Labour in the time of platinum

The August 2012 massacre of 34 striking mineworkers at Lonmin’s platinum mine in Marikana was for many the event that has defined post-apartheid South Africa. In that single moment, the last, tattered vestiges of the political ‘miracle’ were torn aside, and the essential continuity of the old system of racialised exploitation laid bare, in all its stark violence. Yet, in the great outpouring of analysis that followed, remarkably little attention was paid to the changes that had been set in motion by the phenomenal growth of the platinum industry itself, and how these had generated entirely new tensions and struggles at the very core of the national mining economy. The genesis of this special issue was an international colloquium that sought to address this lacuna. Convened a year after the massacre by the Society, Work and Development Institute (SWOP) at the University of the Witwatersrand, the colloquium brought together new and ongoing research on the subterranean reconfigurations of mine labour regimes, settlement patterns and worker organisation engendered by the ‘platinum revolution’, and their wider implications for the historic compromise between capital and labour that had underpinned the political order since 1994. Over two days, 25 papers were presented across eight panels to a lively audience of academics, students, community and worker-activists and representatives of the major mining unions, and thus provided a unique opportunity to discuss the proximate determinations of the ‘Marikana moment’ and debate its broader ramifications.¹

Within a year of the event, the platinum belt had again erupted in what would become the longest mineworkers’ strike in the country's history. Running for five months from January 2014, and now formally led by the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU), this took up the emblematic demand of a ‘living wage’ of R12,500, which had organically emerged from the wildcat strikes of 2012. The result was a significant pay rise among the lower-level grades that comprised the bulk of the permanent workforce, but also a deepening of tensions between the AMCU leadership and the worker-activists who two years earlier had led the revolt against the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and, through it, the ruling ‘tripartite alliance’ of the African National Congress (ANC), South African Communist Party (SACP) and Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU).

Meanwhile, the platinum industry continued its headlong fall into a crisis of profitability. Previously the rising star of the post-apartheid mining sector, the unprecedented platinum boom that had begun in the late 1990s had already started to falter in the wake of the world financial crash of 2008. The deepening sense of crisis was further intensified by the great mineworker struggles of 2012–2014, but it continued to be driven by the collapse of global demand in a context of massive overinvestment, heightened competition and mounting corporate debt. How then to make sense of the multiple crises centred on the platinum sector? Here an instructive (if brief) comparison can be drawn with the historically premier gold industry, before moving on to survey the articles that make up this collection.

From gold to platinum

As will be well known to readers of this journal, gold was at the centre of the ‘mineral revolution’ that propelled and shaped South Africa's distinctive trajectory of capitalist development from the late nineteenth century. While the Witwatersrand gold fields were the largest hitherto discovered (1887), the ore itself was low grade and deep underground, and the international price was rigidly fixed by the ‘gold standard’ (Davies 1978, 80; Johnstone 1976). Profitable extraction was thus dependent on a combination of large-scale investment (to develop sufficient economics of scale) and vast supplies of cheap wage-labour (to maximise the rate of exploitation). The first of these conditions was met through the rapid concentration of mine ownership (including coal mines) into the hands of six major producers, whose interests were coordinated through the Chamber of Mines (Davies et al. 1988, 105–108). These mining houses benefited from massive state support in key input sectors – most notably energy, but also metals and transport – and then fused with Afrikaner money capital during the second half of the twentieth century to increasingly diversify both within and beyond the mineral and energy core (Fine and Rustomjee 1996).

