South Africa’s political crisis: Unfinished liberation and fractured class struggle
本书批判了左翼学界对南非劳工运动的乐观看法，指出工会运动面临与执政党类似的分裂和庇护主义，挑战了‘社会运动工会主义’和‘民族主义衰退论’两种分析框架。
This book is a timely challenge to the wishful thinking which often pervades left scholarship on South Africa. Beresford, who has made a significant contribution to the study of South African labour, challenges two related strains of analysis. First, international labour scholarship which sees the South African movement as an exemplar of ‘social movement unionism’, whose presumed militancy, commitment to social change beyond the workplace and democratic organisation is proposed as a model for unions everywhere. Second, the ‘exhausted nationalism’ thesis which holds that the multi-class nationalism of the governing African National Congress is losing its appeal to black workers who have traditionally offered the ANC unwavering support, opening the way for a radical, class-based, challenge to poverty and inequality. Using his ethnographic work on energy workers organised by the National Union of Mineworkers as well as secondary sources, Beresford offers a convincing critique of both. On the first score, he shows that the labour movement is beset by much the same factionalism and patronage which threatens the ANC. While the split in the ANC’s trade union ally Cosatu, which expelled the National Union of Metalworkers (Numsa) after it withdrew its support from the ANC, has triggered much excitement among left scholars, ‘self-destructive’ factionalism is as much a reality as an attempt by sections of the labour movement to recover its radical past (p.73). South Africa’s ‘much revered’ unions are at a crossroads, he argues—they will either embrace ‘radical measures’ to reinvigorate organisation or face the prospect of gradually withering away (p.115).