Introduction
The historical and social links between South Africa and Brazil have traditionally been analyzed through the lens of race relations and state-based forms of production of inequality. While such approaches are fundamental, they have become somewhat routine, obscuring other structural dimensions of the historical experiences of both countries. In this article, we propose shifting the analytical focus from racial macrostructures to a perspective centered on the working class, taking into account the industrial dynamics that emerged powerfully in both contexts during the twentieth century.
The Durban strikes, which began in January 1973 in South Africa, and the Brazilian labor mobilizations — in particular the ABC Paulista strikes (1978–1980) — provide a privileged vantage for understanding how racialized workers, subject to authoritarian regimes, organized themselves, developed forms of leadership, and challenged prevailing systems of domination.
Adopting this approach does not imply denying that both apartheid and the Brazilian military dictatorship functioned as regimes structured by racial hierarchies, albeit in different ways. The strikes were, therefore, shaped by conflicts related to citizenship, cultural recognition, and social expectations, all of which were directly rooted in histories of racism and state violence on both sides of the Atlantic.
The histories of both South Africa and Brazil are marked by the violence and subjugation of African, Afro-descendant, and Indigenous populations. It is therefore essential to analyze strike movements in both countries as spaces of political reconstruction. Comparative writing must take into account the strategies of visibility and silence embedded in sources related to labor movements, as conceptualized by Trouillot (1995).
Van der Linden (2009) emphasizes that labor history cannot be understood solely within a national or local framework. A global labor history makes it possible to situate strikes and social mobilizations within broader dynamics, highlighting forms of resistance, organization, and solidarity among South African and Brazilian working classes. Y. L. dos Santos (2022), for her part, argues that the history of racism in Brazil should be understood beyond the sole framework of systemic violence inherited from slavery and the post-abolition period. The case of South Africa presents significant parallels. Numerous political and social practices have extended debates on racism into other spheres of social life, including urban dynamics, interracial relations, Indigenous rights, and gender relations. From this perspective, contexts of strikes and urban mobilizations emerge as spaces for the production of shared meanings that enable us to understand not only racism but also the persistent social and cultural inequalities present in both countries.
Although advances in labor history have been considerable, comparisons between strikes and social mobilizations have generally developed through studies that relate events occurring in a country of the Global North to those in a country of the Global South (Van der Linden, 2010). A similar tendency can be observed in research on racism and anti-racist struggles during the same period. This article, therefore, proposes a direct comparison between two territories generally regarded as peripheral within the spaces and dynamics of global capitalism during the twentieth century. Although South Africa and Brazil occupied unequal positions within processes of capital accumulation during the 1970s and 1980s, neither stood outside the dynamics of global capitalism (Robinson, 2021).
From this perspective, the workers’ struggles observed in both contexts should be understood as forms of opposition to racism. They are also interpreted here as spaces of resistance to late capitalism. In this sense, anti-racist struggle also appears as a broader struggle against speculation and against the loss of economic autonomy among nation-states of the Global South. Moreover, while the history of racism is often written from the perspective of the racists themselves, that is, those who built and legitimized systems of social and cultural inequality between Black and White populations (Coetzee, 1991), this article seeks to move beyond a reading of racial dynamics limited to their most explicit manifestations. The comparison is therefore based on the hypothesis that studying the presence of Black workers within the labor world also provides a privileged avenue for understanding struggles against capitalism and authoritarianism during the period under consideration.
Most comparative studies on strikes and social mobilizations tend to proceed from one hegemonic center of analysis in order to illuminate another (Van der Linden, 2010). In other words, workers’ struggles are frequently interpreted through European and/or American reference frameworks before being compared with experiences from the Global South. In order to avoid artificially producing hierarchies between the two sides of the Atlantic through comparative analysis (Bloch, 1928, pp. 15–50), I have chosen to present separately the similarities and the differences observed between South Africa and Brazil.
This separation between the contexts of the Durban strikes (1973) and the ABC Paulista strikes (1978–1980) is informed by the perspective developed by Jacques Revel (1996), according to which social reality changes when the scale of observation is altered. Each context produces a specific social reality, shaped by its everyday interactions, the trajectories of particular groups, and its own labor relations. Revel’s microanalytical approach reminds us that phenomena conceived at a global scale may receive profoundly different interpretations when the focus shifts from Durban to ABC Paulista, or vice versa.