For its part, gold's ‘labour problem’ was progressively resolved in the critical period between 1890 (when deep-level mining began) and 1920 through the construction by Chamber recruitment agencies of an increasingly expansive and regulated system of African (male) migrant labour (Allen 1992; Crush et al. 1991; Jeeves 1985). This sourced black workers from across South Africa (mostly the Eastern Cape) and its neighbouring territories (above all, Mozambique and Lesotho) and, at the end of their contracts, returned them ‘to rural homes where agriculture supported (or “subsidised”) their low wages and the reproduction of their labour-power’ (Bernstein 1996a, 4; see also First 1983; Moodie 1994; Murray 1981). At the mines, these labour migrants were subjected to harsh cost and work disciplines through the compound system and a stark racial division of labour in which semi-servile black work gangs executed the tasks set by a rigid hierarchy of white miners, supervisors and management. The migrant labour system, as classically described in Ruth First's (1983) Black Gold, thus rested on a profound spatial separation between those areas defined as ‘white’ industrial centres and as ‘black’ rural reserves, themselves founded on older geographies of colonial expansion, violent dispossession and African resistance (Paulin 2001).

In the reserves, it was largely the subsistence labour of women that reproduced this distinctive worker-peasantry, both partially tied to and separated from the land. This in turn rested on distorted systems of ‘customary’ tenure under the coercive control of state-appointed chiefs, who also collected the taxes and administered the passes that compelled and regulated the migrant's circular movements between town and countryside (Neocosmos 2006, 32–35). While it would be subject to significant regional variations and policy shifts over the course of the twentieth century, the migrant labour system remained the bedrock on which the entire edifice of South Africa's racial capitalism was erected (Lacey 1981; Marks and Rathbone 1982), and the cornerstone of the fictively autonomous ‘homelands’ into which the black majority was geopolitically segregated and ethnically divided under apartheid (Davies et al. 1988, 216).

The platinum industry gradually evolved out of the political economy constructed around gold and its associated sectors, following the discovery of major deposits in the 1920s.² However, it did so under a quite different set of geological and world market conditions. South Africa holds 87% of the world's known platinum reserves, which are located in the Bushveld Complex (BC) – a vast, bowl-shaped formation with major “limbs” outcropping in what are now the North West and Gauteng provinces (western limb), and Limpopo and Mpumalanga provinces (northern and eastern limbs).³ The potential advantages of this immense geological concentration have, however, been historically offset by the extremely high costs of platinum refining, its limited commercial applications and end users who are hypersensitive to price. Whereas gold's role as the international money commodity for long periods guaranteed demand underpinned by stable pricing regimes, the tension between the (limited) use and (high) exchange values of platinum resulted in a notoriously volatile commodity market historically punctuated by violent booms and busts, and hence a sector characterised by extremes of expansion and contraction. Faced with platinum reserves whose scale could easily outstrip global demand, the South African producers thus from the onset attempted to regulate the rate of supply in order to avoid, or at least ameliorate, the industry's periodic crises of overproduction.

Such regulation was in part facilitated by the highly concentrated corporate structure of the wider economy in which the industry was embedded. The main platinum capitals were themselves little more than subsidiaries of one or more of the great mining houses that had emerged out of gold, and by the end of apartheid the platinum industry was dominated by just three companies: Rustenburg Platinum, Impala Platinum and Western Platinum, which in 1995 accounted for 51.6%, 39.1% and 9.3% of national production respectively (Vermaak 1995, 69). Rustenburg and Impala Platinum were in turn the subsidiaries of Johannesburg Consolidated Investments (JCI) and Gencor, themselves held by the giant Anglo American and Sanlam corporations, while Western Platinum was majority controlled by Lonmin, the mining arm of the London-listed Lonrho. But, most significantly, the platinum producers were able to achieve an unusual degree of exclusive control over South Africa's giant resource base, which both erected powerful barriers to competitive entry and allowed them to unilaterally deploy or sterilise their reserves in response to boom and slump. And what made this control possible was the differentia specifica of the platinum industry under apartheid: the geopolitical location of the greater part of these reserves within Bophuthatswana and Lebowa, two of South Africa's nominally independent homeland territories.

