boss and the employee is “klaas.” It is both psychologically foolish to treat employees in this manner, and also humiliating for union members.”Footnote 51 Reforms facilitating the advancement of black workers threatened to undercut white miners' material conditions and destabilize the social order in which white working-class men formed part of the racially dominant power bloc. That these threats were perceived to be manifesting due to the actions of white businessmen and politicians reveal the intraracial class tensions caused by reform.
The timing of white miners' objections to African advancement is significant. In the case of the retail industry, Bridget Kenny finds that white working-class women started opposing the growing entry of black workers into front-line shop employment in the late 1960s, anxious about this encroachment into their occupation.Footnote 52 As noted, a similar reorganization of the racial division of labor was occurring in the mining industry during this period. In contrast to white women in the retail industry, however, the MWU did not object to such changes, but actively negotiated for job fragmentation to be allowed in exchange for improvements in white miners' wages and benefits. It was only a decade later that white miners started expressing concerted opposition to this process, as well as anxiety about its implications for their position within the country's political economy as a whole. Until then, they had been involved in eroding their own position, drawing advantage from this process as long as they continued to hold power within the industrial conciliatory mechanisms by virtue of their race. But when reforms started threatening this privileged position, white miners became anxious about losing baasskap (their position as “masters”)—both in terms of their economic position in the division of labor, as well as their political position in the nationalist alliance—at a time when other classes of whites remained politically and economically secure.
The MWU's newspaper reveals a number of ways in which miners sought to discursively negotiate the changing environment and regain the security and privileges of their now flailing class and racial position. This included attempts to discredit black labor in a last effort to avert the opening of blasting certificates to all races. Central to this strategy was the notion that African labor was “irresponsible.” The MWU highlighted the degree to which the black mass actions of the 1980s were accompanied by destruction and violence.Footnote 53 Opposing the recommendations of the Commission of Inquiry, the MWU argued that this “proved” that “Africans still cannot handle trade union rights”Footnote 54 and contrasted the actions of black workers with the “responsible” nature of white labor.Footnote 55 In addition, the union argued that the black labor force was undisciplined and lazy, and that their production rates and standards were much lower than those of white workers.Footnote 56 The crude racism of such remarks points as much to the racial prejudices as to the economic vulnerability of these white workers, who in this way sought to maintain their privileged position. By emphasizing their own political and economic significance, and objecting to being treated like a “white Klaas,” white miners sought to emphasize their belonging and importance within the political order. To the same end, they attempted to draw clearer divisions along racial lines in order to distance themselves from the African miners alongside whom they worked.
But in 1987 job reservation in the mining industry was finally removed. The MWU slammed this as government's “final treason” against the white worker.Footnote 57 It cast its members as the victims of employers, who were only interested in profits, and of the NP government, which had bowed to international and local pressure. The feelings of humiliation and indignation first expressed by Paulus were echoed by his successor, Peet Ungerer, during the salary negotiations of 1989, when he condemned the Chamber of Mines for showing a “total lack of interest in the needs of our members” and displaying an “attitude of ‘we're the boss and you'll do as we say.’”Footnote 58
Discursive Blurring in the Face of Political Uncertainties
The removal of job reservation in the mining industry marked the failure of the MWU's resistance to economic reform. Within an increasingly volatile industrial and political landscape, the union responded by expanding its membership to form a “super white union” and cementing its ties to right-wing groups. During this period, white miners' indignation at being treated in a manner unfitting their social position continued to appear in the pages of their newspaper—but discursive blurring occurred as the baas-Klaas trope started to accentuate racial and ethnic elements in addition to class. One issue which demonstrates these shifting categories was the MWU's opposition to pressures by mining houses in the early 1990s to introduce a seven-day workweek. Picking up on the baas-Klaas trope, the MWU condemned these suggestions as “slave-working weeks.”Footnote 59 In a related article entitled “Use your power, or die a slave,” the MWU-News urged its readers not to have a “yes boss, fine boss” attitude and called upon all white workers to join the MWU in order to halt the “total onslaught on the white Afrikaner man.”Footnote 60 Although the issue at stake pertained specifically to the blue-collar mining industry and sought to resist the perceived subjugation and exploitation of white miners, it was represented as resonating with a wider “onslaught” in ethnic and racial terms.
