The Working Class Isn’t Just Factory Workers: Rethinking Class Struggle in Africa

What is it about?

When people picture the working class, they often imagine factory workers: people with regular jobs, a single employer, and perhaps a trade union representing them. But that picture does not fit much of Africa today. Across the continent, millions of working people make a living as street vendors, market traders, casual laborers, small-scale producers, domestic workers, unemployed or underemployed people, and others who work without stable jobs or traditional employment relationships. Much of this work is called “informal” or “irregular.” This article asks a simple but important question: What if we have been looking at Africa’s working class the wrong way? The argument is that these workers should not be treated as somehow outside the working class simply because they do not work in factories or receive regular wages. They are still deeply dependent on the economy and on selling their labor, goods, or services to survive. In fact, they make up a huge part of the working population in contemporary Africa. The article challenges what it calls “factory-workerism”: the idea that factory workers, especially workers in large, organized industries, are the most important part of the working class and therefore the group with the greatest potential to challenge capitalism. The article argues that this way of thinking does not make sense in much of Africa, where urbanization has occurred without the large-scale industrialization that took place in Europe and North America. Waiting for Africa to develop a massive industrial workforce before thinking about working-class politics therefore means overlooking the workers who already exist. The article draws on Marx's writings, particularly his discussion of the 1844 uprising of textile workers in Silesia, to argue that Marx's understanding of the working class was broader than the factory-centered definition sometimes associated with Marxism today. It then develops four arguments about why Africa's informal and irregular workers have significant political power. These workers can directly confront governments and political systems, may have fewer economic privileges to lose, are often less divided by professional and class distinctions within the working class, and occupy an important position in the economies of their countries and the global economy. The article concludes that these workers should be taken seriously not simply as “the poor,” but as workers and as a potentially powerful force for social and political change.

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Photo by Sikwe Scarter on Unsplash

Photo by Sikwe Scarter on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This argument matters because it changes how we think about both who the working class is and where working-class political power can come from. If we assume that the working class is primarily made up of people with stable industrial jobs, then much of Africa's population can appear to be outside the traditional story of class struggle. Informal workers can instead be described simply as “the poor,” “the unemployed,” or even as people who have somehow failed to enter the modern economy. The article argues that this gets the situation backwards. Africa's informal workers are not outside capitalism. They are a central part of how African economies function. Street vendors provide inexpensive goods and services. Small-scale and irregular workers produce commodities and services that other workers depend on. Informal workers also perform enormous amounts of work that allows households and communities to survive. This means that the people who appear to have the least economic security may actually possess considerable collective power. The article points to several recent examples of mass political movements in which informal or irregular workers played important roles, including the uprisings that helped launch the Arab Spring, protests by market women in Liberia, and movements involving unemployed young people in Burkina Faso. These examples suggest that workers do not need to be organized in factories or traditional unions before they can become a powerful political force. This also raises an uncomfortable question for socialist movements themselves. If most workers are informal, unemployed, or working outside traditional workplaces, then organizations built primarily around factory workers and conventional trade unions may be organizing only a relatively small portion of the working class. The article therefore calls for a broader understanding of working-class politics. Socialists need to organize with the workers who actually exist, rather than expecting African societies to first become more like industrialized Europe or North America. The broader lesson is that capitalism does not produce the same kind of working class everywhere. Class struggle has to be understood in relation to the particular economic conditions people actually live under. For Africa, that means taking informal and irregular workers seriously—not as a temporary population waiting for “real” jobs, but as a central part of the working class and a potentially decisive force in struggles over the future of society.