Changes in scale thus provide more complex representations of social reality. Distinguishing between contexts allows us to grasp the particular ways in which the social world is constructed at each level of analysis. The Brazilian labor movement did not derive from the South African labor movement, nor vice versa. Rather, they were distinct social formations that must be studied separately before any comparative relationship is established. Microhistory rejects abstract models and mechanistic linear determinisms, favoring an understanding of the macroscopic through the microscopic. From this perspective, the development of the state, capital, racism, anti-racism, and trade unionism is examined through individual interactions and the trajectories of specific groups. This approach helps ensure that subsequent comparison does not reproduce Eurocentric hierarchies or relations of dependency between the contexts under study.
This article, therefore, aims to reposition Brazil and South Africa within a comparative framework designed to examine the distinct ways in which late industrial capitalism, in authoritarian contexts of the Global South, articulated class exploitation and racial hierarchy. It also advances the argument that labor history can only truly become a global field if it incorporates, on a non-subordinate basis, the experiences of Black and African workers. Finally, the experiences of Durban and ABC Paulista provide an opportunity to reconsider certain canonical issues and concepts in labor history and sociology, while opening the way for analyses that do not separate workers’ struggles in the Global South from the broader historical dynamics in which they are embedded.
Late Capitalism, Authoritarianism, and Race
From the late 1960s onward, Brazil and South Africa underwent profound transformations in their modes of capitalist accumulation as well as in the social expectations associated with industrial labor. In both cases, the rapid growth of the industrial sector generated an increasing demand for the workforce, composed predominantly of Black workers and members of the popular classes. Cities thus became centers of migration, but also spaces of social tension, concentrating the contradictions inherent in late capitalism.
In this context, racial structures — explicit in the case of South African apartheid and implicit in that of Brazil’s military-industrial dictatorship — conditioned access to employment, income, and social mobility. At the same time, the authoritarian states of both countries sought to discipline and control the urban workforce, which was perceived as a potential source of political opposition. During the twentieth century, the transition from agricultural to industrial labor in South Africa formed part of a long history of forced displacement and the marginalization of African populations. These processes profoundly transformed the capitalist relations established within the country. This transition was structured both by the rise of mining and industrial capitalism and by the consolidation of the racial segregation regime.
From the beginning of the century, the exodus of African workers from rural areas to major urban centers — Johannesburg, Pretoria, and Durban — was encouraged by the deliberate erosion of the African peasant economy, particularly following the promulgation of the Natives Land Act of 1913, which drastically restricted African access to productive landownership. Deprived of their means of subsistence and their identity as agricultural producers, these workers were incorporated — voluntarily or under coercion — into an industrial labor market characterized by underemployment and low wages, especially in sectors linked to the mining complex, such as metallurgy, chemicals, and textiles.
The South African state employed a range of coercive policies to channel African workers into wage labor in industry: increased tax burdens, strict control of mobility (particularly through the Pass Laws and the Colour Bar Act), and the transformation of African reserves into areas of agricultural underproduction, making economic self-sufficiency virtually impossible (M. P. A. dos Santos, 2024). At the same time, White employers and public authorities consolidated a racially stratified labor market in which Africans were confined to low-skilled and poorly paid positions, while White workers occupied protected and privileged roles (Bundy, 1988).
Between the 1940s and the 1970s, rapid urbanization and industrial development contributed to the expansion of the African proletariat, which began to develop new forms of political and trade union organization both inside and outside the factories. This process directly influenced the formation of national labor movements such as the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), founded in the 1980s (Worden, 2012). The transition from agricultural to industrial labor in South Africa was therefore not only an economic shift but also a structural transformation mediated by racial capitalism, redefining relations of class, race, and urban space within the context of apartheid.
In the case of Brazil, the transition from agricultural to industrial labor also accelerated during the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. Unlike South Africa, this process was not governed by a formal regime of racial segregation. Nevertheless, it remained deeply shaped by the legacy of slavery, land concentration, and state policies aimed at economic modernization (da Costa, 1999).
Following the abolition of slavery in 1888, a large portion of the Black population remained confined to precarious forms of rural labor, such as sharecropping, tenant farming, and seasonal work. At the same time, the state and agrarian elites encouraged European immigration to supply labor for the emerging manufacturing sector and to replenish the workforce on the coffee plantations of southeastern Brazil (Ianni, 1988). Brazilian industry gradually consolidated between 1880 and 1930, particularly in the textile, clothing, and consumer-goods sectors, with a strong geographical concentration in São Paulo (Prado Júnior, 1994).