This blurring of class and race in response to change, and the fluid subject positions it indicates, may be read as reflecting the similarly fluid and unstable political context of the time. Previously, the MWU's discourse reflected its resistance to industrial reform within the context of continued white political dominance, and hence it focused on threats to the material position and racial identity of white miners as a class distinct from other, more economically secure whites. By the early 1990s, however, the white supremacist state was clearly in its death throes. The abandonment of apartheid policies in the late 1980s and negotiations with organizations once regarded as terrorist (like the ANC) in the early 1990s portended uncertainty as to the future shape of South Africa and the position whites would occupy in it. The discursive blurring identified above may therefore be read as indicating a perception that white dominance in general was now under threat from impending political democratization. The MWU therefore cast challenges to the interests of its working-class members within the broader context of the perceived threats facing all whites. This resulted in the blurring of mining- or class-based issues with broader racial interests. White miners' struggle for survival in the face of African advancement and government abandonment was linked with anxieties surrounding racial integration and the threat this posed to white identity and privileges. This led the MWU to support right-wing efforts to resist the racial integration of amenities, neighborhoods, services, and schools. In the pages of the MWU-News “white workers” was increasingly used interchangeably with “whites.”
At the same time, an articulation of Afrikaner ethnic identity came to the fore. While the MWU had long been a predominantly Afrikaner organization, there had been little need to articulate this explicitly within a context of Afrikaner political dominance and the union's partnership in the nationalist alliance since the 1940s. But the imminent demise of the Afrikaner-run state in the early 1990s and, after 1994, the public decline of the Afrikaans language and symbols, left Afrikaners insecure as an ethnic group. Hence, the MWU joined the right-wing Afrikaner Volksfront (People's Front) as a vehicle for its resistance to racial integration and democratization leading up to 1994 and supported its demands for an independent Afrikaner republic. This period, while marked by discursive blurring and shifting subject positions, therefore saw the MWU move from resisting economic change to resisting political transformation and its implications.
In the aftermath of the first democratic elections, as whites' formal loss of political power became a reality, this shift toward race and ethnicity became more pronounced. The baas-Klaas language of humiliation, indignation, and subordination, which in the 1980s expressed white working-class experience, was now increasingly extended to encompass the experiences of all whites. Where the NP had once betrayed white miners by abolishing job reservation, it had now left all whites in the lurch by capitulating to a black majority government while white capital eagerly adopted race-based affirmative action policies in order to please the new powers that be. The MWU saw Afrikaners as the main victims of the political transformation—like white miners in the early 1980s, they were being pushed into a subordinate position. By 1996, the editor of MWU-News was lamenting that a job and income was worth little when MWU members' culture, social conditions, and right to self-determination were “under attack.”Footnote 61 This statement strikingly demonstrates the MWU's shift from an exclusive focus on the mining industry and employment-related issues to a “declassed” focus on socio-political issues and racial/ethnic identity.