The property regimes within these ‘states’ broadly enabled the major producers to sew up the rights to much of the Bushveld Complex through favourable lease agreements (Capps 2012a, 69–76). Moreover, pending new minerals legislation, these arrangements would stay in place during the early years of the post-apartheid dispensation. There were also significant differences between platinum and gold in the realms of labour recruitment and wage negotiation. While Impala sourced its migrant workers through TEBA (the Employment Bureau of Africa – the Chamber of Mines’ recruitment agency), Amplats and Lonmin used independent recruiters. Moreover, platinum producers did not negotiate wages through a centralised bargaining body like the Chamber for gold and coal. While it is likely that this led to greater facility to recruit and dismiss migrants in the booms and busts of the industry, fairly wide differences in worker remuneration developed over time, leading to a tendency for the producers to poach experienced workers from one another, especially from Impala, which had a better established training programme. Local collective action, when successful, also had a ripple effect across the industry.

As South Africa re-engaged with the global economy after 1994, its leading conglomerates began to relocate to the world's leading financial centres – increasing their capacity to tap global equity markets, and export capital and assets – while embarking on vigorous programmes of domestic restructuring (‘unbundling’) in which their diverse holdings and subsidiaries were broken up, sold off where they were weak, or amalgamated into powerful new companies where deemed internationally competitive. The first and most significant example of this ‘globalised restructuring’ in the platinum sector was the formation of Amplats itself. In May 1995, the giant Anglo American Corporation (AAC) ‘unbundled’ its subsidiary, JCI, into three separate companies: JCI Ltd with interests in gold, ferrochrome and base metals; Johnnies Industrial Corporation containing its nominal industrial holdings; and Anglo Platinum, which amalgamated the industry leader Rustenburg Platinum Holdings with JCI and AAC's other platinum assets into a single, ‘focused’ entity. Majority-owned by Anglo American and accounting for 40% of global output, Amplats was consolidated as the world's pre-eminent platinum powerhouse, while the parent companies of the two other major platinum producers – Impala and Lonmin – would, to different degrees, soon follow suit.

The effect was to globally position the South African industry for an unprecedented boom in platinum demand, driven by the phenomenal growth of the global auto-catalyst sector (in which the platinums are an indispensable element) and the white-metal jewellery market. As the platinum price surged, South African output grew by 67% between 1994 and 2009, while gold production continued its long-term decline, falling by 63% during the same period. By 2010, over 24,000 more workers were employed in platinum than gold, while global sales were generating higher returns than any other mineral commodity. The profits were enormous. In 2001, Amplats became the first South African company to report a profit of US$1 billion earned solely from its domestic operations, while its annual profit rate increased by 87% from 1996. At the peak of the boom in 2007 and 2008, Amplats paid out a total of R29 billion in dividends to its shareholders – the bulk of which flowed overseas since its parent company, Anglo American, was now headquartered in London. Overall, the sector achieved a return on capital of over 20%, turning it into the star mining stock of the international bourses. What had hitherto been a relatively marginal industry, had thus emerged as the most dynamic element of the post-apartheid mining economy, and was now also fast becoming the focal point of efforts by the ANC government to simultaneously promote a new black bourgeoisie at its commanding heights – a process most graphically personified by the elevation of Cyril Ramaphosa, a former General Secretary of both the NUM and the ANC, to the Lonmin board of directors – and reverse years of manufacturing decline through the development of a new minerals-based industrialisation strategy (ANC 2012; Capps 2012b; Fine 2012).

