The winter-beaten streets of the Johannesburg Central Business District are lined with informal traders this morning and they’re selling everything you can imagine – fruit, vegetables, cuts of meat, dried fish, used clothes and shoes, toiletries, electronics, and mobile SIM cards and airtime. While they hustle, our policymakers, self-proclaimed activists, and academics sit in their ivory towers, boardrooms, and host conferences in five-star hotels engaged in a perpetual tug-of-war.
While they argue ad infinitum, the mass of those living in poverty, unemployment, and inequality in South Africa has taken to disengaging from the mainstream market and that is their notion of revolution. This is not a new phenomenon, during colonialism and apartheid black South Africans resorted to informality as the sole means to mitigate shocks from poverty and deprivation.
When conditions were unsanitary, chronic lung disease set in from working on mines, diets changed, climates worsened, and many died. The marginalized didn’t wait for their policymakers or activists to intervene – they saved themselves. Social capital and the funds raised from informality provided the only means for medical services, groceries, and funeral costs.
The alienation from the mainstream economy did not lead to the marginalized black man or woman desiring inclusion but disengaging completely from the structures of domination through informality. These social capital networks have only grown and deepened over the years, and voluntary, reciprocal, and horizontal networks have saved our deeply divided and unequal society from plummeting into absolute poverty.
The majority of South Africans still struggle to meet their basic needs for food, shelter, clothing, education, and healthcare, and South African Social Security grants barely make a dent on daily expenditure. It is personal relationships and informality that provide the most reliable and accessible means to cope with the daily shocks of poverty, hunger, and illness.
South Africa’s informal sector is now worth trillions, and on the African continent, the informal sector is estimated at anywhere between 40 percent and 80 percent of the workforce. Globally, the story is the same and Mike Davis (whose seminal work Planet of Slums remains one of the most comprehensive studies of the almost 1 billion people in ‘informal survivalism’) has estimated that the informal sector is the fastest growing social class on earth. So, why are we still talking about the working classes?
It is as if our imagination as the left begins and ends with Marx and no further and yet, our society demands a re-imagining of the social order with the informal at the very centre. The informal sector will not stop growing because mainstream structures and systems are geared to condense the centre, making it wealthier and more powerful while marginalizing more and more people.
The notion, therefore, of the worker-led revolution is archaic and, in South African society, where 32 percent of the population is unemployed, an impossibility. So, we ask – where are the real revolutionaries? Where are the people brave enough to say Marx has taken us so far, but we must chart the way ahead. Where are the people brave enough to call out the hypocrisy of performative leftist activism which centres the activists with their placards and marches while systematically decentring and stripping the marginalized of their right to be seen, heard, and make a decent living?
We must define the new left on our new circumstances and those circumstances are clear – the vast majority are marginalized, and this must end. No society can be sustained when so many are disenfranchised. The new left needs to shift its focus to the new social class of informality and that means leveraging on traditional leftist tools like collective bargaining for advancing inclusive economic growth amongst the informal classes.
Traditional labour relations frameworks focus exclusively on formal sector institutions , but emerging evidence suggests that informal actors such as street vendors are increasingly engaging in organized forms of negotiation and collective action to secure livelihoods, influence policy, and improve working conditions.
Collective bargaining can contribute to sustainable economic growth by enhancing productivity, reducing vulnerability, and strengthening state–citizen engagement. It is crucial, not only as a labour relations tool, but as a strategic …