Michelle Williams - Challenging Inequality in South Africa: Transitional Compasses

In Challenging Inequality in South Africa: Transitional Compasses leading scholars of South Africa explore creative possibilities to challenge structures of economic, social, and political power that produce inequality. Through concrete empirical examples of movements, workers struggles, initiatives, and politics in challenging inequality, the authors illustrate transitional compasses that go beyond protest politics to a generative politics, a politics of building the alternatives in the interstitial spaces of capitalism. The conceptual framing is oriented around the way in which power is produced and reproduced through intricate relationships between hegemonic projects and everyday life. While power underpins all social relations, it is often taken for granted, as it is frequently hidden behind other social relations. Resistance to power emerges through engendering counter-hegemonic projects that are intertwined with alternative everyday practices. The authors highlight sources of alternative forms of power found in resistance to dominant forms of power through concrete experiences to create transformative alternatives. To concretize the conceptual framing, the authors look at the emancipatory possibilities of a universal basic income, the use of law in tackling inequality in health and education, creative initiatives to establish a people-centred food system through food sovereignty, new forms of organizing led by precarious workers, democratic possibilities in local state delivery, and attempts at reconceptualizing the good life by looking at issues of happiness and ecosocialism.

This project received funding from the Emancipatory Futures Studies in the Anthropocene project and the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies, both at Wits University.

The chapters in this book were originally published in the journal Globalizations.

Michelle Williams is Professor of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. Her recent publications include Building Alternatives: The Story of Indias Oldest Worker Owner Cooperative, 2017 (co-authored with Thomas Isaac); The End of the Developmental State?, 2014; and Marxisms in the 21st Century: Crisis, Critique and Struggle, 2013 (ed. with Vishwas Satgar).

Vishwas Satgar is Associate Professor of International Relations, editor of the Democratic Marxism series, and the principal investigator for the Emancipatory Futures Studies in the Anthropocene project at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. He has published widely on South African politics, global political economy, and the ecological issues. He chairs the board of the Cooperative and Policy Alternative Centre and is a co-founder of the South African Food Sovereignty Campaign and the Climate Justice Charter process.

Rethinking Globalizations

Edited by Barry K. Gills, University of Helsinki, Finland and Kevin Gray, University of Sussex, UK

This series is designed to break new ground in the literature on globalization and its academic and popular understanding. Rather than perpetuating or simply reacting to the economic understanding of globalization, this series seeks to capture the term and broaden its meaning to encompass a wide range of issues and disciplines and convey a sense of alternative possibilities for the future.

The Politics of Destination in the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals
Leaving No-one Behind?
Edited by Clive Gabay and Suzan Ilcan

Migration, Civil Society and Global Governance
Edited by Carl-Ulrik Schierup, Branka Likic-Brboric, Ral Delgado Wise and Glay Toksz
Philosophies, Practices, Contestations
Edited by Ian Bruff and Cemal Burak Tansel

Authoritarian Neoliberalism
State Authority, New Risks and Dynamics
Stuart P. M. Mackintosh

Challenging Inequality in South Africa
Transitional Compasses
Edited by Michelle Williams and Vishwas Satgar

Between Class and Discourse
Left Intellectuals in Defence of Capitalism
Boris Kagarlitsky

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/Rethinking-Globalizations/book-series/RG