- Email: [email protected]
Violent political and economic geographies of mining
Political Geography 33 (2013) A1–A2
Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
Political Geography journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo
Guest Editorial
Violent political and economic geographies of mining
On 16 August 2012, post-apartheid South Africa witnessed the first large-scale massacre of citizens by the police, who mowed down 34 miners in Marikana within a few minutes. Through this incident, the hill on which the massacre took place and at which miners gathered to wage their struggle for a decent wage (R12 500 per month) was inserted into the world map overnight because of the wide ranging ramifications of the massacre on South Africa’s socio-political landscape and the potential impact of the massacre on the global economy that was already in a crisis. On the same weekend of the massacre, the cover page of the national Mining Weekly magazine carried a story on the significant contribution of the local mining sector to the national economy and general welfare that, in the view of the magazine, is neither clearly communicated to or understood by the South African public. Clearly, the massacre has multiple meanings and is understood differently by children who will never see their fathers again; investors and shareholders whose eyes have been on the London and Johannesburg stock exchanges in the aftermath of the incident; politicians hoping to stake a claim at the 53rd National Conference of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) in Mangaung in December 2012; social and human rights activists who wondered why and how a Sharpeville-type massacre could take place in a free and democratic country; and the list goes on. Closer attention to the Marikana massacre has the potential to offer rich insights into the grey line between the political geography of the state, the political geography of capital, and the political geography of the workplace. The politics of mining – as power over, access to, and ownership of mineral resources and revenue – has a long and global pedigree. For instance, under colonialism the power of the colonial regime was based on, among other things, control and ownership of mineral resources with the help of metropolitan mining companies. Mineral resources remain crucial in the contest for power in the postcolony; they are mobilized by regionalist movements as a political strategy; and they also underpin much of contemporary geopolitics. Apart from colonial conquest and bloody wars, the private sector has long used the principle that the discovery and development of mineral resources leads to private ownership and hence the concentration of mining rights in multinational companies. The rocky road towards the nationalization or indigenization of mineral wealth might be seen as a resurgence of modern-day socialism or a way of reasserting national sovereignty over territorial resources. Conceptually, however, it is false to frame sovereignty in absolute antagonism to foreign capital because, as Emel, Huber, and Makene (2011: 70) note, ‘global capital is constitutive of the process of constructing a specifically national mode of 0962-6298/$ – see front matter Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2012.12.004
territorial sovereignty’ congenial to flows of foreign mining capital. The mine is thus a site of intense investment and state-aided control while also serving as a linchpin of the economy that provides the state with the much-needed revenues that in turn affect the credibility and legitimacy of the state. The mining industry is anchored in the symbiotic relationship between extractive political and economic institutions which, ‘by their very logic, must create wealth so that it can be extracted’ (Acemoglu & Robinson, 2012: 124). In the context of South Africa, the mining industry has relied heavily on institutionalized migrant system that not only guarantees cheap labour through excessive exploitation but that also ensures the externalization of costs to the ‘reserves’ and neighbouring countries. The fact that four of the miners killed in Marikana were Basotho nationals while most of the others were internal migrants reveals the continuation of the migrant labour system rooted in the political economy of South Africa and operating under the watchful eye of the democratic state. The mine thus provides an especially intense version of all the contradictions that Marx associated with the Factory. It was in Marx’s Factory that large numbers of workers gathered and developed common interests, and in South Africa this process has been particularly evident in mines, as evidenced by the birth of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) in 1982 and the leading role that it subsequently took in the overthrow of the apartheid regime. The union’s historical struggle was mobilized on the inherent contradictions between capital and labour. During apartheid the location of workers in the economy gave mineworkers the ability to disrupt the economy in pursuit of better working conditions and their disruptive behaviour was understood as part of the broad struggle for liberation (Buhlungu and Tshoaedi 2012). However, under a democratic state, their behaviour has acquired various interpretations ranging from anarchy to political opportunism. In the context of the theme under discussion here, the wildcat strike that led to the Marikana massacre should be seen as disrupting the management of mining labour that had been arranged by the apartheid state and mining houses and later refined and affirmed by the state, NUM and Lonmin company in a constitutional democracy. The democratic state responded to this disruption by adopting apartheid-era tactics, language and instruments of control to manage disruptions in the production of wealth. The events at Lonmin reveal changing conditions in the Marxian notion of the Factory, namely the emergence of a social opposition equivalent to the Gramcian Factory Council that negated industrial legality. Gramsci proposed the formation of the Factory Council as an organ of workers’ democracy and a school of political and
A2
Guest Editorial / Political Geography 33 (2013) A1–A2