However, by 2012 the intensely cyclical nature of the platinum industry had reasserted itself in the wake of the world financial crash. That year, Amplats reported a staggering fall of 78% in its headline earnings, and like its peers now confronted the twin problems of overcapacity and indebtedness – the consequence of the industry's frenetic expansion during the boom years. Alongside this, costs continued to escalate at double-digit rates, and the companies came under intense pressure from their international investors to reduce them as platinum prices flat-lined. While labour was not the only element of the cost base that had inflated prior to 2012 – power and transport were other key components – it was the only one over which the producers exercised direct control, and hence where they would first look for savings in an effort to restore cash flow and address the clamour for ‘shareholder value’. But their position was further worsened by the fact that the ANC's policy reforms, most notably the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act (2002), had not only compelled the established producers to take on new Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) partners – its principal means of promoting an African capitalist class – but had also eroded their historic monopoly over the mineral resource base and opened the field to new, international entrants, above all junior miners from Canada and Australia (Capps 2012b). Meanwhile, the secondary supply of platinum from recycling had quadrupled since 2000, and the market price was further depressed by a steady flow from vast above-ground stocks, which had previously been hoarded by an opaque combination of producers, end users and speculators. Facing a deepening crisis of overproduction and with their capacity to regulate the rate of global supply significantly diminished, the major South African companies were then rocked by the great explosion of worker militancy that begun at Impala in January 2012 and rapidly spread across the platinum belt.

The collection

The contributions to this special issue explore the changing conditions and forms of these worker struggles in detail. The majority of the authors participated in the colloquium, and most of the pieces are based on their papers. The collection has three distinguishing features. First is its sustained focus on the political sociologies of mine labour and local communities on the platinum belt around Rustenburg. This is the region where the social transformations wrought by the rise of the industry have been most intensely concentrated and over the longest period of time: a fact indexed by Rustenburg's distinction as the epicentre of the 2012–2014 strikes. In particular, the collection presents a cumulative account of how the growth of platinum in the post-apartheid era has pioneered a complex pattern of continuity and change in the dynamics and geographies of the old migrant labour system, and how this in turn connects with the historic ruptures in the modes of worker incorporation that underpinned the political settlement of 1994. But it also allows for exploration of other forms of community formation and class struggle that are arising from platinum's distinctive geopolitical location in the former homelands, which is casting the ‘rural’ and the ‘urban’ into new relationships and amalgams that are at once strikingly original and profoundly unstable. Second, all of the main articles, and many of the briefings, are based on detailed ethnographic research – a good deal of it under way before the Marikana massacre – making for particularly nuanced and textured accounts of the dynamics and forces at play. Finally, many of the contributions are from young activists and scholars who make a new contribution to the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) and open a debate to which the journal will no doubt return.

The first three articles explore the changing conditions of mine labour that have been engendered by a potent combination of South Africa's neoliberal transformation and the platinum industry's dramatic expansion in its distinctive geopolitical location. Drawing on her original field research, Kally Forrest opens with a detailed account of the new labour ‘recruitment regime’ that has crystallised around the Rustenburg mines. Forrest deploys Michael Burawoy's conceptual distinction between ‘despotic’ and ‘hegemonic’ labour regimes to carefully trace the transition from the old migrant labour system to a much more fluid and fragmented labour dispensation, characterised by increasing differentiation within the black workforce. At one end of the spectrum, and in a context of deepening structural unemployment, is the phenomenal growth of outsourcing. This is creating an enormous pool of highly exploited and insecure workers who are defined (or present themselves) as ‘local’, and can be drawn on or expelled as market conditions dictate. The fundamental logic of the migrant labour system is thus being reproduced, but in ways that circumvent new legislation aimed at undoing its worst excesses and steadily improving worker conditions, under historic pressure from the NUM. At the other end is the emergence of a much smaller stratum of highly skilled workers, who have been able to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by the formal end of job discrimination and statutory affirmative action. Forrest argues that these structural changes in the mine labour market have eroded older worker solidarities, and produced a more complex and contradictory field of trade union membership. However, between these two poles there remains a core of semi-skilled workers – most notably the iconic Rock Drill Operators (RDOs) – who were the driving force behind the strike waves and, having rejected NUM, now form the main constituency of AMCU.