Reinventing the MWU after Apartheid
In 1996, the Afrikaner Volksfront was disbanded, and creation of an independent volkstaat as a political solution appeared ever less likely—those who had resisted democratization would have to negotiate a space for themselves within the new ANC-ruled South Africa. It was in this context that Flip Buys assumed leadership of the MWU in 1997 and initiated the Wenplan 2002. From this point onward it seems that the ethnic component of the MWU's discourse, which emerged in the early 1990s, was consolidated. While employers were assailed in the MWU's rhetoric up to 1996, class relations were now rarely mentioned. Meanwhile, the antagonism previously directed at the NP was seamlessly transferred to the ANC government, which the MWU-News explicitly called “the enemy” of “our people.”Footnote 62 Hence, the baas-Klaas trope was now used to cast all whites in the democratic South Africa, and particularly Afrikaners, as being in the subordinate and disempowered position of Klaas: they were “a volk that has lost its freedom.”Footnote 63 Where it had once highlighted class divisions within the white population in an effort to contest workers' loss of industrial power, the baas-Klaas trope now effectively obscured class divisions and claimed a homogenous experience for all Afrikaners on the basis of their ethnic identity and their loss of political power. Despite its now-affirmed self-identification as an Afrikaner organization, the MWU continued to leave discursive space for other whites to also identify with its resistant discourse by shifting between casting Afrikaners specifically, and whites in general, as victims of political transformation.
The MWU presented South Africa under black rule as a picture of anarchy: It criticized the country's trade relations, economy, and security, and found medical services, ethnic harmony, and educational standards to be declining. “No intelligent person expected anything other than the present shambles from the new South Africa,” it scoffed.Footnote 64 Hence the Wenplan was presented as a proactive response to the anarchy of the ANC government, thereby offering the MWU as a substitute for the state. “We will have to create our own future, no one is going to do it for us,” Buys stated in 1998.Footnote 65 While many of the union's new services and initiatives—from retraining opportunities to legal support and medical insurance—were developed in response to changing economic trends, these services were represented in politicized and ethnicized terms as efforts to resist “unfair discrimination.” To underscore the point, the union adopted the slogan “we protect our people.” In the same way that the MWU sought to preserve the privileged position of white workers in the 1980s by representing them as “responsible” in contrast to “destructive” black workers, the MWU now sought to claim moral superiority for its members by crediting Afrikaners with a “proactive culture.” Meanwhile, by framing democratizing processes such as affirmative action in dangerously provocative terms, such as “ethnic cleansing,”Footnote 66 the MWU sought to mobilize its members and public opinion against societal transformation on the basis of minority rights. By the turn of the millennium, the MWU had been reinvented as Solidarity, an organization primarily concerned not with labor relations, but with the “increasing alienation of the Afrikaans minority.”Footnote 67 Perhaps reflecting the effectiveness of the union's new form of declassed resistance, many white-collar workers and professionals joined its ranks.Footnote 68 Although it no longer employed the baas-Klaas idiom explicitly, it invoked the feelings of humiliation, indignation, and subordination contained in the trope, recasting them in terms of political disempowerment and cultural alienation.
The parallels between the MWU/Solidarity's resistant discourse and post-apartheid “white talk,” through which whites have sought to maintain their material, social, and cultural privileges in the context of black political empowerment, are plainly evident.Footnote 69 Indeed, the ethnicity-centered discourse, which crystallized within the MWU in the early 1990s and was consolidated after 1997, resonates with a number of the Afrikaner “white talk” strategies identified by Melissa Steyn in her 2004 taxonomy. These include, for instance, the attempt to unify white Afrikaans-speakers around the notion of an organic Afrikaner volk; the articulation of a discourse of victimhood and persecution (specifically with regard to affirmative action); the rejection of the new South Africa and representation of black government as inherently unscrupulous and dangerous; identification between Afrikaans- and English-speaking whites for the purpose of racially united resistance against transformation; and the championing of Afrikaners as the defenders of all minority interests.Footnote 70 Steyn identifies “white talk” as a distinctly post-apartheid phenomenon. But the analysis presented here demonstrates that—at least in the case of the MWU/Solidarity—the origins of this resistant discourse may be traced back to white working-class efforts to negotiate the dislocation of their position in South Africa's economic and political order beginning in the late 1970s. While the MWU/Solidarity cannot be seen as representative of the entire spectrum of white, or even Afrikaner, opinion, the evidence presented here suggests the necessity of historicizing post-apartheid responses to transformation and paying attention to their possible class roots.
