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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 181 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 181, December 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Going for Gold
T. Dunbar Moodie with Vivienne Ndatshe
University of California Press £11.95
The breaking of apartheid in South Africa has been one of the most inspiring events of the 20th century. However, the death throes of apartheid form part of a wider crisis of South African capitalism. T. Dunbar Moodie’s book studying capitalist relations in the gold mining industry demonstrates this.
Gold mining was one of South Africa’s first major industries. The discovery of a huge reef of gold deposits deep under the Witwatersrand and later the western Orange Free State led ‘to men and machinery and explosives ... moved underground and massive amounts of rock brought to the surface to be treated to extract minute proportions of gold. The grade of South African gold ore is poor.’ The consequence of low grade but massive quantity of gold ore was ‘colossal capital investments’ which could only pay off if other costs were kept low. The fact that gold had a fixed price until the early 1970s ‘exacerbated the effects of already stringent cost constraints’. The capitalist class had three methods for dealing with this.
Firstly, large mining investment houses shared the cost of engineering and development of individual mines. Secondly, the Chamber of Mines intervened to hold down wages and ensure a ready supply of labour. Thirdly, the workforce was divided racially with well paid white managers or supervisors and poorly paid, compounded black miners. This was the basis of the migrant labour system.
The low wages offered only appealed to the impoverished of the wider Southern African countryside, with large numbers of Mozambicans and Malawians drawn in. Workers were housed in compounds producing a ‘totally regimented’ environment. This book excels in studying the effect of the migrant labour system on the culture, solidarity and sexuality of the miners.
There are interviews with black miners who graphically explain the brutal regime of abuse and violence by supervisors.
The rise in the price of gold in the early 1970s led to the collapse of the migrant labour system. By 1973 gold mining profits had trebled since 1970. However, the 1974 revolution in Mozambique destroyed the labour supply and Malawian mine recruits were withheld after a plane crash. The result was that average wages were dramatically increased.
‘A different kind of individual responded to the appeal of higher wages’ and the workforce became more permanent and militant. The gold mine owners now had to deal with a working class determined to organise and fight back. The National Union of Mineworkers was formed in August 1982 and recognised shortly afterwards. Moodie’s analysis shows the effects of this proletarianisation on every facet of life in the mines.
This book has a wealth of material charting the rise of a militant black working class in South Africa. The interviews with black miners are invaluable in gauging the changing sense of power that workers have felt. There is, however, a big problem with this book. Its style is far too scholastic and ends up in convoluted sociological conclusions that tie the author in knots. Sections are lucid while others are virtually impassable. There is also a failure to analyse the political conclusions of much of this study. This conclusion is simple. It is that apartheid was a product of capitalism and was broken by the black working class. This working class has won an enormous victory and now needs to overthrow the system that breeds such exploitation.
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