SACP Message of Condolences to Professor Eddie Webster Family

7 March 2024

Solly Mapaila, the General Secretary of the South African Communist Party (SACP), conveys sincere condolences on behalf of the SACP to the family of Professor Edward Webster (82). This message extends to the University of the Witwatersrand, the Chris Hani Institute, the academic community, including those involved in research, education, and scholarship. Equally significant, our condolences are expressed to the working class. Professor Webster, affectionately known as Eddie, passed away on Tuesday, 5 March 2024. “This is a monumental loss for the working class, particularly labour” said Mapaila on Wednesday, 6 March 2024 at the SACP headquarters in Johannesburg. 

Eddie’s body of research is extensive, encompassing various areas, including public policy. Nevertheless, labour studies have held a prominent position in his research for decades, dating back to at least the 1970s. His examination of the Durban workers’ strikes in the 1970s proved to be influential. In the subsequent decade, in 1985, Eddie published Cast in a Racial Mould, a remarkable work delving into the labour process within foundries and radical trade unionism. A focus on the labour process, in the hidden abode of production where capital not only produces but is itself produced as Karl Marx found in Capital (Vol. 1), played a key role in Eddie’s labour studies approach.

As part of his research work, Professor Webster played a key role in shaping the Decent Work Agenda in South Africa and making decent work a focal point in both labour and policy studies. Among the roles he played, he served as the Director of the Chris Hani Institute, established jointly by the SACP and the Congress of the African Trade Unions. This culminated in The Unresolved National Question in South Africa: Left thought under apartheid and beyond, published in 2017. As part of his contribution to the book, he edited it together with Karin Pampallis.

As the University of the Witwatersrand stated in its message of condolences on Wednesday, 6 March 2024, Eddie published many research reports, books and over 100 journal articles. Eddie co-founded the Institute for Industrial Education in 1973, marking the inception of the first workers’ college in South Africa Eddie. The following year, 1974, he played a pivotal role as a founding member of the South African Labour Bulletin. In the year that followed, 1975, Eddie was arrested and tried under the Suppression of Communism Act for his activism against the apartheid regime.

In the 2000s, Eddie founded and chaired the Global Labour University at Wits, a global initiative by the International Labour Organization. This initiative links universities in Germany, India, South Africa, and Brazil.

Among others, Professor Webster’s research work covered the important question of workers’ power. This culminated in his final book, Recasting Workers’ Power: Work and Inequality in the Shadow of the Digital Age, published in 2023.

In the book, Professor Webster directs his focus towards workers’ power, examining it through the lens of “The Power Resources Approach”. This perspective is anchored in identifying the sources of workers’ power and how workers experiment, build and strategically exercise their own power in the workplace and the economy in the struggle to resist exploitation and fight for policy changes. The “Digital Age” in the book’s title draws attention to the examination of the state-of-the-art digital technological revolution, its implications for work and workers now and in the future, and their responses in the Global South.

Together with professors Rob Lambert and Andries Bezuidenhout, in 2008 Eddie published Grounding Globalization: Labour in the Age of Insecurity examining the impact of neoliberal globalisation, focusing on the white goods industry in three Global South countries, Australia, South Africa and South Korea. This book earned the prestigious American Sociological Association award for the best scholarly monograph published on labour in 2008.

In honour of Professor Edward Webster’s memory, the SACP is committed to enhancing its research efforts for the betterment of the working class. The goal is to strive towards social emancipation and progress towards a society free from the exploitation and oppression of one person, class, or country by another. Deepening, expanding, and defending non-racialism stands as a crucial pillar of this commitment, alongside the imperative to eliminate gender inequality.   

Issued by the South African Communist Party,

Founded in 1921 as the Communist Party of South Africa.

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