In researching workers, livelihoods and rural-urban linkages the thesis articulates a lineage of analysis and debate of South Africa‘s economic, political and social crisis in Marxist transition and post-transition scholarship. While Wolpe (1972, 1980) does not necessarily use crisis terminology, his argument on ‗articulation of modes of production‘, in which he analyses the history and formations in the capitalist system of accumulation in South Africa is central in outlining a history of political economy debates in South Africa. He saw apartheid as a significant social formation, resulting from concrete struggles as well as a political mechanism to manage the increasing crisis of bifurcated social reproduction in the countryside. The promulgation of apartheid in 1948 is an important, but not determining factor in the shaping of capitalist super-exploitation from the 1950s leading to the golden decade of capitalist boom in South Africa.
The initial discussions on the crisis of reproduction, drawing from Gramsci were made by Saul and Gelb (1981), which Gelb (1991) developed further into an edited book project titled, ‗South Africa‘s Economic Crisis‘. In this analysis, apartheid capitalism faced an organic crisis, constituted by a coalescence of economic crisis, political and social crisis, resulting in a retreat into co-optation and reform by capital and the apartheid state. Yet, they argue that reforms in the 1980s did not ameliorate the crisis because they were too limited to cover a wide range of mass demands based on the total abolition of apartheid and the racially organised capitalist system. Furthermore, they argued that these reforms instead gave further impetus for mass mobilisation and space for joint formations and linkages of community struggles with workplace struggles in the late 1980s and early 1990s. At that time, Gelb (1991) envisaged nothing less than the total transformation of South Africa, with a fundamental redistribution of political, economic and social power to the majority of South Africans.
Lately, crisis theory has been visited by Hassim (2008), Fakier and Cock (2009) and Mosoetsa (2011), through a lens of social reproduction discourse. Bezanson and Luxton (2006) are some of the leading contributors to a feminist approach contribution to the concept of social reproduction, in which they look at the
articulation of capitalist accumulation and patriarchy. In this analysis, social reproduction theory shows how the production of goods and services and the production of life are part of one integrated process. If the formal economy is the production site for goods and services, the people who produce such things are themselves produced outside the ambit of the formal economy at very little cost to capital. Labour power is reproduced by three interconnected processes. First, by activities that regenerates the worker outside the production process and allows her to return to it. These include, among a host of others, food, a bed to sleep in, but also care in psychical ways that keep a person whole. Second, by activities that maintains and regenerate non-workers outside the production process, i.e.
those who are future or past workers, such as children, adults out of the workforce for whatever reason, be it old age, disability or unemployment. Lastly, labour power is produced by reproducing new workers, i.e. through child-birth and child- rearing.
They argue that these activities, which form the very basis of capitalism (in that they reproduce the worker) are done completely free of charge for the system by women and men within the household and the community (Folbre 1994, Bakker and Gill 2003). They argue that the significant insight of social reproduction theory is that capitalism is a unitary system that can successfully, if unevenly integrate the sphere of production and the sphere of reproduction. Changes in one sphere thus create ripples in another. For example, low wages and neoliberal cost- cutting at work and in society can produce foreclosures in the workplace and simultaneous domestic violence at home.
Mosoetsa (2011) uses this analysis to investigate household and community responses and reactions to neoliberalism and faltering of local government in Mpumalanga and eNhlalakahle townships, in Kwa-Zulu Natal. Similar to earlier works and arguments by Hassim (2005) and Fakier and Cock (2009) she argues that the lives of men and women in the two communities illustrate contradictions inherent in South Africa‘s transition, which she argues are characterised by a crisis of reproduction of social relations, society and capital. This crisis emanates from a neoliberal transition, resulting in loss of secure employment (and total loss of employment in these two townships) and the simultaneous commodification of
everyday life at the sphere of local government. Although there is an expansion in the delivery of social grants, poverty undermines the survival and livelihoods of households. The crisis plays out in simultaneous solidarity and conflict as well as harmony and violence, as households and communities become sites of both stability and conflict, and where sharing and solidarity is increasingly eroded by adverse social and economic conditions. She found that poverty undermines the collective nature of households and households are increasingly becoming sites of struggle for control of meagre social grant resources and elderly women are both the heroines and the main victims of this treacherous crisis.
Hart (2013) revisits the crisis discussion, using Gramsci, Fanon and Lefebvre in re-thinking fault lines in South Africa‘s post-apartheid transition. Hart‘s argument goes beyond the limits of the crisis of reproduction thesis, but looks at systemic crisis, using Gramsci (1971), in what he identified as an organic crisis in the system. Hart looks at the crisis of neoliberalism and its playing out in post- apartheid South Africa, looking at what she calls movement beyond movement, which is an extension of Polanyi‘s double movement, by looking at responses to crisis as not limited only to movements from below. She looks at how the post- apartheid project of de-nationalisation and re-nationalisation play out in attempting to re-create a South African identity. She also looks specifically at key events that play out as focal points of the crisis of post-apartheid South Africa, starting with the Bredell occupation and violent police response to quell protests, the xenophobic rupture of 2008 and the Marikana Massacre as three nodal points of crisis. This analysis is significant because it looks at the systemic crisis emanating from conservative neoliberal policies of government, wholesale effects of this conservative policy shift was commodification of service functions, especially at the municipal government level, dashing hopes of the material improvement of many black South Africans. Pressures on communities increasingly feeling the squeeze of neoliberalism resulted in various expressions of oppositional political, social movements and the growth of civil society formations. It also resulted in re-articulations of nationality – the national question, culminating in the xenophobic ruptures of 2008. It also resulted in various expressions of community responses. Political turmoil and protests have become an increasingly common feature in the second decade of democracy.
There have also been tumultuous industrial relations, characterized by lengthy and violent industrial action across all sectors of the economy. There has also been a growing violent crackdown by the police on the right to protest broadly, with graphic scenes like Bredell, Fiksburg, Delmas and the recent Marikana.