Capitalist Transformation and The Fourth Industrial Revolution: Mechanisation and automation in the South African mining industry

The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) is supposed to be the latest big technological shift in manufacturing and beyond. As a technological framework and policy programme, it has formally been adopted by several countries, including South Africa, where 4IR technologies are hailed as a possible solution to chronic high levels of poverty and unemployment. The South African mining industry has fully embraced this narrative by designing its version of the 4IR branded "Modern Mine". This work investigates the reasons that shaped the design of the Modern Mine while studying the challenges faced by its attempted application. Theoretically, it sees the Modern Mine as an attempt to enhance the movement from the formal to the real subsumption of labour to capital. Empirically, it situates this strategy within the history of the struggle between capital and labour in the industry, where the use of new technologies represents an attempt to strip workers of their autonomy while extracting and codifying their tacit knowledge. This work shows that this attempt is followed by considerable resistance from workers. The resulting conflict generates a significant limitation to socio-technical changes in the organisation of production. Ultimately, this work contributes to a series of debates around the future of work, the 4IR, Marxist theories of the labour process and South African labour studies. By shedding some light on the concrete challenges of technological adoption it underlines the unpredictability surrounding the future of work. Its emphasis on workers' ability to resist technological development provides further evidence of the need to discard determinist concepts of control and re-evaluate the role of resistance in shaping technological choices and directions.