administrative experience of the proletariat in post WWI Italy because the trade union had come to be ‘foreign to the masses who [had] acquired a consciousness of their historical mission as a revolutionary class’ (Levi, 1991: 132, 167). The wildcat strike at Lonmin and the consequent settlement of the dispute by a wage increase of 11–22% not only disrupted the industrial legality epitomized by agreements between labour unions and employers but also highlighted the sociology of upward mobility in the labour unions. In the post-apartheid context, union leaders have different expectations, goals and motivations (Buhlungu and Tshoaedi, 2012). For example, a senior ANC comrade, Cyril Ramaphosa, who facilitated the formation of NUM, sits on Lonmin’s Board of Directors to represent his company, Shanduka Group, which is Lonmin’s principal Black Economic Empowerment partner. The elite within NUM have become preoccupied with class and political interests to the neglect of a working class agenda. Hence ordinary members are losing trust in the union. These conditions notwithstanding, the possibilities for the emergence of Gramsci’s Factory Council in South African mines are remote because NUM and its alliance partner, the ruling ANC, have tactfully dislodged any alternative union or political entity that could seriously contest the constituency of NUM and, by default, that of the ANC. The tragic event at Marikana raises the question of how a democratic state could be brutal like its predecessor, the apartheid state. To borrow from Mamdani’s book, When Victims Become Killers, what gave rise to the ANC government’s brutal response to striking miners, given the party’s experience at the hand of one of the world’s most oppressive and brutal regimes as well as the constitutional measures that had been put in place to limit the possibilities for state overreach? These questions suggest that any explanation of the Marikana massacre would be incomplete without a proper reflection on the nature of the post-apartheid state. Such a reflection need not be construed as an obsession with state-centrism. Instead, it should be seen as a window through which we can understand the ways in which the political geographies of the state, the economy, the workplace, and the social (labour) movement intersect. The state’s brutal response to striking miners brings to light the violence of state agencies and also suggests a dangerous reinstitutionalization of an autocratic and authoritarian regime. Southall (2003) reminds us that the authoritarian culture of liberation movements became dominant in those countries where the colonial power was reluctant to depart and in settler dominated political economies. The Leninist notions of vanguard leadership and democratic centralism adopted during the armed struggle ‘promoted a culture in which opposition to established leadership and received theory was regarded as both illegitimate and reactionary’ (Southall, 2003, 259). The ruling ANC is increasingly becoming an intolerant partly as result of its dominance – in terms of electoral victories and the monopoly of power over state resources – and the party’s belief that it has the inherent right to govern on the grounds of its struggle credentials. The contestation over mineworkers as a political constituency hints at political intolerance while the massacre exposed dynamics in organized labour and the growing inability of the state to manage the cumulative effects of capitalist exploitation in a neoliberal economy. It could be argued that the Marikana massacre manifests a larger social conflict whose roots can be traced to the political economy of mining. To the disappointment of the working class and other segments of society, mainly the poor, political liberation epitomized by Nelson Mandela taking office as the first head of the state in a democratic South Africa has yet to fundamentally change the material conditions of the working class majority. The mining industry in South Africa is still highly exploitative and dangerous – miners are not only paid low wages while living under poor
conditions but also face death underground in the form of mine accidents that kill and maim mineworkers every year. These conditions contrast sharply with the Lonmin Charter that claims to conduct business in a sustainable, socially and environmentally responsible way; respect the communities and nations that host its operations; enhance the quality of life for its employees and their families; and so on. It was to the exploitative nature of Lonmin that workers sought to respond, without using the established bargaining structures through which NUM was supposed to represent their interests. In so doing, they engaged in social activism for an economic emancipation that, it was hoped, would fundamentally transform the economy in favour of the working class and the poor. The Marikana massacre not only shook conceptions and images of post-apartheid South Africa as an extraordinary state and place but might be considered a turning point in the struggle for freedom, or what workers at the 11th Congress of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) called the Lula moment – in reference to the fundamental transformation of the Brazilian economy under the working class leader, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The costly victory of mineworkers at Lonmin made a huge dent in the system of collective bargaining. Following Lonmin, workers at other mines have embarked on wildcat strikes to demand wage increases outside formal bargaining structures and procedures. Thus, the Marikana tragedy has plunged the mining industry into a crisis to which capital has had to adjust with the strong backing of the state. It has set in motion some fundamental changes in the political economy of mining in South Africa while also symbolizing the costs and opportunities for the larger project for economic freedom. The use of violence by the state to control the strike at Lonmin points to the complex relationship between the political geography of the state and the political geography of mining and how these ‘two geographies’ could be contextualized in a dynamic workplace that in turn reflects the political environment and economic conditions of the time. The enduring contradictions between capital and labour provide an avenue for exploring the ways in which multiple geographies might constitute a comprehensive analytical framework that enables us to grasp the spatial patterning of mining and capital and the role of the state in that process, and the patterns of violence and resistance it engenders. Acknowledgements I wish to thank James Sidaway for encouraging me to reflect on the Marikana tragedy and Phil Steinberg for his useful comments on the draft.
