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This introduction to the special issue on "The South African Tradition of Racial Capitalism" situates the South African tradition of racial capitalism (SAT) against the organizational backdrop of the anti-apartheid movement, outlines the key theses of the SAT, and presents the contributions of the special issue. We argue that the SAT rests upon four key theses: 1) class struggle from above – the pursuit of profit – generates racism; 2) the capitalist state is the primary agent of racialization; 3) racial ideology can divide, enabling capitalism, but it can also unify, facilitating resistance; and 4) racial capitalism is a strategic concept that emphasizes the inseparability of anti-racist and anti-capitalist struggle. The SAT underscores the centrality of struggle and the importance of conjunctural analysis in the study of racial capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past two decades, South Africa has experienced a consistent wave of local protests rooted in impoverished residential areas. Given the centrality of ideas about community within these protests, and building on Gramsci and Katznelson, this paper characterizes low-income residential areas as the "community trenches" of contemporary working-class struggle. Drawing on 29 months of ethnographic fieldwork and 287 interviews, I probe the meaning of community within local protests and its relationship to possibilities for building democracy from below. I argue that current manifestations of community have both benefits and limits: they help protesters to build solidarity across division and infuse their struggles with moral weight, but they also encourage localization, geographic isolation, and internal conflict. With reference to both historical and contemporary South African examples, the paper offers three possible rearticulations of community that—when woven together through interscalar connections—may facilitate democracy from below: community as participatory democracy; community as a right to the city; and community as national citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current popularity of "racial capitalism" in the American academy is typically attributed to the work of Cedric Robinson. But in this paper, we demonstrate that Robinson was riding a wave that began a decade before: in the South African movement against apartheid. We trace the intellectual history of the concept through two heydays, one peaking in the 1970s and 1980s and another emerging following the 2008 financial crisis. To make sense of racial capitalism during these two heydays, we argue, one must locate the concept in relation to three dialectics. First, racial capitalism traveled back and forth between periphery and center, emerging, for example, in both the context of anti- and post-colonial/apartheid struggles in southern Africa, and against the backdrop of the Black Power and Black Lives Matter movements in the United States. A second dialectic is evident in the way the concept, while initially produced in the context of these fierce struggles, was quickly absorbed into academic discourse. And, in addition to periphery/center and activism/academia, we identify a third dialectic: between the term itself and the broader problematic in which it was (and remains) situated. Our analysis is attentive to the ways that theories acquire contextually specific meanings as they travel, providing a model for understanding the circulation across multiple political contexts of a concept as deceptively stable as racial capitalism. It also demonstrates how expansive the field of racial capitalism actually is, extending well beyond any particular historical or geographic context, institutional or social domain, and even the very term itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Michael Burawoy’s writings lay a foundation for critical sociologies of immigration, social movements, race, and postcolonial society. To realize these promises, however, it will be necessary to reconstruct Burawoy, as he has done with the theories of so many others. In this piece, I trace my own engagements with Burawoy in three areas: migrant labor, the politics of economic precarity, and postcolonial and racial transformations. For each area, I show how Burawoy laid a foundation for subsequent analysis, which I sought to take forward in my own work. These reconstructions reveal just how valuable Burawoy’s theories are to the advancement of critical sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For more than a decade, widespread protests have erupted within South Africa's impoverished black townships and informal settlements. The mobilizations resembled what Sidney Tarrow refers to as a 'cycle of contention' or 'protest cycle,' as they represented a diffusion of heightened conflict across society. In contrast to Tarrow's protest cycle, however, resistance failed to converge around 'objective coalitions' and a generalized challenge, and it persisted rather than reaching exhaustion. Drawing on a case study of protest and organizing in Bekkersdal, this article argues that the fragmentation and localization of resistance reinforced this peculiar combination. Bekkersdal activists responded to democratization by seeking administrative fixes to local government. Political parties also pulled activists in different directions, yet without facilitating bridges to activism in other areas. While providing a highly visible example for activists in other areas to replicate, the Bekkersdal resistance thus failed to produce broader concessions that might have discouraged protests elsewhere. The case study shows how local containment of political incorporation processes may enable the persistence of protest cycles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]