It may thus be suggested that white miners' discourse of resistance played a role in the development of post-1994 discursive strategies opposing democracy and transformation. Indignant discourses of unjust treatment or subordination in the economic arena were already available within the white working class when political transformation started gaining momentum, and it is possible that this type of rhetoric could have been appropriated and adapted by other white classes to make sense of their own experiences of losing baasskap. Indeed, as Solidarity started to gain prominence and frequent media coverage as an apologist for Afrikaner minority rights in the early 2000s, the organization put forward a specific framing of Afrikaners' position in post-apartheid South Africa as one of disempowerment and alienation. This interpretation could well have been drawing on the union's traditional blue-collar membership's experiences during the earlier period of reform, adapting and offering them to the wider Afrikaner population in the post-apartheid context.Footnote 71 As we have seen, this adaptation saw working-class discourses declassed to appeal to all whites and ethnicized in order to mobilize Afrikaans-speaking whites, in particular, around a specific interpretation of post-apartheid South Africa. It seems significant that the consolidating shift toward what appeared to be a more broadly appealing ethnic-centered discourse coincided with the takeover of the MWU's leadership by middle-class actors. In this sense, the union's shifting discourse has ironically seen the experiences of white mineworkers seemingly usurped into a declassed Afrikaner-centered discourse, effectively silencing their class-specific voice.
Conclusion
From a reactionary and right-wing union in the mining industry to a dynamic labor movement and the most successful post-apartheid Afrikaner organization, the MWU's remarkable transformation involved not only organizational reinvention and political realignment, but also fundamental shifts in the union's discourse and identity politics, as this article has shown. While in the 1980s the notion of baas en Klaas served to contest white workers' perceived exclusion from the political order on the grounds of their class identity, by the 2000s it served to contest perceived political disempowerment and cultural marginalization on the grounds of ethnic identity. However, this shift was characterized by discursive blurring, and the union's use of identity categories—worker, white, or Afrikaner—was inconsistent. Class identification might have been harder to sustain in the postwar years, but these findings demonstrate that it did not altogether disappear during apartheid and that not all identity articulations pre-1994 were racial in nature. Even within the MWU—arguably the union most successfully incorporated into the nationalist alliance—class- and ethnicity-based discourses continued to jostle for interpretive supremacy until the early 1990s. The discursive developments within the MWU therefore offer revealing insights into the co-constitution of white workers' class and racial identity during the period of reform and transformation, particularly the ways in which this was subject not only to perceptions of the racial “other,” but also to perceptions of intraracial differences. Moreover, this article has sought to demonstrate how a discursive-analytical approach may be employed fruitfully to uncover the politics, power dynamics, and subjectivities of class. Significantly, this case study has revealed how the MWU and its use of the baas/Klaas trope testifies to these arguably “free” workers' perception of being “unfree.” Particularly interesting is the evidence that, in the course of the period under investigation, this perception shifted from one of being “unfree”—treated like servants, or even “slaves”—due to the behavior of white employers and policies of a white government, to being politically “unfree” in the context of black majority government—a “volk that has lost its freedom.”
The insights gained from this case study prompt revisions to the existing literature on the period of reform and transformation in South Africa. It has shown that for an economically vulnerable section of the Afrikaner population, the shift from a position of baas to Klaas occurred in economic terms well before the political disempowerment associated with 1994. This exposes the homogenizing tendencies of prevailing interpretations and suggests that 1994 is over-emphasized in existing analyses of South Africa's transition to democracy. By taking a longue durée approach, it is possible to produce more nuanced understandings of historical change and experience, and open up different perspectives on otherwise homogenizing narratives. Thus, this article has offered a historicization of the Afrikaner experience of transformation from a working-class perspective, thereby reinserting white workers into the historiography of the demise of apartheid and the democratization of South African society. By repositioning class in a debate currently dominated by race, it has shown that the class specificity of Afrikaners' experience of transformation must be taken into account.