References Acemoglu, D., & Robinson, J. A. (2012). Why nations fail: The origins of power, prosperity, and poverty. London: Profile Books. Buhlungu, S., & Tshoaedi, M. (Eds.), (2012). COSATU’s contested legacy: South African trade unions in the second decade of democracy. Cape Town: Human Sciences Research Council. Emel, J., Huber, M. T., & Makene, M. H. (2011). Extracting sovereignty: capital, territory, and gold mining in Tanzania. Political Geography, 30, 70–79. Levi, M. (1991). Marxism, Vol. 1. Aldershot: Edward Edgar Publishing. Southall, R. (2003). Democracy in southern Africa: moving beyond a difficult legacy. Review of African Political Economy, 96, 255–272.
Maano Ramutsindela* Department of Environmental & Geographical Science, University of Cape Town, South Africa * Corresponding author. Tel.: þ27 21 6502873. E-mail address: [email protected]
Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
Political Geography journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo
Guest Editorial
Violent political and economic geographies of mining
On 16 August 2012, post-apartheid South Africa witnessed the first large-scale massacre of citizens by the police, who mowed down 34 miners in Marikana within a few minutes. Through this incident, the hill on which the massacre took place and at which miners gathered to wage their struggle for a decent wage (R12 500 per month) was inserted into the world map overnight because of the wide ranging ramifications of the massacre on South Africa’s socio-political landscape and the potential impact of the massacre on the global economy that was already in a crisis. On the same weekend of the massacre, the cover page of the national Mining Weekly magazine carried a story on the significant contribution of the local mining sector to the national economy and general welfare that, in the view of the magazine, is neither clearly communicated to or understood by the South African public. Clearly, the massacre has multiple meanings and is understood differently by children who will never see their fathers again; investors and shareholders whose eyes have been on the London and Johannesburg stock exchanges in the aftermath of the incident; politicians hoping to stake a claim at the 53rd National Conference of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) in Mangaung in December 2012; social and human rights activists who wondered why and how a Sharpeville-type massacre could take place in a free and democratic country; and the list goes on. Closer attention to the Marikana massacre has the potential to offer rich insights into the grey line between the political geography of the state, the political geography of capital, and the political geography of the workplace. The politics of mining – as power over, access to, and ownership of mineral resources and revenue – has a long and global pedigree. For instance, under colonialism the power of the colonial regime was based on, among other things, control and ownership of mineral resources with the help of metropolitan mining companies. Mineral resources remain crucial in the contest for power in the postcolony; they are mobilized by regionalist movements as a political strategy; and they also underpin much of contemporary geopolitics. Apart from colonial conquest and bloody wars, the private sector has long used the principle that the discovery and development of mineral resources leads to private ownership and hence the concentration of mining rights in multinational companies. The rocky road towards the nationalization or indigenization of mineral wealth might be seen as a resurgence of modern-day socialism or a way of reasserting national sovereignty over territorial resources. Conceptually, however, it is false to frame sovereignty in absolute antagonism to foreign capital because, as Emel, Huber, and Makene (2011: 70) note, ‘global capital is constitutive of the process of constructing a specifically national mode of 0962-6298/$ – see front matter Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2012.12.004
territorial sovereignty’ congenial to flows of foreign mining capital. The mine is thus a site of intense investment and state-aided control while also serving as a linchpin of the economy that provides the state with the much-needed revenues that in turn affect the credibility and legitimacy of the state. The mining industry is anchored in the symbiotic relationship between extractive political and economic institutions which, ‘by their very logic, must create wealth so that it can be extracted’ (Acemoglu & Robinson, 2012: 124). In the context of South Africa, the mining industry has relied heavily on institutionalized migrant system that not only guarantees cheap labour through excessive exploitation but that also ensures the externalization of costs to the ‘reserves’ and neighbouring countries. The fact that four