Trashing Solidarity: The Production of Power and the Challenges to Organizing Informal Reclaimers

This article presents a nuanced social history of how reclaimers at the Marie Louise landfill in Soweto, South Africa, organized against each other on the basis of nationality instead of uniting to combat the effects of the 2008 global economic crisis. Through this narrative of struggles at one particular dump, the article contributes to debates on informal worker organizing by theorizing the importance of the production of identities, power relations, space, and institutions in understanding how and why informal workers create and maintain power-laden divisions between themselves. The article argues that organizing efforts that seek to overcome divisions between informal workers cannot simply exhort them to unite based on abstract principles, but must actively transform the places and institutions forged by these workers through which they create and crystallize divisive identities and power relations.