Privileged Precariat: White Workers and South Africa's Long Transition to Majority Rule

"Existing scholarship on South Africa's transition is theoretically and empirically weak when assessing the role of class in white society. This book offers the first study of how white workers experienced and negotiated the dismantling of the racial state and the establishment of black majority rule, and places this story in the global context of the ascendance of neoliberalism and identity politics. Starting from the escalating economic and political crises of the 1970s, it shows how late apartheid reforms constituted the withdrawal of state support for working-class whiteness. This sent white workers in search of new ways to safeguard their interests in a rapidly changing world. Focusing on the blue-collar Mineworkers' Union, the book shows how this organisation shed its working-class identity to reposition itself as a culture-based civil society organisation. By the new millennium, it had become the Solidarity Movement, a service-providing social movement appealing to cultural nationalism and expressing state-like ambitions. Locally and internationally, it presented itself as the voice of South African minorities and white Afrikaans-speakers in particular. This book integrates South Africa's recent past with current global debates to unlock new perspectives race and class under late capitalism, and on the growing appeal of identity-based politics"--