of the miners killed in Marikana were Basotho nationals while most of the others were internal migrants reveals the continuation of the migrant labour system rooted in the political economy of South Africa and operating under the watchful eye of the democratic state. The mine thus provides an especially intense version of all the contradictions that Marx associated with the Factory. It was in Marx’s Factory that large numbers of workers gathered and developed common interests, and in South Africa this process has been particularly evident in mines, as evidenced by the birth of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) in 1982 and the leading role that it subsequently took in the overthrow of the apartheid regime. The union’s historical struggle was mobilized on the inherent contradictions between capital and labour. During apartheid the location of workers in the economy gave mineworkers the ability to disrupt the economy in pursuit of better working conditions and their disruptive behaviour was understood as part of the broad struggle for liberation (Buhlungu and Tshoaedi 2012). However, under a democratic state, their behaviour has acquired various interpretations ranging from anarchy to political opportunism. In the context of the theme under discussion here, the wildcat strike that led to the Marikana massacre should be seen as disrupting the management of mining labour that had been arranged by the apartheid state and mining houses and later refined and affirmed by the state, NUM and Lonmin company in a constitutional democracy. The democratic state responded to this disruption by adopting apartheid-era tactics, language and instruments of control to manage disruptions in the production of wealth. The events at Lonmin reveal changing conditions in the Marxian notion of the Factory, namely the emergence of a social opposition equivalent to the Gramcian Factory Council that negated industrial legality. Gramsci proposed the formation of the Factory Council as an organ of workers’ democracy and a school of political and
A2
Guest Editorial / Political Geography 33 (2013) A1–A2
administrative experience of the proletariat in post WWI Italy because the trade union had come to be ‘foreign to the masses who [had] acquired a consciousness of their historical mission as a revolutionary class’ (Levi, 1991: 132, 167). The wildcat strike at Lonmin and the consequent settlement of the dispute by a wage increase of 11–22% not only disrupted the industrial legality epitomized by agreements between labour unions and employers but also highlighted the sociology of upward mobility in the labour unions. In the post-apartheid context, union leaders have different expectations, goals and motivations (Buhlungu and Tshoaedi, 2012). For example, a senior ANC comrade, Cyril Ramaphosa, who facilitated the formation of NUM, sits on Lonmin’s Board of Directors to represent his company, Shanduka Group, which is Lonmin’s principal Black Economic Empowerment partner. The elite within NUM have become preoccupied with class and political interests to the neglect of a working class agenda. Hence ordinary members are losing trust in the union. These conditions notwithstanding, the possibilities for the emergence of Gramsci’s Factory Council in South African mines are remote because NUM and its alliance partner, the ruling ANC, have tactfully dislodged any alternative union or political entity that could seriously contest the constituency of NUM and, by default, that of the ANC. The tragic event at Marikana raises the question of how a democratic state could be brutal like its predecessor, the apartheid state. To borrow from Mamdani’s book, When Victims Become Killers, what gave rise to the ANC government’s brutal response to striking miners, given the party’s experience at the hand of one of the world’s most oppressive and brutal regimes as well as the constitutional measures that had been put in place to limit the possibilities for state overreach? These questions suggest that any explanation of the Marikana massacre would be incomplete without a proper reflection on the nature of the post-apartheid state. Such a reflection need not be construed as an obsession with state-centrism. Instead, it should be seen as a window through which we can understand the ways in which the political geographies of the state, the economy, the workplace, and the social (labour) movement intersect. The state’s brutal response to striking miners brings to light the violence of state agencies and also suggests a dangerous reinstitutionalization of an autocratic and authoritarian regime. Southall (2003) reminds us that the authoritarian culture of liberation movements became dominant in those countries where the colonial power was reluctant to depart and in settler dominated political economies. The Leninist notions of vanguard leadership and democratic