The promulgation of the Lei Áurea (Golden Law) on May 13, 1888, formally ended slavery in Brazil but introduced no policy of social, economic, or legal integration for the newly freed Black population. The silence of the state was, in itself, a political act. Significantly, in December 1890, Ruy Barbosa, then Minister of Finance of the recently proclaimed Republic, ordered the burning of slavery records. This act not only erased archival evidence but also established, as the inaugural act of the new order, the systematic denial of Brazil’s slaveholding past (L. G. Silva, 2022). This erasure found a direct counterpart to the structure of the labor market: contrary to what Fernandes (1965) argued, subsequent historical research demonstrated that by 1872 the majority of the Black and mixed-race population was already legally free, establishing themselves as artisans, merchants, and urban workers (Andrews, 1991; Monsma, 2016).
It was the massive influx of European immigrants, subsidized by the state and coffee-growing elites as a deliberate policy of demographic whitening and labor replacement, that displaced this population from jobs it already occupied. Racism, in this sense, was functional to the establishment of Brazilian capitalism (Almeida, 2019). This functionality manifested itself throughout the legislation and policing practices of the First Republic. The 1890 Penal Code criminalized capoeira with penalties ranging from two to six months’ imprisonment; Decree No. 145 of 1893 authorized the forced relocation of “vagrants, idlers, and capoeiras” to agricultural penal colonies; and Decree No. 3,475 of 1899 revoked the right to bail for defendants “without a fixed residence,” while also authorizing police incursions without judicial oversight (Chalhoub, 1996). These legal instruments did not explicitly mention race, nor did they need to, since their social targets were self-evident. Thus, Brazil’s republican punitive apparatus was structurally oriented toward controlling the movement of Black populations in urban spaces (Ribeiro, 2008).
In São Paulo, for example, between 1892 and 1916, more than 80% of arrests were made under charges of vagrancy (Kowarick, 1994). Structural racism, therefore, operated through the active presence of mechanisms of exclusion and criminalization. Yet, this presence was systematically erased from the historiographical memory of the labor movement. The tradition of studies on labor and trade unionism during the First Republic tended to frame social conflict exclusively in terms of class, rendering the racial dimension invisible and producing a history of the proletariat that was, to a large extent, the history of White immigrant workers (Domingues, 2007).
The Black press, for its part, documented these experiences in real time. Periodicals such as O Menelick (1915), O Alfinete (1918), Clarim d’Alvorada (1924), and A Voz da Raça (1933) recorded discriminations in the labor market, leisure spaces, educational institutions, and police interventions, thereby constituting a body of primary sources that conventional historiography took decades to incorporate (Alberto, 2011; Ferrara, 1981). This body of evidence ultimately reveals the structural racism established during the First Republic, defined by the manner in which institutions themselves reproduced racial inequality as a norm, generation after generation (Almeida, 2019).
Beginning in the 1930s, within the framework of national developmentalism, the state played a central role in industrialization by promoting import-substitution policies, creating strategic state-owned enterprises, and enacting more comprehensive labor legislation, particularly through the Consolidação das Leis do Trabalho (Consolidation of Labor Laws) of 1943 (A. de C. Gomes, 2005). This dynamic intensified rural-to-urban migration: poor workers, predominantly Black and mixed-race, were driven to the cities due to the crisis of the coffee economy, the delayed mechanization of the countryside, and the structural poverty of the country’s interior regions (Dean, 1969).
During this period, the idea of “racial democracy,” popularized through Freyre’s work (1933) and elevated to the status of state ideology during the New State (Estado Novo) (1937–1945) and subsequent governments, obscured the realities of Brazilian racism. As Hasenbalg (1979) demonstrated, this concept functioned as a mechanism for depoliticizing the racial issue, transforming inequality into a cultural phenomenon and racism into the supposed hypersensitivity of its victims. This depoliticization had concrete political consequences: The Brazilian Black Front (Frente Negra Brasileira), founded in 1931 and transformed into a political party in 1936, was dissolved along with all other political parties by the New State in 1937. The Black Experimental Theatre (Teatro Experimental do Negro), founded by Abdias do Nascimento in 1944, faced persistent institutional marginalization. Furthermore, the National Negro Convention (Convenção Nacional do Negro) of 1945–1946, which advocated the criminalization of racism before the 1946 Constituent Assembly, was ignored (A. do Nascimento, 2016). The employer-military coup of 1964, which ended the democratic period inaugurated in 1945, consolidated the silencing of an agenda that, even under liberal democracy, had never been fully recognized as a legitimate public issue.
