Notes from Marikana, South Africa: The Platinum Miners’ Strike, the Massacre, and the Struggle for Equivalence

This note reflects on the August 2012 miners' strike at Marikana, South Africa in light of a century long history of violence associated with worker actions in that country and elsewhere in the Global South. It suggests that the breakaway union's allegedly ‘illegal’ strike fits within a long tradition of radical worker activism in South Africa, which is best understood in light of anticolonial efforts to short-circuit the chronologies of imperial power. The Marikana strike, like anticolonial rebellions during the early twentieth century and, critically, white worker struggles following First World War, was an effort to speed up the process by which the value of workers’ lives and labor might be made equivalent to those in power.