African Studies Institute - Seminar Papers
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Item From reluctant slavery to a black flood: Black workers, mass production and cultural formation in South Africa's metalworks(1982-08-02) Sitas, A.In the first chapter of this thesis the problem of the transition from absolute to relative surplus-value extraction, of the changes in the social relations of production that bring about the mass production of commodities in South Africa's Metalworks, was discussed in some detail. There it was shown that South Africa's bonded accumulation and reproduction of capital, militated against such a transition: The local Metalworks, subordinate on the one hand to an international division of labour, on the other, to the needs of the local mining industry, faltered in all their efforts to effect this transition. Furthermore, through a discussion of the economic role of the South African State it was emphasised that the first pockets of mass producing Metalworks, like Iscor and the African Metals Corporation were created through State or para-statal corporations. This entailed a vast reorganisation of the industry by the late 19 30s. Finally, despite the favourable conditions for growth engendered by the Union's 'war effort', the dominance of these new relations of production was shown to be tenuous and a continued juxtaposition of jobbing and mass forms of production defined the morphology of the industry by the 1950s. The second chapter of the thesis addressed itself to the transition itself, located in the era after 1964 and consolidated by the crisis years of the mid-nineteen-seventies. Primarily through a rapid concentration and centralisation of the industry but also through the sudden large scale involvement of Mining Houses and Transnational Corporations, the 'universal worker' of machinofacture is created. The absolute increase of operative African workers turn from a quantitative flood to a qualitative presence. This present chapter is an attempt to examine the contradictory implications of this presence, in the words of the author M. Dikobe a generation 'that is surprising the world, fast very fast', in its combativity and political consciousness (1).Item Disorganising the unorganised: The 'Black Flood' and the Registered Metal Union responses, Part I, the 1960s, of South African 'development'(1981-05) Sitas, A.This paper arises out of a combination of two factors: firstly, it is out of a dissatisfaction with a reality presented to us of late by a number of articles and more voluminous affairs like books about the role of white-skinned people in the racial division of labour, and through that, South African society as a whole. Secondly, out of a feeling that the ever-recurrent debate about 'inter-racial solidarity' and the South African working classes has been spirited away by some theoretical formulations that like the best of imported machinery started producing a mass of realities that obfuscate rather than clarify real issues that the labour movement is facing at present. (2) Unlike Demag machinery though, the results of the former, produced a reality that in most cases does not exist. These two factors will increasingly become clear as the narrative unfords and need not detain us here. What needs to detain us here though is the plot of the ensuing argument. In the first two parts of this paper, the story of the shifts in the T.U.C.S.A. as concerns African unionisation and their affiliation, disaffiliation acrobatics that characterised much of the 1960s is told. It finally traces two divergent responses vis-a-vis the registered union movement. The one, spearheaded by what have been called 'craft-diluted' unions, the other by 'industrial unions'. The third part, concerns an exploration of the material complexities that characterise the 'craft-diluted' unions with a specific focus on the actual transformations in the metal industry in South Africa throughout the 1960s. The fourth part looks at the unions themselves and how they respond to their new-found reality, not at the point of leadership but rather at the actions and passivities of their respective ranks and files. The fifth part analyses what has been discussed so far in the light of the current debates about the class determination of the white wage-earning classes. The paper closes with the 1972 T.U.C.S.A. Conference and the clear polarisation/accommodatiorithat exists in strategy between registered unions: a year before Potgieter's Zulus took to the streets, their rags barely covering their bottoms but for completely different reasons than he gives or to use Nelson's bad metaphor, the year his Black-worker-Christ resurrects himself despite the washing of the hands of Pontius Pilate (read; colonial administrator; read: registered union movement).(3) The second part, or the second paper, at the moment in preparation, will be tracing the process to the present.