centralism adopted during the armed struggle ‘promoted a culture in which opposition to established leadership and received theory was regarded as both illegitimate and reactionary’ (Southall, 2003, 259). The ruling ANC is increasingly becoming an intolerant partly as result of its dominance – in terms of electoral victories and the monopoly of power over state resources – and the party’s belief that it has the inherent right to govern on the grounds of its struggle credentials. The contestation over mineworkers as a political constituency hints at political intolerance while the massacre exposed dynamics in organized labour and the growing inability of the state to manage the cumulative effects of capitalist exploitation in a neoliberal economy. It could be argued that the Marikana massacre manifests a larger social conflict whose roots can be traced to the political economy of mining. To the disappointment of the working class and other segments of society, mainly the poor, political liberation epitomized by Nelson Mandela taking office as the first head of the state in a democratic South Africa has yet to fundamentally change the material conditions of the working class majority. The mining industry in South Africa is still highly exploitative and dangerous – miners are not only paid low wages while living under poor
conditions but also face death underground in the form of mine accidents that kill and maim mineworkers every year. These conditions contrast sharply with the Lonmin Charter that claims to conduct business in a sustainable, socially and environmentally responsible way; respect the communities and nations that host its operations; enhance the quality of life for its employees and their families; and so on. It was to the exploitative nature of Lonmin that workers sought to respond, without using the established bargaining structures through which NUM was supposed to represent their interests. In so doing, they engaged in social activism for an economic emancipation that, it was hoped, would fundamentally transform the economy in favour of the working class and the poor. The Marikana massacre not only shook conceptions and images of post-apartheid South Africa as an extraordinary state and place but might be considered a turning point in the struggle for freedom, or what workers at the 11th Congress of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) called the Lula moment – in reference to the fundamental transformation of the Brazilian economy under the working class leader, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The costly victory of mineworkers at Lonmin made a huge dent in the system of collective bargaining. Following Lonmin, workers at other mines have embarked on wildcat strikes to demand wage increases outside formal bargaining structures and procedures. Thus, the Marikana tragedy has plunged the mining industry into a crisis to which capital has had to adjust with the strong backing of the state. It has set in motion some fundamental changes in the political economy of mining in South Africa while also symbolizing the costs and opportunities for the larger project for economic freedom. The use of violence by the state to control the strike at Lonmin points to the complex relationship between the political geography of the state and the political geography of mining and how these ‘two geographies’ could be contextualized in a dynamic workplace that in turn reflects the political environment and economic conditions of the time. The enduring contradictions between capital and labour provide an avenue for exploring the ways in which multiple geographies might constitute a comprehensive analytical framework that enables us to grasp the spatial patterning of mining and capital and the role of the state in that process, and the patterns of violence and resistance it engenders. Acknowledgements I wish to thank James Sidaway for encouraging me to reflect on the Marikana tragedy and Phil Steinberg for his useful comments on the draft.
References Acemoglu, D., & Robinson, J. A. (2012). Why nations fail: The origins of power, prosperity, and poverty. London: Profile Books. Buhlungu, S., & Tshoaedi, M. (Eds.), (2012). COSATU’s contested legacy: South African trade unions in the second decade of democracy. Cape Town: Human Sciences Research Council. Emel, J., Huber, M. T., & Makene, M. H. (2011). Extracting sovereignty: capital, territory, and gold mining in Tanzania. Political Geography, 30, 70–79. Levi, M. (1991). Marxism, Vol. 1. Aldershot: Edward Edgar Publishing. Southall, R. (2003). Democracy in southern Africa: moving beyond a difficult legacy. Review of African Political Economy, 96, 255–272.
Maano Ramutsindela* Department of Environmental & Geographical Science, University of Cape Town, South Africa * Corresponding author. Tel.: þ27 21 6502873. E-mail address: [email protected]