Multiunionism, Union Bureaucracy, and Untruth in Collective Ethical Self-Making

Like many Global South unions, the Mineworkers’ Union of Zambia has fragmented into multiple near-identical organizations. These unions rarely strike, and they are incentivized to cooperate with management and to compete for members by serving as financial patrons. Zambian union leaders increasingly find themselves responding to this disempowerment through omission, obfuscation, and self-deception. Rather than dismissing their actions as corruption, this article considers how untruth shapes the personal and collective political projects of union members, bureaucrats, and leaders. Linking the anthropologies of unionism and bureaucracy, this paper explores how members and bureaucrats cocreate “public” and “populist” secrecies, which protect unionism’s utopian goals and narratives of strength from practices shaped by disempowerment. Responding to works that foreground the importance of reflection in the creation of collective ethical subjects, I assert the significance of (self-)deception in responding to the constant setbacks and unequal rewards of progressive social change.