Between the 1950s and the 1970s, rapid urbanization and industrialization based on sustainable goods and infrastructure expanded the urban proletariat while simultaneously deepening social, racial, and regional inequalities (Rodney, 2018). Brazil thus combined modern forms of industrial labor with archaic structures of rural exploitation (Gorender, 1990). The transition from agricultural to industrial labor, therefore, produced a profound reconfiguration of social relations, marked by a developmentalist state, enduring historical inequalities, and limited social mobility for the most marginalized segments of society.
The “Durban Moment”: A Rupture in Grand Apartheid
In its most common understanding, South African apartheid refers to the period of institutionalized segregation between 1948 and 1994. It is generally defined as a legislative system designed to organize the separation of individuals according to racial and/or ethnic criteria. What distinguishes apartheid from other forms of social racialization is precisely its explicit incorporation into a coherent and systematic legal framework.
Chronologically, apartheid corresponds to the policies officially implemented from 1948 onward, following the electoral victory of the National Party. The emphasis on the “official” character of this date stems from the fact that many segregationist measures had already been in force since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, long before the National Party formally came to power.
Following the abolition of slavery in the British Empire and its colonies in 1834, growing tensions emerged between the Boer population and the British authorities. These conflicts led to the Great Trek, during which groups of settlers moved into the interior of the territory, crossing the Drakensberg region and establishing the Orange Free State and the Transvaal Republic during the second half of the nineteenth century. These processes were accompanied by colonial violence, including the massacre and displacement of African populations such as the Basotho and the Zulu (Kriel, 2021, pp. 1198–1212).
At the same time, the British colonial system in the Cape and Natal regions instituted racist practices that laid the legal foundations for the future apartheid regime. As early as the nineteenth century, Pass Laws were introduced, requiring Africans to carry permits in order to travel, work, or exercise certain cultural and social rights. In 1892, voting rights for Black populations in the Cape Colony were restricted according to educational attainment and land ownership. Two years later, the Indian populations were stripped of its political rights in Natal. In 1905, Black voting rights were abolished throughout the South African colonies, and in 1906, Indians were likewise subjected to mandatory identification and movement documents (M. P. A. dos Santos, 2024).
In 1910, Louis Botha’s rise to power marked a new stage in the consolidation of racial segregation. His government passed laws prohibiting non-White populations from breaking labor contracts or accessing certain religious institutions. In 1913, the Natives Land Act prohibited African populations, except those in the Cape Province, from acquiring land outside designated reserves. This legislation divided land ownership along racial lines, allocating approximately 7.5% of the land to Black populations and more than 90% to White populations (R. G. A. Gomes, 2012, pp. 181–201).
A new regime of urban segregation was gradually implemented beginning in 1918, although it was not fully consolidated until the government of Jan Smuts (1939–1948). It was during this period that the term “apartheid” began to be employed as an explicit political project. The Sauer Commission, established in the late 1940s, advocated for the systematic strengthening of racial separation policies throughout the Union of South Africa (Beinart, 2001).
With the National Party’s victory in the 1948 elections, apartheid was institutionalized as a comprehensive legal and social system. For its supporters, it was a means of preventing what they described as the demographic and political “threat” posed to the White population. Historians generally distinguish between two major phases of apartheid. “Petty apartheid,” implemented from 1948 onward, was characterized by a proliferation of laws enforcing interpersonal and urban segregation. “Grand apartheid,” which took shape from the mid-1960s, deepened this logic through large-scale territorial and political segregation (Beinart, 2001).
The first forms of organized resistance to apartheid emerged with the founding of the African National Congress (ANC) in 1912. During the Defiance Campaign of 1952, the ANC deliberately encouraged Black populations to violate segregationist laws in order to overwhelm the prison system. However, having been informed by state security services, the government intentionally limited arrests, resulting in the imprisonment of several thousand individuals, though this did not reflect the true scale of the protests.
From the 1970s onward, a significant shift occurred in the relationship between domination and resistance in South Africa, particularly through what historiography has termed the “Durban Moment.” This period was characterized by a combination of intellectual and historiographical revisions within South African universities and an intensification of popular mobilization, strikes, and trade union activism (Morphet, 1990). The Durban strikes of 1973 represented the most emblematic expression of this dynamic. Workers from various industrial sectors claimed wage increases and improved working conditions. The protests, which began in January 1973 (Maree, 1987), continued through March and primarily affected the textile, metallurgical, and chemical industries of the region (Lichtenstein, 2017, pp. 215–235).
