In desperation individuals and businesspeople have resorted to paying people to fix the roads in Inxuba Yethemba municipality. (Jaco Marais/ Media24)
The social fabric of communities in South Africa, especially those in which the majority of the broad working class reside, is rapidly fraying. The country is experiencing social, economic, ecological and political crises, which are driven by the continued legacy of apartheid, neoliberalism and growing austerity.
With the credo of individualism and celebration of greed and selfishness dominant, values such as communalism and solidarity are eroding and opportunistic politicians are using this situation to gain people’s loyalty by giving them a false sense of belonging. Most political parties are selling — with varying degrees of intensity — ideological snake oil based on a combination of hate, xenophobia, racism, tribalism, ecocide, authoritarian populism and big man messiah politics.
At the base of these combined crises, is the reality that, economically, South Africa continues to be the most unequal country in the world. According to the latest figures from the World Bank (a generally horrible institution but one which produces good statistics), while the wealthiest 20% control 70% of the country’s resources, 62% of the population lives in poverty.
Further, the most accurate information at hand reveals that the poorest 40% of the population spend almost half of their income on food and non-alcoholic beverages and cannot afford even the most basic basket of foodstuffs. This means that we are in a situation where up to 50% of all South Africans are either presently experiencing hunger or are at risk of going hungry.
There is no greater confirmation of a country in crisis than the majority of its inhabitants not having enough to eat.
Accentuating this situation is the reality that, since the Covid pandemic, the economy has stagnated, while inflation, especially for the working class, has remained high. While headline inflation stood at just under 5.5% in 2024, food inflation has skyrocketed in the past year. A classic example is the price of the staple food of most poor and working people — white maize — which increased by 41% from June 2023 to June 2024.
Not only does the working class carry the biggest burden of inflation but also of increased austerity, especially regarding state services such as healthcare, education and housing. For instance, the real spend per healthcare user by the state was cut by R173 from 2023-24 to 2024-25. Likewise, the state’s real spend on basic education decreased by R175 per learner between 2023-24 and 2024/5.
Meanwhile, the housing shortage has grown to almost 2.5 million units. Not only do millions of people live in informal settlements but also in shacks in the backyards of formal dwellings — something which official statistics tend to gloss over. As services such as education and healthcare decline, the burden of filling the gaps evermore falls on working-class women and black working-class women in particular.
Under- and unemployment too remain structural issues with little sign of being resolved. With the expanded definition of unemployment standing at 42% and unemployment, among the 15 to 24-year-old youth reaching almost 60%, there is a real possibility that many people will never have a job in their life. This not only exacerbates material deprivation but also amplifies mental issues as a result of feelings of worthlessness and loss of hope.
But it is not only a matter of unemployment. The majority of those who do have formal work have become highly casualised. Besides the ever-expanding public sector reliance on the outsourcing of casualised labour, corporations have retrenched hundreds of thousands of workers, introduced myriad forms of casual work and actively sought to destroy workers’ ability to organise.
With the rise of gig and app work — including food delivery — this is being intensified. A sense of permanent insecurity now pervades the workforce, with the days of permanent nine-to-five jobs becoming a distant memory, increasingly relegated to stories told by parents.
State and democracy
A key part of the neoliberalism that has framed South Africa’s political economy for the past 30 years was, and is, that the state itself has become a site of accumulation for politicians and their allies through tendering and outsourcing, along with the corruption this has engendered.
In fact, the national government alone will spend R320 billion buying services and goods from private companies in 2024. Along with provincial and local governments, the state will expend more than R 1 trillion in procuring goods and services through outsourcing and tendering this year alone.
This has allowed politicians and state bureaucrats to create vast, corrupt patronage networks through rigging tenders and other forms of corruption for family members and cronies. The fact that the state is a source of accumulation has led to intense competition for positions in it, resulting in rising levels of political assassinations of both opponents and whistleblowers.
One of the biggest victims of this reality is the system of representative democracy, that has all but been hollowed out. Occasional elections give power to the politicians to make decisions and laws. We, the people, simply vote while they decide what happens. Even though civil society can lobby and advocate to try to influence these decisions, there is little incentive for the politicians to act unless their positions and power are under serious threat.
As the majority slides deeper into poverty and socio-economic stress, there is no way to compete with better-resourced corporations and the internal interests of the political parties in power. While some checks and balances are hanging on, politicians and their private sector elitist buddies often side-step these and have largely become a law unto themselves.
Consequently, there is distrust in the parliamentary system and other spheres of representative government. All we need to do is look at the steep decline in voter turnout during the 2024 elections. Only 16.3 million out of 42 million eligible voters voted in the elections (39%).
Possibilities and dangers
This opens up both possibilities and dangers. The fact that people live in desperate and deprived circumstances signals the real dangers of a serious fragmentation of society. Under intense pressure to simply survive, ever increasing numbers of people, especially in poor communities, are suffering from mental health issues.
Other problems such as alcohol and drug abuse, often leading to gender-based violence, with people seeking escape from the dire realities of life, have become huge dangers in communities. Linked to this, many more youths are becoming involved in gangsterism, which is one of the few routes that offers instant affirmation and wealth.
Under such circumstances, it has become increasingly difficult to hold communities, organisations, communal projects and mutual aid initiatives together. For example, competition for positions and access to resources — in a context of growing individualism, inequality and poverty — has negatively affected trade unions and community organisations.
This is particularly the case because progressive politics, mutual aid, egalitarianism, humility and non-racialism have been ideologically vilified by those in, and with, power. The longer-term danger here is that this succeeds in killing off hope for a better life for the majority.
The rise of narrow right-wing nationalism based on hate, ethnicity, tribalism, machismo and race poses incredible danger. Large sections of the white population have embraced right-wing Christian nationalism while sections of the black elite unabashedly push a narrow race-based form of right-wing ethnic nationalism. Meanwhile, the political elites who run the state have begun to pass increasingly divisive, xenophobic laws and largely turn a blind eye to the epidemic of hate crimes.
A significant minority of workers and the poor are adopting such politics, a development that poses a danger to progressive humanist politics and principles including feminism, solidarity and broader human rights. Like in many places in the world, authoritarianism, patriarchy and nationalism have been accompanied by a dirty form of politics in which facts matter very little. Character assassinations and personal smears are becoming the order of the day and are increasingly framing public discourse.
Despite all of these dangers, there is also the possibility that people will turn towards building socio-political and organisational structures that are participatory and directly democratic and that enable people to be involved in making decisions and to carry out projects which improve their lives. Among sections of the working class, albeit small, creative thought, experimentation and resistance is alive and well, driven by the desire to build a more participatory, directly democratic, healthy, ecologically sustainable and communal society.
In doing so, increasing numbers of people have begun to come to the conclusion that they cannot, and should not, solely rely on the state to deliver services and address both basic and longer-term needs. As such, some are beginning to build or re-build independent structures and organisations that can collectively improve their material, spiritual and mental-emotional conditions, while not letting the state off the hook.
It is here, in under-resourced but self-organised campaigns and struggles, that hope for the future lies. If people are, over time, to turn the tide and create a new, better South Africa and world, it will come from the varied struggles for, and of, self-organisation, unification, education/awareness-raising, direct action/mobilisations, solidarity/care and experimentation with greater forms of direct and participatory democracy.
Dale McKinley and Shawn Hattingh are long-time activists as well as researcher-educators at the International Labour, Research & Information Group, www.ilrigsa.org.za.