Xenophobia is the symptom but class failure is the disease

“Abahambe!” (They must go!) This was the chant reverberating through the streets of Durban, Johannesburg and other South African cities on 30 June 2026 as anti-migrant protests escalated into one of the most coordinated xenophobic mobilisations in recent years.

Protesters, many carrying sticks and shields, marched through urban centres demanding the expulsion of undocumented migrants, invoking economic scarcity, unemployment and crime as justification for exclusion. The phrase, now central to SA’s contemporary anti-immigrant politics, is simple yet profound. It condenses into two words an entire structure of displacement: a political economy of exclusion in which social crisis is projected onto migrant bodies.

The dominant public interpretation of xenophobia in SA remains trapped in moral and juridical discourse. It is frequently framed as a pathology of intolerance, a crisis of social cohesion, or the consequence of weak border management. These frameworks are not entirely incorrect, but they remain analytically incomplete. They tend to treat xenophobia as an irrational social aberration rather than as a structurally intelligible social phenomenon.

This discussion advances a different proposition: xenophobia in SA is best understood as displaced class antagonism. More specifically, it is a horizontal struggle among the working poor, intensified by economic precarity and blocked social mobility, but misrecognised as a national conflict between citizens and foreigners.

Unresolved contradictions of post-apartheid class formation

Drawing on the work of theorists such as Karl Marx, Frantz Fanon, Pierre Bourdieu and Francis Fukuyama, I argue that SA’s xenophobic eruptions reveal the unresolved contradictions of post-apartheid class formation. At the heart of Marx’s critique of capitalism lies the insight that class struggle is constitutive of capitalist society.

In Capital (1867), Marx demonstrates that capital accumulation depends upon labour exploitation, producing structural antagonisms between capital and labour. Yet capitalism also fragments labour internally. Workers compete against each other for wages, opportunities and survival. This intra-class competition is not accidental; it is central to the reproduction of capitalist order.

Marx’s concept of the “industrial reserve army” is particularly useful here. Capitalism, he argues, sustains a surplus labour force to discipline wages and maintain labour flexibility. In SA, migrant labour has historically occupied this reserve function. From the colonial mining economy to contemporary informal economies, migrants have remained integral to SA’s labour market.

Yet their structural usefulness also makes them politically vulnerable. Under conditions of economic crisis, migrants become visible embodiments of labour competition. The accusation that “foreigners are taking our jobs” is therefore not simply ideological fiction. It is a distorted articulation of real material competition under conditions of scarcity.

What makes SA distinctive is where this competition manifests. The protests of 30 June did not unfold in affluent suburbs like Sandton or Constantia. They unfolded in townships, inner-city margins and informal settlements, spaces historically shaped by apartheid’s racialised urban planning.

Social location of xenophobia

This spatiality matters because it reveals the social location of xenophobia. It is overwhelmingly a phenomenon of the precarious working class. Townships are spaces of compressed social competition. Here, South Africans and migrants compete for housing, informal trading opportunities, transport routes, public services and insecure labour. The township becomes the theatre of horizontal antagonism. Marx would immediately recognise this.

The tragedy is that the structural enemy, capital, unemployment, deindustrialisation, and elite accumulation, remains abstract, while the migrant is proximate and visible. In The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Fanon theorises how postcolonial societies inherit colonial economic structures without fundamentally transforming them.

Political sovereignty does not guarantee economic redistribution. Instead, a native bourgeoisie often emerges, inserting itself into existing structures of accumulation while the masses remain dispossessed. SA is exemplary of this condition. Post-1994 democracy dismantled juridical apartheid but left economic apartheid largely intact. The result has been the emergence of a narrow black elite integrated into existing capitalist structures, while millions remain trapped in unemployment and urban precarity.

Fanon anticipated precisely this. He warned that where liberation fails to transform everyday life materially, violence becomes displaced. Rather than confronting the structures of exploitation directly, the oppressed turn against those nearest to them. This is what Fanon calls the “circulation of violence”. Xenophobia in SA is this circulation made visible.