The contribution by Andries Bezuidenhout and Sakhela Buhlungu further develops this picture from the perspective of Rustenburg's changing settlement patterns. Revisiting the old apartheid socio-spatial categories of suburb, compound, township and homeland they show how the stratification of the mine workforce has combined with Rustenburg's rapid urbanisation, in a setting where all these residential forms have long co-existed, but now formally share the same political space. In each case, the endemic insecurity engendered by the effective withdrawal of the state and parallel commodification of virtually all elements of public provision is creating new kinds of ‘enclaving’. This phenomenon is endemic across post-apartheid South Africa, but is assuming very particular forms around Rustenburg due to the decomposition of the old migrant labour system, and the rigid residential patterns and separations this entailed. Included here is the partial breakdown and reconfiguration of the compound system into more secure domestic units, and the explosive growth of informal settlements as mineworkers attempt to boost their wages by taking the option of a small ‘Living-Out Allowance’ and erecting shacks, often on ‘tribal’ land. Elsewhere is the equally visible growth of large gated ‘McMansions’ for senior mine managers (both black and white), and the outward spread of the old township into the buffer zones that had historically divided it from the areas of white residence, which has a created a new kind of suburb favoured by upwardly mobile mineworkers and union shop stewards. Within the tribal areas themselves, most notably Bafokeng, mineral revenues from local mines are ostensibly recycled for the exclusive benefit of the ‘royal nation’, generating another form of enclaving at the level of distribution, which melds the privatisation of services with ethnic qualification.

The third article zooms in on a very particular – and symbolically potent – residential type: the informal settlement at Lonmin's Marikana mine. Asanda Benya's intimate and committed study peels back the layers to show the central role played by the ‘women of Marikana’ in simultaneously sustaining the systematic exploitation of mine labour and the struggle against it. Here a critical shift is registered in the intensely gendered spatial relations of the old migrant labour system. In the past it was the unpaid labour of rural women that subsidised the reproduction of the mine workforce in the traditional labour-sending areas, while at the mines its capacity to labour was renewed on a daily basis through the provision of food and lodging in the segregated compounds, at minimum cost. Today, the picture is far more complex and differentiated. Marikana is broadly a settlement of migrant workers from these same areas, but while their families back home continue to rear the next generation of workers, these migrants are also establishing second homes with mistresses – or ‘town wives’, to use Moodie's (1994) term – in the informal settlement who do the daily work of replenishing their labour-power. A key implication of the demise of the ‘compounded migrant’ is thus that one wage now has to support two families, which in turn play different roles in the cheapening of mine wage-costs and hence the accumulation of capital.⁴ The pressures on social reproduction of the Marikana community as a whole are further intensified by the immense discrimination confronted by its women in the field of public provisioning, whether by the local municipality or the tribal authority, who are the registered owners of the land on which the settlement was founded. Yet, at the same time, these women's lives are so intimately structured by the daily rhythms and shifting demands of the mine that they experience the exploitation of ‘their’ men as an extension of their own marginalisation. As with mining communities across the world, the women of Marikana consequently played an indispensable role both in the 2012 strike, and in the aftermath of the massacre that tried, but failed, to crush it. Thus, concludes Benya, the ‘class struggle’ is not just limited to the point of production, but must be extended to encompass the entire sphere of social reproduction, and hence has a gender dimension that is simultaneously integral and irreducible.

Having established how these underlying changes in the composition and conditions of the mine workforce have fuelled the demand for a ‘living wage’, the next set of three articles in the issue take us directly to the recent strikes themselves, and in different ways cast light on the complex and shifting relationships between rank-and-file worker committees and formal trade union structures.