These strikes constitute one of the most significant episodes in twentieth-century South African labor history, rooted in a long process of organization and resistance among the city’s Black working class. Durban possessed a tradition of labor organization that long predated the events of 1973: African dockworkers had already gone on strike in 1874. In 1913, Indian workers on sugar plantations launched a major strike movement, demonstrating that the local working class was far from politically passive (Davie, 2007). However, the immediate background to the 1973 strike wave lay in the period between 1969–1972, marked by growing economic instability: declining international oil production, rising fuel prices, and the abandonment of the gold standard by the U.S. dollar directly affected colonial economies (Wood, 1992). In February 1971, more than 24,000 textile workers in Durban stopped work and demanded a 20% wage increase; they ultimately succeeded because employers were unable to impose disciplinary sanctions on such a large scale (Buhlungu, 2004).
The formal trigger of the 1973 strikes occurred on 9 January 1973, when African migrant workers employed by Coronation Tile and Brick marched to a local sports field, demanding wages of R20 per week (Davie, 2007). At that time, approximately 80% of jobs in South Africa’s private sector paid wages below the poverty[1] line (Wood, 1992). Between January and March 1973, 160 strikes were recorded in KwaZulu-Natal, involving 146 workplaces and approximately 61,410 workers, cutting across racial, gender, and religious divisions (Cottle, 2024). It is important to emphasize that strike action also constituted an act of mass civil disobedience. The Native Labour (Settlement of Disputes) Act of 1953 prohibited African workers from striking, under penalty of arrest, imprisonment, and, in the case of migrant workers, deportation to African reserves (Wood, 1992).
In response, the government attributed the movement to outside “agitators”; Minister of Labour Marais Viljoen accused student organizations such as the National Union of South African Students and the Black Workers’ Project, although intelligence services of the South African Police reported that they possessed no evidence of centralized organization behind the strikes (Davie, 2007). Despite repression, the strike wave achieved concrete results: of the 160 strikes that occurred up to March 1973, 118 were successful (Cottle, 2024).
Initially focused on economic claims, these strikes quickly acquired a political dimension, challenging the very foundations of the racial state. By prohibiting Black workers from fully unionizing, apartheid paradoxically helped create a space of protest in which wage claims as well as claims for civil rights became intertwined (Mamdani, 2021). The Durban strikes also reshaped the trade union landscape, encouraging the emergence of coordinating structures that would ultimately lead to the creation of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) in 1985.
Finally, these mobilizations opened internal cracks within the political architecture of apartheid, forcing the state to revise certain aspects of labor legislation. The “Durban Moment” thus inaugurated a cycle of contestation that intensified throughout the 1980s and played a decisive role in the gradual collapse of the apartheid regime (Fine & Davis, 1990).
The Strikes in the ABC Paulista Region (1978–1980)
Beginning in the 1990s, faced with declining industrial competitiveness and the relocation of productive activities to other regions of Brazil, the ABC Paulista[2] region began to experience a more pronounced expansion of the commerce and service sectors. This shift, however, cannot be separated from the earlier cycle of industrial consolidation in the Greater ABC, whose concentration of metallurgical and automobile complexes produced a shared social experience among workers subjected to similar conditions of exploitation, factory discipline, and urban sociability (Municipality of Santo André, n.d.). In this sense, industrialization contributed to the formation of a relatively cohesive working-class identity, territorially rooted and marked by its own forms of collective organization (Antunes, 1995).
Within this context of class formation — understood as a historical process of building consciousness, solidarity, and collective action — some of the most significant labor mobilizations of Brazil’s authoritarian period emerged. The labor mobilizations in the ABC Paulista region, in the state of São Paulo, represented a major turning point in the history of the military regime established in 1964. The metalworkers’ strikes that took place during this period are generally regarded as a founding moment of Brazil’s “new unionism” (novo sindicalismo) because of their ability to combine economic claims, autonomous worker organization, and an explicit political challenge to state authoritarianism (Antunes, 1995).