Repository for frustrations

The migrant body becomes a repository for frustrations that properly belong to the failures of economic transformation. But class also shapes how xenophobia is experienced. In Distinction (1979) and The Forms of Capital (1986), Bourdieu argues that class is not reducible to economic capital alone. Social life is structured by multiple capitals: economic, cultural, social and symbolic. Access to institutions depends upon one’s ability to convert these capitals into legitimacy.

This distinction helps explain why xenophobia takes different forms across class locations. For the working poor, xenophobia is immediate and physical. Shops are looted. Bodies are assaulted. Homes are burned. But for middle-class migrants, xenophobia is often institutional. It is subtle, procedural, and bureaucratically rationalised.

My own experience illustrates this. In June 2022, I was offered sessional lecturing positions in sociology and anthropology at one of SA’s leading universities. Both departments had selected me on academic grounds. Yet the offers were withdrawn after institutional HR systems, entangled in immigration compliance and Home Affairs bureaucracy, could not process the appointments.

This was not spectacular violence. It was administrative exclusion. The institution recognised my academic capital but refused its conversion into institutional legitimacy. Bourdieu would describe this as the regulation of entry into institutional fields. What appears neutral – immigration compliance, HR procedure, bureaucratic rationality – often reproduces exclusion through formal mechanisms.

Middle-class xenophobia thus operates differently. It does not destroy the body. It obstructs the future. This distinction is analytically important because it reveals xenophobia as stratified by class. Working-class xenophobia targets physical presence. Institutional xenophobia regulates professional mobility. Both are linked by scarcity.

Severe intra-black inequality

SA’s extraordinarily high Gini coefficient reflects not simply racial inequality, but increasingly severe intra-black inequality. This is perhaps the defining contradiction of the democratic era. A small black middle class has emerged. But it remains too narrow. In Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (1995), Fukuyama argues that social stability depends on generalised trust, institutional predictability, and the expansion of stable middle classes. Trust is not merely cultural; it is produced through durable economic security. Where precarity dominates, trust collapses. SA’s xenophobic condition is fundamentally a crisis of trust.

In contexts of unemployment and insecurity, social cooperation is replaced by defensive exclusion. Migrants become symbols of uncertainty, and exclusion becomes a strategy of social self-preservation. Fukuyama’s insight forces an uncomfortable conclusion: the long-term solution to xenophobia is not merely ethical education or tighter borders. It is class expansion. SA must deliberately produce a broader black middle class. This is not a liberal fantasy. It is a sociological necessity.

Middle classes stabilise societies because they anchor aspiration. They embody deferred gratification, property ownership, educational investment, and legal-rational norms. They transform social life from immediate extraction to long-term reproduction.

In SA, this class remains too thin relative to the size of the economically excluded majority. This imbalance matters. Where upward mobility appears blocked, resentment intensifies. Blocked aspiration is politically dangerous because it transforms hope into hostility. The township becomes the site where failed futures collide.

The irony is that migrants themselves often embody precisely the entrepreneurial capacities South Africa needs. Somali and Ethiopian traders have built sophisticated township retail systems based on kinship credit, cooperative supply chains and low-margin distribution. These are adaptive economic innovations. Yet they are scapegoated. This reveals the irrationality of xenophobia. Migrants are not the cause of economic crisis. They are participants in its management.

Deeper structural question

The persistence of anti-migrant politics thus obscures the deeper structural question: Why has SA failed to produce broad-based economic citizenship? Political liberation created formal citizenship, but economic citizenship remains unevenly distributed. And where economic citizenship is uneven, belonging itself becomes contested.

This is the sociological heart of xenophobia. It is not simply about foreignness. It is about scarcity. It is about blocked mobility. It is about the unfinished project of class formation. Marx helps us see the fragmentation of labour under capitalism. Fanon explains the lateralisation of violence under incomplete decolonisation. Bourdieu reveals how exclusion is institutionalised across social fields. Fukuyama clarifies why broad middle-class formation is essential to trust and stability.

Together, they offer a unified framework for understanding South African xenophobia. Not as irrational hatred. But as a structurally displaced class struggle.

Until SA addresses unemployment, housing precarity, educational inequality, and the narrowness of black middle-class expansion, xenophobia will remain a recurring symptom. The poor will continue fighting the poor. And each time the chant “Abahambe!” returns, it will tell us less about migrants than about the unresolved contradictions of SA itself. DM