Abstract: In South African urban society today, discord is growing between those emerging bourgeoisie who participated in the struggle against apartheid and the working and underclass people who have been left behind in the townships. While both fought for a post-apartheid nation of liberation and democracy for all, South Africa operates in a global economic context in much the same way it did under apartheid, and township communities are still challenged in attaining such things as clean water, electricity, proper housing, education and health care. My research in the Black township of Munsieville, outside of Johannesburg, attests to the fact that many in the community are demoralized by their ongoing lives of poverty and the lack of response from the new democratic government. This qualitative research focuses on the reaction of four Black South Africans, formerly active in the anti-apartheid struggle, to the unfinished business of liberation, examining how they negotiate their daily lives when social and economic justice remains elusive. The dissertation is based on six field seasons in the community, engaging in participant observation, conducting interviews, and taking oral histories. The field data is triangulated with additional historical and archival research including underground political documents from the 1980s, news articles, and government papers. Today, some in Munsieville continue in their quest for the social justice promised to them during the radical activism of the 1980s, and many are developing new strategies for survival outside of the familiar model of their political activism. I argue that one response of disheartened activists is to transmute material 'things' into justice as they imbue commodities with power against the socioeconomic legacy of apartheid and the current democratic government's economic policy of neoliberalism. The interplay between the degree to which people wield control over material goods today and their memories of the goals and experiences of radical resistance against the apartheid state during the 1980s is a type of daily marker of the way in which people are managing their frustrations with the government and their disappointment in the negligible fruits of their costly radical activism.