Karl von Holdt

Bio: Karl von Holdt is an academic researcher from University of the Witwatersrand. The author has contributed to research in topics: Subaltern & Habitus. The author has an hindex of 10, co-authored 15 publications receiving 606 citations.

Social Movement Unionism: the Case of South Africa

Abstract: In the context of renewed international debates about the significance of social movement unionism, this article undertakes a detailed analysis of social movement unionism in a South African steelw...

South Africa: the transition to violent democracy

Abstract: South Africa is torn between the persistence of an exclusionary socioeconomic structure marked by deep poverty and extreme inequality on the one hand, and on the other the symbolic and institutional rupture presented by the transition to democracy. This relationship produces a highly unstable social order in which intra-elite conflict and violence are growing, characterised by new forms of violence and the reproduction of older patterns of violence, a social order that can be characterised as violent democracy. I analyse three different forms of such violence – the struggle for control of the state institutions of coercion, assassination, and the mobilisation of collective violence. The prevailing forms of politics may shift quite easily between authoritarianism, clientelism and populism, and indeed exhibit elements of all three at the same time. Violent practices accompany each of these political forms, as violence remains a critical resource in a struggle for ascendancy which democratic institutions are...

Nationalism, Bureaucracy and the Developmental State: The South African Case

Abstract: This article undertakes a concrete analysis of the workings of the post-apartheid South African state bureaucracy, within the state hospitals and provincial health departments, in an effort to understand the reasons for its poor functioning. The research points to a contradictory set of rationales shaping the workings of the bureaucracy, which may be ascribed to the tensions identified within the nationalist project by Partha Chatterjee. The article discusses six key features of the post-apartheid bureaucracy: class formation, ambivalence towards skill, the importance of ‘face’, hierarchy, ambivalence towards authority, and budgetary rituals. It argues that these constitute a set of informal rationales shaped by the imperative to undo racism and white domination in the state and in the society more broadly, and that they tend to work against and erode the Weberian rationales for a meritocratic and effective state bureaucracy. There is a tension at the heart of the nationalist project, between the...

Conversations with Bourdieu: The Johannesburg Moment

Abstract: Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) is the most influential sociologist of our time. His works take in education, culture, sport, literature, painting, class, philosophy, religion, law, media, intellectuals, methodology, photography, universities, colonialism, kinship, schooling and politics. Not much remains outside Bourdieu’s sociological eye. His works are widely read across disciplines and he was one of the most prominent public intellectuals in France. Conversations with Bourdieu presents the first comprehensive attempt at a critical engagement with Bourdieu’s theory as a totality. Michael Burawoy constructs a series of imaginary conversations between Bourdieu and his nemesis – Marxism – from which he silently borrowed so much. Starting with Marx, and proceeding through Gramsci, Fanon, Freire, de Beauvoir, and Mills, Burawoy takes up the challenge Bourdieu presents to Marxism, simultaneously developing a critique of Bourdieu and a reconstruction of Marxism. Karl Von Holdt, in turn, brings these conversations to South Africa, showing the relevance of Bourdieu’s ideas to a country he never visited. Armed with Bourdieu, Von Holdt takes up some of the most pressing social and political issues of contemporary South Africa: the relation between symbolic and real violence, the place of intellectuals in public life, the intervention of gender in politics, the grappling with race, the critique of education, the importance of habitus, the history and future of class mobilisation, and the legacy of the liberation struggle. Conversations with Bourdieu pioneers a distinctive approach to doing social theory that is neither a combat sport nor an artificial synthesis, but a way of pushing theory to its limits through dialogue – dialogue between theorists and dialogue between theory and the world it represents. The book is distinctive too in pointing towards a new global sociology consciously rooted in a dialogue between the social realities and theoretical perspectives of North and South. The conversations were first presented as Mellon Lectures at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg in 2010

The violence of order, orders of violence: Between Fanon and Bourdieu:

Abstract: This article uses the high levels of collective violence associated with contentious politics in South Africa as a prism through which to explore the confrontation between a sociology of the West, ...

Against the Law: Labor Protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt

Abstract: Ching Kwan Lee, (2007), x + 325 (University of California Press, Berkeley, $55.00, paperback $21.95). This book is a solid study of laboUr politics in contemporary China. Largely based on years of ...

Worker Centers: Organizing Communities at the Edge of the Dream

Abstract: Low-wage workers in the United States face obstacles including racial and ethnic discrimination, a pervasive lack of wage enforcement, misclassification of their employment, and for some, their status as undocumented immigrants. In the past, political parties, unions, and fraternal and mutual-aid societies served as important vehicles for workers who hoped to achieve political and economic integration. As these traditional civic institutions have weakened, low-wage workers must seek new structures for mutual support. Worker centers are among the institutions to which workers turn as they strive to build vibrant communities and attain economic and political visibility. Community-based worker centers help low-wage workers gain access to social services; advocate for their own civil and human rights; and organize to improve wages, working conditions, neighborhoods, and public schools.In this pathbreaking book, Janice Fine identifies 137 worker centers in more than eighty cities, suburbs, and rural areas in thirty-one states. These centers, which attract workers in industries that are difficult to organize, have emerged as especially useful components of any program intended to assist immigrants and low-wage workers of color. Worker centers serve not only as organizing laboratories but also as places where immigrants and other low-wage workers can participate in civil society, tell their stories to the larger community, resist racism and anti-immigrant sentiment, and work to improve their political and economic standing.

Learning from the Ground Up : Global Perspectives on Social Movements and Knowledge Production

Abstract: The dynamics, politics, and richness of knowledge production within social movements and activist contexts are often overlooked in scholarly literature, and sometimes even in the movements themselves. Given the academic emphasis on whether an action, campaign, or movement can be judged a “success,” the intellectual work that takes place in movements frequently goes unseen, as do the politics, processes, sites, and locations of knowledge production and learning in activist settings. Even social movement scholarship that draws upon or is embedded in movement actor perspectives has an expressed interest in “taking the measure of the new movements” (see Tom Mertes, 2004, p. xi, a collection of interviews with activists, originally published in New Left Review). The contributors to this collection, however, suggest that many powerful critiques and understandings of dominant ideologies and power structures, visions of social change, and the politics of domination and resistance in general emerge from these spaces and subsequently emphasize the significance of the knowledge-production dimensions of movement activism. Learning from the Ground Up also challenges ways in which grassroots and movement voices are often overwritten or otherwise marginalized in the context of purportedly “alternative” civil society networks and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). The interdisciplinary approaches adopted by the authors in this volume are as rich as the varied movements, processes, and dynamics of knowledge production that these chapters explore and elucidate.