In a subtle and evocative piece, Dunbar Moodie provides a crucial slice of historical context that has too often been overlooked – or simply distorted – in accounts of the struggles of the present. Going back to the late 1980s, he shows that organising workers in the platinum mines around Rustenburg has never been easy, precisely because of their geopolitical location within, or near, the then Bophuthatswana bantustan. Initiating a comparative study with the case of Impala, Moodie first illuminates the tensions within senior mine management – typically dominated by larger-than-life personalities – over the question of whether or how to recognise worker demands to join the NUM, which at that time was banned within Bophuthatswana. On the other side of the class divide, he shows with equal nuance the divisions among worker-activists and organisations that were leading the struggle for union recognition, which had their own share of major personalities and strategic differences. Throughout is an emphasis on the intricate and shifting informal networks on which both sides drew in their respective domains of corporate boardroom and mine compound. Moodie's second case is that of Rustenburg Platinum Mines (later Amplats), and particularly its Union operation. The time is now 1996, the NUM has apparently secured its hegemony across the platinum belt and the homeland now no longer formally exists. Yet, apparent dissatisfaction with the heavy-handed and bureaucratic way the NUM has handled the delicate question of pension funds explodes in a worker revolt against the union, which seemingly anticipates those of the present. However, as Moodie shows, all manner of social forces are involved – again drawing on their own networks – and ultimately for quite different ends. While the NUM's hold on the platinum belt has, contrary to its self-image, always been comparatively tenuous, and there is a long tradition of independent worker initiatives, it would, concludes Moodie, be mistaken to see recent events simply as a replay of this earlier conflict, as indeed the NUM and SACP have attempted to present them.

The next contribution heads straight into the heat and fury of the 2012 strike wave, at its point of origin the Impala mine. Drawing on his extraordinary knowledge of the Rustenburg scene, Crispen Chinguno presents a virtual ‘insider's account’ of how the simultaneous revolt against the NUM and mine management unfolded. This is framed by a broader concern with the breakdown of the labour relations system that institutionalised the great class compromise of 1994, and with the new system that may be emerging in its place. Chinguno shows that a key consequence of this corporatist framework was to structure an increasingly remote and privileged trade union bureaucracy that felt more at home in co-determination fora with the state and industry, than dealing with the day-to-day concerns of its members. While a general tendency in such corporatist arrangements, this was given a particular cast and potency in the South African context through the NUM's central role in the tripartite alliance between the ANC, the SACP and COSATU: a fact reflected in the traditional elevation of its leadership into the high offices of party and state. But, argues Chinguno, the particular balance of organisational and political power institutionalised in these ‘social contracts’ is not necessarily stable, and it was precisely the hollowing-out of trade union democracy that created conditions for the workers’ rebellion, itself drawing on the older traditions and forms of rank-and-file initiative described by Moodie.

Luke Sinwell's contribution further develops the story, tracing the spread to Amplats of the 2012 strike, which came out much later that year. Here we learn of the growing tensions in the relationship between the Amplats worker committees and AMCU – the union that displaced the NUM – which manifested even more strongly in the second, 2014 strike wave. Again, Sinwell's intimate and sympathetic relationship with these worker leaders shines through – a product of his deeply engaged fieldwork – but he develops the analysis of the trade union bureaucracy in a different direction. Drawing on Gouldner's critique of Michels’ ‘iron law of oligarchy’ (Gouldner 1955; Michels 1915), Sinwell develops the suggestive concept of ‘insurgent trade unionism’ to show that when the rank-and-file takes the initiative the official power of the trade union leadership can be quickly marginalised and challenged. This, of course, is neither inevitable nor automatic, but opens up the field of possibility far wider than Michels would allow and suggests that trade unions themselves should be conceived as sites of struggle, with all this implies for worker strategy (a point also made by the more explicitly Marxist account of Cliff and Gluckstein [1986]). Tracing the changing fortunes of this insurgency at Amplats over the course of the 2012 and 2014 strikes, Sinwell pays particular attention to the intense debates between worker-activists over the tactical advantages and dangers of formalising their structures through AMCU, and how this would finally be at the cost of their independence. Another important counterpoint to Chinguno's account of the struggle at Impala emerges around the composition of the worker committees and their leadership. Where these were largely initiated and led by the RDOs at the former, it was other job categories – most notably crane drivers – who took the initiative at Amplats, which imbued the strikes with a quite different character and dynamic, particularly in their attitude to female mineworkers – a point taken up in Nyonde Ntswana's briefing, below.

