Rethinking the rural: Households and internal migration in contemporary South Africa

Harold Wolpe's 1972 article analysing cheap labour in South Africa remains one of the most widely read pieces on the political economy of the country.

Despite this continued attention, much of the substance of his work, and in particular the 'cheap labour thesis', is often considered something of an historical relic rather than a theory that can help us understand contemporary South Africa.

Since Wolpe wrote, a significant new field of labour studies has emerged in the country, which has taken up the issues of power relations in the workplace which Wolpe’s work aimed to explain.

Yet the connections between precarious work in urban areas and precarious livelihoods in rural areas, which were central for Wolpe, have largely been neglected.

During thispresentation, we will focus through a Wolpean lens on how urban rural connections have been retained, and also how they have been transformed through the changing nature of capitalism and the state. In the first section of this presentation, the four major changes (globalisation, financialisation, informalization, and democratization) that have taken place in the 40-plus years since Wolpe wrote his classic work will be examined.

The presentation will also draw on 105 interviews conducted in late 2015 and early 2016 with multiple members of households in the rural villages of the Intsika Yethu Local Municipality (IYLM) of the Chris Hani District Municipality (CHDM) of the Eastern Cape Province.

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