This book has shown how capital’s attempt to homogenize and deskill the labour process in South African foundries was resisted by workers, and how a key role was played by the craft unions through the mechanism of social closure. In South Africa craft workers possessed institutional leverage in the industrial relations system and were able to use this privileged access to entrench the exclusivity inherent within craft unionism. The specificity of the South African labour process lies in the explicitly racial form taken by social closure. Capitalist development did not, in the short term, lead to an undermining of the racial order; instead it led, as shown in Part I, to an intensification of the racial division of labour in the foundry.

However, the contradictions generated by capitalist development, and in particular by the transition to monopoly capitalism, created a crisis of control in work relations. Changes in the labour process led to a shift in the balance of power: the decline of the ‘labour aristocrat’ saw the rise of the production worker. As a consequence a new form of workplace organization emerged — the industrial union, which through the strategic location of its members in the labour process was able to challenge the traditional forms of control in the foundry. Faced by the challenge described in Part II, the state withdrew formal support for racial exclusion and embarked upon an experiment to incorporate black workers into the industrial relations system (the Wiehahn solution). Part III showed how this incorporative strategy has been challenged ‘from below’ by demands that the shop steward structure be involved in negotiations and that factory-level bargaining take place. These demands have now widened, moving the frontier of control beyond production to the reproduction of the workforce — from the politics of production to global politics. This raises the difficult and unresolved question of the relationship between workplace organization and the wider popular struggle. To illustrate the complex nature of the interaction between divisions within the working class, the labour process, and workplace organization, we need to return to the ‘five faces’ introduced in Chapter 1. Through these five working lives — Bob, Len, Morris, Sipho, and Josias — we hope to provide an illustration, in capsule form, of the main themes of the study.