The final article in the collection takes us in a full circle back to the question of ‘community’ and the signal importance of the platinum industry's locational specificity. Drawing on a detailed case study of the Bakgatla-ba-Kgafela traditional authority area, Gavin Capps and Sonwabile Mnwana consider how the rapid growth of the platinum industry has been impacting on rural relations, which brings us into quite a different political realm – that of land and the chieftaincy. They frame their account with an examination of how the evolution of a historically specific tenurial regime across Rustenburg's mineralised tribal authority areas has conditioned two distinct – and opposing – trajectories of rural class formation with the recent expansion of mining. On the one hand, the necessity of securing stable property rights in this ‘tribal-trust’ land under changing legislative conditions has compelled the platinum corporations to incorporate the chiefs as junior partners, typically through the conversion of previous royalty streams into equity stakes in their local mining operations. This in turn has enabled the latter to strike out on new paths of ‘accumulation from above’ and join the ranks of the BEE elite. However, since this path is also predicated on the dispossession of the rural population and entails massive chiefly corruption, it has on the other hand been resisted by smaller, clan-based groups who claim to be the original buyers, and are now struggling to have their own rights formally recognised. Yet, these ‘claims from below’ themselves entail the stricter definition of group boundaries and legitimate authority, which can also lead to the exclusion of key social categories, including youth, women and, especially, labour migrants. Capps and Mnwana thus conclude that while there is a strong democratic impulse in the emergent movement against the mine–chief nexus, its emphasis on securing private group property rights – and hence a cut of the mineral revenues – at the same time poses a strategic challenge for a new left whose stated aim is to unite worker and community struggles on the platinum belt.

Four briefings further support and develop the cumulative picture emerging from the articles. The first returns us to the strikes themselves, but here from the perspective of women workers. A further change in the composition of the mine workforce post-1994 was the statutory entry of women, who were previously barred from underground occupations. Women have faced enormous discrimination on the job, and chauvinism and sexual violence is rife at every level. However, as Nyonde Ntswana shows in her important account, there were cases where the position of women was transformed during the strike, in some instances seeing them emerge as worker leaders in their own right. She thus not only provides an important counterpoint to the contributions of Chinguno and Sinwell, but also complements and extends Benya's gendering of the class struggle.

Paul Stewart then provides a well-informed account of the prospect for mechanisation in the platinum industry, and its social constraints and implications. This is a particularly topical question given the immense pressure now being placed on the platinum producers to adopt more capital-intensive methods in the wake of the strikes and current profitability crisis. However, Stewart is sceptical that the geological constraints of the deep-level operations around Rustenburg can be that easily engineered out, and hence predicts that the RDOs and associated grades will remain in place for some time to come. Moreover, while there is undoubtedly scope to shift to the northern limb around Mokopane (which is much more amenable to open-cast methods, and which Amplats is now doing), this may be limited not only by the prospect of worker resistance, but also having to displace the rural communities that occupy this portion of the former Lebowa homeland.

The last two briefings look at the struggle over the profoundly inequitable distribution of profits and wages within the platinum industry in terms of its location in the global economy. Drawing on his expert report on the ‘affordability’ of the mineworkers wage demands to the Marikana Commission of Inquiry, Dick Forslund exposes the transfer-pricing activities of Lonmin. Crucially, he argues that this should not necessarily just be seen as problem of ‘tax evasion’ but also one of ‘wage evasion’, which will continue so long as the platinum corporations are able to shift profits around offshore tax havens like Bermuda.

