South Africa at the End of Neoliberalism? “Gangster Capitalism”, Rentier Accumulation, and the Transformation of Labour Politics after the Failure of Industrial‐Export Development
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Situated in the manufacturing and construction industries of Durban, South Africa, this paper presents an ethnographic investigation into non‐unionised labour activism emergent from so‐called “organised crime” linked to the patronage politics of the African National Congress. In doing so, this paper traces a twin process of post‐colonial class formation: of a new elite class developing through recourse to patronage systems, and of a new class of precarious workers emerging through new forms of non‐union labour activism. Following this process of class formation, I argue, provides an analytic lens for critiquing recent debates on “rentier capitalism” and “political capitalism”, as concepts used to describe contemporary political and economic decay amid chronic low growth. Contributing to this debate, I show how organised labour shapes the articulation of “gangster capitalism” in South Africa, and I suggest that critical theories of “rent” are problematically beholden to a politics of growth.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".