FROM LAISSEZ FAIRE TO INTERVENTIONIST STATE: SUBJUGATION AND CO-OPTATION OF ORGANISED LABOUR ON THE SOUTH AFRICAN GOLD MINES 1902-1939

The literature on twentieth-century South Africa is prone to over-emphasise the unique aspects of South African society, such as its highly institutionalised and rigid system of race discrimination. This has led to an impasse, making it difficult to analyse and situate South Africa in general and comparative contexts. It is increasingly seen as a deviant, even bizarre, case among modern industrial states; and its historians have tended to seek unique causes for these ostensibly unique effects. The quest is usually carried out in a highly selective way which ignores or understates important contextual and contingent processes, distorting both past and present.;The study rejects the virtually unanimously held theory that the protracted capital-labour conflict between 1907 and 1924 was essentially about the substitution of poorly paid black labour for exceptionally well-paid white labour. Rather the overriding issue was the struggle for industrial dominance between capital and labour, and the state's growing intervention in the conflict.;The study consequently also rejects the equally widely held "turning point" theory which argues that international mining capital won the "battle" of 1922 (by crushing the Rand Revolt), only to lose the "war" of 1924 (when a new government ostensibly representing Afrikaner nationalists and white labour was elected).;The events of 1922-1924 marked a decisive defeat for organised labour, a definite victory for the expanding interventionist state, and a qualified but important victory for mining capital. They did not constitute a turning point, the study demonstrates, because they were logical consequences of both the long-standing and growing state-capital alliance and the uneven but unidirectional process by which the state subjugated and co-opted organised labour.;This study places South Africa in a broader analytic framework by focussing on the increasingly interventionist nature of the state in the conflict between capital and organised (white) labour on the gold mines. It is at the same time a detailed examination of the South African decision-making process and the relationship between mining capitalism and political power.;Neither did the increasing state support for import-substitute industrialisation after 1924 mark a "turning point": it was a wholly logical development of previous governments' preoccupations with stabilising revenue and expanding employment opportunities for the white electorate.;The results of the study define certain types of situations--relevant to other industrial states as well as South Africa--which tend to influence the speed, degree and quality of state intervention in a fairly predictable way wherever they occur. (1) In "developing" or "developed" states where the government must account to an electorate there tends to be an expanding state role in all sectors of the economy, especially in the creation of jobs and the control of the capital-labour conflict. The role is a major part of what some social scientists refer to as the "legitimation imperative" of the state. (2) Where an economy is heavily dependent on a single product (such as gold), the state will be especially prone to safeguard its major source of revenue by intervening in crisis situations to guarantee the producing industry's viability. This role corresponds roughly with what has been called the state's "accumulation imperative." (3) Where the electorate's economic divisions are significantly cross-cut by ideological and cultural divisions (as in South Africa), the true purposes of state intervention are even more than normally apt to be dissembled. This is achieved by processes such as formal co-optation, which supply organised labour with the shadow of power rather than its substance, and mask the state's informal alliance with capital.