The region’s strategic location, approximately 18 kilometers from the city of São Paulo and nearly 40 kilometers from the Port of Santos, has historically, contributed to its integration into regional economic dynamics. The construction of the railway in the nineteenth century, linking the coffee-producing interior to the coast, was decisive in transforming the area into an industrial hub, attracting investment and encouraging the establishment of production facilities along the railway corridor (Municipality of Santo André, n.d.). Throughout the twentieth century, particularly from the 1950s onward, the industrial complex known as the Greater ABC consolidated itself, with a strong presence of the metallurgical, petrochemical, and automotive sectors. The period of accelerated growth during the 1970s, often referred to as the era of the “economic miracle[3],” was followed by phases of industrial contraction and productive restructuring in the decades that followed, processes that significantly altered the region’s economic profile (Municipality of Santo André, n.d.). The discontent generated by periods of economic decline, combined with broader protests against the regime’s authoritarian arbitrariness, meant that this period was marked by the historic event of major strikes in the ABC Paulista region.
Originating in factories located in the municipalities of Santo André, São Bernardo do Campo, São Caetano do Sul, and Diadema, the strikes began within the premises of major automobile companies such as Ford, Volkswagen, and Mercedes-Benz. The claims focused primarily on wage recovery in the face of high inflation, as well as broader denunciations of state control over trade unions, police repression, and the absence of democratic freedoms (T. C. da Silva, 2023).
Regarding the social composition of the striking contingents, it is necessary to distinguish between the numerical and professional presence of Black workers in ABC factories and their political and symbolic visibility within union leadership, public narratives, and the official memory of these mobilizations. Recent research highlights that, during the final decades of the twentieth century, Black people constituted a significant portion of the region’s industrial workforce, occupying mainly production jobs that were often more precarious, lower-paying, and characterized by limited opportunities for professional mobility (M. A. da Silva, 2009).
These structural inequalities shaped not only patterns of participation in the strikes but also access to mobilization committees and representative bodies. Nevertheless, mainstream labor historiography has tended to obscure the specific role played by Black workers in this cycle of struggles (Nascimento, 2016). The figures most prominently celebrated in collective memory are predominantly White men, or racially unspecified individuals, whereas everyday forms of resistance — such as solidarity networks on production lines, partial strikes, slowdowns, and informal boycotts — depended heavily on the active participation of Black workers.
Brazilian historiography on the new unionism sometimes overlooks the fact that 1978 was also the year in which the Unified Black Movement (Movimento Negro Unificado – MNU) was founded. On June 18th, representatives of dozens of Black organizations met in São Paulo to establish the movement. On July 7th, on the steps of São Paulo’s Municipal Theatre, more than two thousand people listened to the movement’s open letter, which called upon the population to organize “in their neighborhoods, workplaces, and prisons against racial discrimination and the violence of police institutions” (Memórias Reveladas, 2025).
The immediate events that precipitated the movement’s creation included the arrest, torture, and murder of the Black worker Robson Silveira da Luz at the 44th Police Precinct in Guaianazes, in the eastern zone of São Paulo, after he was accused of stealing fruit from a market. This was followed by the murder of worker Nilton Lourenço by the Military Police in the Lapa district, in the western part of the city (Barbosa, 2019). Thus, in the same year and in the same region, two movements emerged in opposition to the dictatorship: one centered on class exploitation, the other on racial violence. One of the founders of the MNU, Milton Barbosa, later recalled in an oral history interview that the Black movement “supported the metalworkers’ strikes in the ABC” (Barbosa, 2019). However, the recognition of the MNU by the trade union movement as a legitimate political interlocutor is not reflected in the documentation from the period.
This asymmetry reflects what labor historiography has identified as a structural blindness of the new unionism toward the racial issue. In theory, overcoming class exploitation would automatically resolve racial oppression. As Domingues (2007) has shown, historiography on the subject has tended to frame social conflict exclusively in terms of class, thereby producing a narrative of the proletariat whose visible protagonists were predominantly White. Furthermore, the racial structure of the labor market in the ABC automotive industries reproduced, within the factories themselves, the racial hierarchy of broader society (Lima et al., 2001). The “blacklists” that circulated between factories and state security agencies during the dictatorship, requiring criminal and ideological background checks as a condition of employment, operated with particular intensity against Black workers, who had already been historically overrepresented in police records since the First Republic (Alves & Bispo Neto, 2021).
Moreover, socio-spatial and occupational segregation within the São Paulo metropolitan region limited Black workers’ access to union leadership positions and broader political visibility. Despite these restrictions, photographic archives and oral testimonies related to the ABC strikes reveal a massive and consistent Black presence throughout the mobilizations[4].
