Durban's dock workers defy easy classification either as radical proletarian dock workers or as conservative migrant laborers who “exhibited a distinct unwillingness to join an uprooted proletariat,” as Patrick Harries argues for Mozambican miners. Work in Durban's port, however, cannot simply be divorced from the experiences of dock workers around the world, as many of the work and hiring processes at the Point were notably similar to those elsewhere. This chapter discusses two important ways in which the livelihoods of Durban's dock workers resembled those of thousands of dock workers in London and New York, Liverpool and Mombasa, Shanghai and Tanga. First, like dock workers all over the world they bribed foremen and supervisors, and they used their social connections to get the best jobs. Second, they pilfered without shame. Although none of the interviewees was explicitly asked about this, about half mentioned that they regularly engaged in pilferage. Half is thus a conservative estimate.

Different commentators have considered these activities crimes, acts of resistance, or both. In particular, there is a substantial literature on theft and pilferage by laborers and the dispossessed as a form of informal resistance against proletarianization and the disciplinary power of employers. Friedrich Engels famously discusses crime in the context of the industrial revolution as an early, primitive, and individual form of protest, which was later superseded by more mature, collective forms of resistance, including formal trade unionism and the rise of workers’ parties. Eric Hobsbawm similarly assumes a historical progression in forms of resistance in his influential Primitive Rebels. He argues that the “social bandits” of early capitalism were often people who were not born into this new political and economic system; they were only just starting to learn the rules of the new order. These rebels engaged in prepolitical resistance; they challenged the enclosure of their commons, of their collective user rights, but did not have a collective revolutionary vision to challenge or reform the capitalist system that was taking shape. These accounts paint theft as an essentially reactive and defensive, prepolitical form of resistance, not as a creative and strategic one.