Land reform, accumulation and social reproduction: the South African experience in global and historical perspective

Abstract

The reality of capitalist economy, its inherent dynamics and contradictions, must be understood as central to policy debates about land reform in South Africa today. Progressive land reform should strive to promote ‘accumulation’ from below’, through the redistribution of productive land to a large number of petty agricultural commodity producers. Supporting the social reproduction needs of the rural poor is also important, and securing their rights to communal land must be a key goal of tenure reform. Beyond South Africa, the experience of redistributive land reform more broadly suggests that southern Africa is a unique context in some ways (e.g. there is a need to break up large and productive farms) but not in many others. Many of the problems facing land reform in South Africa have been experienced elsewhere. Beyond land reform, the world is currently in the grip of several overlapping crises, notably the increasing precarity of working populations, ecological breakdown, large-scale migration, technological advances that threaten both jobs and democracy, and a swing towards right-wing and authoritarian modes of governance. Again, the centrality of the logic of capital to these simultaneous crises must be acknowledged.