Thus, although the Brazilian military dictatorship cannot formally be equated with South African apartheid, the historically structured racial inequality of Brazilian society helped shape a specific racial profile of the industrial working class (Y. L. dos Santos, 2022).
Between Scales and Comparisons: Democracy Stolen from Workers
In his work The Ladder Game (Jeux d’échelles, 1996), historian Jacques Revel proposes a methodological approach based on the articulation of different levels of analysis — local, regional, and global. The comparative exercise undertaken in this article follows this perspective by highlighting both the convergences and the dissonances between South African and Brazilian labor mobilizations, while paying particular attention to the racial dynamics that structured these strike movements.
A first point of convergence lies in the centrality of the worker subjected to systems of domination that were both authoritarian and racially hierarchical. In South Africa, apartheid hindered the unionization of Black[5] workers through a range of legal and police mechanisms, such as the Pass Laws and the anti-communist legislation enacted in 1950 (South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 1998, pp. 173–175). In the ABC Paulista region, social inequality and structural racism limited opportunities for social mobility, professional training, and political participation, while state repressive apparatuses reinforced these constraints during the strikes.
A second similarity concerns the central role of the factory as a political space. In both contexts, the workplace became a site of sociability, solidarity, and resistance to the authoritarian state. The Durban strikes and the ABC Paulista strikes alike revealed the limits of dictatorial regimes in their ability to contain, over the long term, the social demands advanced by the working classes. Despite their geographical distance, these movements were embedded within broader circulations of discourse on human rights, democracy, and social justice, nourished by the international mobilizations of the late 1960s and by media coverage of state violence, such as the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960[6].
Comparisons must nevertheless take into account the structural differences between the two regimes. Apartheid explicitly defined civil and social rights on racial grounds, whereas the Brazilian military dictatorship operated through more flexible and circumstantial mechanisms of racial hierarchy. Nonetheless, state racism in Brazil, although not systematically codified, proved equally persistent and effective in reproducing social inequalities.
From the standpoint of trade union activity, Black South African unions, were for a long time, considered illegal and were forced to operate clandestinely. In Brazil, although trade unions were not formally prohibited, they were closely controlled by the repressive mechanisms of the military dictatorship and by systems of employer tutelage. In both cases, a collective worker organization developed under conditions of severe political constraint.
Another point of convergence lies in the active participation of Christian religious organizations in labor mobilizations. In South Africa, labor activism received support from movements such as the Black Consciousness Movement (led by Steve Biko), the Anglican Church, the Methodist Church, and the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference, as well as Black Reformed churches such as the Dutch Reformed Mission Church and the Uniting Reformed Church in Southern Africa[7]. In Brazil, Base Ecclesial Communities (Comunidades Eclesiais de Base) and other religious organizations played an important role in supporting strikes and advocating social justice (Secco, 2023).
The comparison between the Durban and ABC Paulista strikes thus reveals common fissures within authoritarian regimes situated in Global South contexts. Beyond their local specificities, these movements constituted profound critiques of the forms assumed by late industrial capitalism, exposing the inability of states to reconcile economic growth, social inclusion, and civic recognition in societies deeply shaped by racialization.
The “Durban Moment,” crystallized in the strikes of 1973, and the labor mobilizations of the ABC Paulista region between 1978 and 1980 can be understood as foundational events, in the sense proposed by Revel (1996). They illuminate broader dynamics, such as the growing fragility of authoritarian regimes at the end of the twentieth century, the strengthening of popular organizations in South-South contexts, and the reconfiguration of the political and social expectations of the working class.
Moreover, they generated a democratic agenda that was simultaneously social and racial. In Durban, the mobilizations of 1973 opened cracks in the apartheid system that, during the following decade, fueled both the expansion of the Black trade union movement and the rearticulation of the African National Congress (ANC) as a mass political force (Fine & Davis, 1990). In the ABC Paulista region, the strikes of 1978–1980 contributed decisively to the crisis of the military dictatorship and to the construction of a democratic platform that would find partisan expression through the Workers’ Party (PT) and institutional expression in the 1988 Constitution (Antunes, 1995; Secco, 2023). In both cases, however, the processes of democratic transition treated political democratization as a priority, while racial democratization was regarded as a derivative, secondary, or continually postponed issue.
