Reproducing racial capitalism through retailing in South Africa: gender, labour and consumption, 1950s-1970s

Using Stuart Hall's concept of articulation and the concrete with Bridget O'Laughlin's reminder of a focus on the struggles of living labour, this paper theorizes racial capitalism in South Africa from the concrete relations of retail labour in Johannesburg. The paper examines ways in which white working class women constituted retailing, struggling for their own claims in relation to gendered family and workplace orders, which in turn conditioned how black women organized when they entered front-line service jobs in the late 1960s, which then disrupted this order to explain a very different class politics and to constitute anew these meaningful spaces. These processes happened through multiple mediations. Retail capital not only contributed to economic expansion; labour relations in shops constituted specific affective spaces as meaningful terrains of collective belonging, projecting ideologies and explaining differentiated subjects in struggle.

Automated summary

This paper theorizes racial capitalism in South Africa by examining concrete relations of retail labour in Johannesburg, using Stuart Hall's concept of articulation and Bridget O'Laughlin's focus on the struggles of living labour. It investigates the ways in which white working class women constituted retailing and how their struggles influenced the organization of black women in front-line service jobs.