In turn, Andrew Bowman and Gilad Isaacs provide a revealing assessment of the different narratives deployed during the 2014 strike by the major platinum corporations. They show that while platinum corporations (and their PR companies) presented themselves as in a state of acute financial crisis, they gave a much more positive impression of both their health and the industry's longer-term outlook to their major investors and analysts. Bowman and Isaacs develop their account around a detailed analysis of the companies’ financial data, which both demonstrates the enormous profits made by them (and their global shareholders) during the boom and also gives a sense of the true company cost of the 2014 wage settlement.

Finally, we include a debate piece by the long-term labour activist Leonard Gentle, which draws out the broader implications of subsequent developments in the South African labour movement. This focuses in particular on the meaning and prospects of the break of the National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa (NUMSA) with the tripartite alliance, which forms a critical part of the chain of events set in motion (or at least accelerated) by the Marikana massacre. The left, both nationally and internationally, has vested much hope in this so-called ‘NUMSA moment’, and particularly the union's stated objectives of both developing a new ‘united front’ to link workplace and community struggles, and exploring the possibilities for launching a new workers’ party, through the development of a new Movement for Socialism. Gentle, while sympathetic, warns of the dangers of channelling the new spirit of workers’ militancy into the trade union structures that evolved out of the COSATU tradition, and argues that new forms of organisation will be required to take account of the radically changed circumstances of the South African working class in the era of neoliberal globalisation. His is both an important and provocative position, and we hope that it will serve to stimulate a debate across future pages of ROAPE at this crossroads for both the South African and continental left.

Acknowledgements

The SWOP ‘Meanings of Marikana’ colloquium was organised by the editors of this special issue in conjunction with the Review of African Political Economy, which was also its main sponsor. The additional support of the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung and Wits Dean of Humanities is gratefully acknowledged, as are two major research grants that helped fund the event as well as SWOP’s work in this area: (i) the ‘Mining, Society and Environment’ project grant of the South African National Research Foundation (no. 78662); and (ii) the ‘Mining and Rural Transformation in Southern Africa’ project grant of the Ford Foundation (no. 0120-6086). Full participant details and video footage of the colloquium proceedings can be found at: http://www.wits.ac.za/academic/humanities/19537/international_colloquia.html. This editorial has benefited from the suggestions and comments of my co-editors, Dunbar Moodie and Ray Bush, as well as those of Andrew Bowman, Janet Bujra and Gabrielle Lynch on earlier drafts. All errors remain my own.

Notes

1 For earlier discussions in this journal of the immediate events around Marikana and their greater significance see Alexander (2013) and Chinguno (2013). Both authors participated in the SWOP colloquium.

2 Despite its growing significance in the post-apartheid mining industry, there have to date been surprisingly few academic analyses of the distinctive political economy of platinum. The following draws on my initial accounts, which were both first published in this journal: Capps 2012a and 2012b.

3 Strictly speaking ‘platinum’ is but one of the family of six chemically similar elements that make up the Platinum Group Metals (PGMs); the others being palladium, rhodium, iridium, osmium and ruthenium. These normally occur together, though in different ratios depending on location. For ease of exposition, ‘platinum’ is used here to refer to the PGMs as a whole, and this convention is followed throughout the special issue.

4 It is perhaps worth mentioning that division between migrant mineworkers and ‘local’ women was never quite so absolute, but rather tending to shift with the changing fortunes of the mining industry and legislative conditions. As Moodie (1994) has shown in the case of gold, women have always tended to be present in migrant worker centres, giving rise to variegated and fluid patterns of sex work, cohabitation and child rearing. However, the key difference with the platinum industry today is the decisive structural shift away from male-only compounds to burgeoning and seemingly permanent informal settlements around the mine heads, in which the formation of local (and often second) mineworker families has emerged as the dominant tendency. This is in part indicated by the fact that, according to the South African Institute of International Affairs, the dependency ratio for mining jobs is now 10:1 (and anecdotal evidence often puts it higher), though this is also attributable to the deepening crisis in structural unemployment.