In post-apartheid South Africa, the negotiated transition preserved economic structures that continued to reproduce a racial hierarchy of labor, now deprived of an explicit legal foundation (Mamdani, 2021; Worden, 2012). In Brazil, democratization formally incorporated civil and social rights while leaving intact the structures of racial inequality that the new unionism had largely silenced within its own historical narrative (Nascimento, 2016; Santos, 2022). In both contexts, democracy was therefore achieved only partially. The separation of class and race, which was emphasized during the transition processes, was removed from the democratic agenda precisely what the strikes themselves had highlighted: the inseparable link between class exploitation and racial hierarchy.
Ultimately, situating the South African and Brazilian experiences within a shared global labor history, as proposed by Van der Linden (2009), helps reposition both countries within broader comparative frameworks. Such a perspective not only renews the analysis of labor mobilizations but also underscores the central role of race, labor, and political resistance in understanding contemporary social transformations.
The comparative examination of the Durban and ABC Paulista strikes allows us to reorganize certain terms and concepts within the historiography of labor in the Global South. The strikes in ABC Paulista and Durban reveal that race and labor are parallel and complementary dimensions, mutually constructed through historical and structural processes. The assertion and adoption of analytical categories lacking empirical foundation risks producing a labor history that is racially incomplete and/or analytically biased.
This reorganization also requires revisiting concepts that labor historiography has long regarded as universal. Solidarity and mutualism, for example, were largely constructed from predominantly White European experiences and subsequently projected onto contexts governed by different social logics. In this regard, the cases of Durban and ABC demonstrate that there have always been one or more racial dimensions within workers’ struggles. Thus, in both contexts, working-class solidarity was marked by asymmetrical hierarchies in its distribution, hierarchies often unrecognized in their racial dimension and frequently erased from the official narratives produced by the very movements that benefited from them.
The comparison between the two cases highlights a fundamental distinction in the forms assumed by state racism in each context. Under apartheid, the agency of Black workers was recognized for the very purpose of criminalizing it. The Durban strikes were attributed to outside agitators, denying African workers the capacity for autonomous organization, treating their demands as a matter of public order, and stripping their actions of political legitimacy.
In the case of the ABC Paulista strikes, the ideology of racial democracy and the structural silence surrounding racial issues facilitated the erasure of Black workers’ agency within the mobilizations. Black workers were numerically present in the factories but politically absent from the movement’s memory. The two cases, therefore, represent distinct forms of political racism: one renders Black agency visible in order to criminalize it, while the other neutralizes it through invisibilization. What brings them together, as objects of analysis, is the removal of Black populations as historical subjects within contemporary laboring classes. Within the framework of Global South studies, the comparison between the two contexts rejects any ethnicizing reduction and interprets Black and African workers beyond their racial identity alone. Similarly, it avoids viewing them solely as victims of racism.
Marcel Van der Linden (2009) argued that a truly global labor history requires the integration of experiences systematically marginalized by analytical frameworks developed in the Global North. The cases of Durban and ABC confirm this requirement. The challenge is therefore not only to expand the map of labor history by incorporating new case studies, but to recognize that such cases fundamentally transform our understanding of this subject of study.
The African workers who went on strike in 1973, the Afro-descendant workers present on the ABC production lines in 1978, and the activists of the Unified Black Movement (MNU) who supported the metalworkers all demonstrate that categories such as solidarity, mutualism, and class consciousness, as inherited from historiography, are grounded in a particular racial experience that has been projected as universal (Mamdani, 2021).
Deconstructing this supposed universality is an essential condition for understanding African and Afro-descendant workers in the full complexity of their historical experience. Ynaê Santos (2022) has shown that Brazilian racism operates through the denial of its own existence, transforming structural inequality into a cultural fact and relegating Black protagonism to invisibility. In the South African context, as Worden (2012) has demonstrated, the permanent assignment of Black workers to a racial condition often obstructed recognition of their class agency. In both cases, therefore, the struggles of Black workers transcended the social and political spaces to which they had been assigned.
Understanding the history of the Durban and ABC Paulista strikes — and of the Black workers who participated in them as historical actors — also allows us to better contextualize the experiences and trajectories of the broader working class. Thus, if for centuries the dominant narrative framework for the histories of the Global South was structured around a White European experience, the comparative study of these two strikes demonstrates that labor history cannot be fully understood without incorporating the trajectories of African and Afro-descendant populations as central elements in its theoretical construction.