12 ANÁLISIS DE RIESGOS
12.1. POSIBLES RIESGOS PRESENTES EN LA FASE DE FUNCIONAMIENTO
Morris (1976) likened the process of capitalist transformation that unfolded in South Africa to a Prussian Path of agrarian transition. The early development of white agrarian capital was characterised by ‘accumulation from above’ (Lenin, 1982) whereby the state made use of its power and resources to build the agrarian capital of a small rural elite. Morris (1976) emphasizes the central role of mining in the 19th century in transforming the social relations of production in the countryside. Rather than a productive agriculture providing a surplus to industry, in South Africa it was the other way around.
Accumulation occurred in the mining sector, which gave a boost to agriculture through an increased demand for agricultural commodities from a growing home market. This in turn precipitated a change in the social relations of production, because it became more profitable for landowners to sell farm produce directly, rather than renting their land to the African peasantry. The slow and uneven process, through which the African peasantry was transformed into wageworkers, is seen as a crucial mechanism through which agrarian capital emerged in South Africa (Morris, 1976).
The formation of South Africa’s Bantustans is also considered to have played a central role in the overall development of the capitalist economy. In the radical political economy tradition, forged through the pioneering work of authors such as Legassick and Wolpe (1976), the Bantustans were understood as constituting ‘pre-capitalist modes of production’, which articulated with the dominant capitalist mode of production. In this view, the Bantustans played an important role in the development of capitalism because they provided the basis for ‘cheap’
migrant labour by essentially subsidising low wages. This was possible because migrants reproduced themselves in part through their rural households and own-account agricultural production (Wolpe, 1972). Agricultural production was, however, constrained in the homelands by this exploitative system and slowly household livelihoods became less reliant on farming, as reproduction needs were met primarily through wage labour and migrant remittances (Cousins, 2010; Murray, 1995).
Bundy (1979) demonstrated how in the early period of industrialization, conditions for accumulation existed and successful African petty commodity producers emerged. However, the state’s increasingly discriminatory policies eroded these opportunities, thus marginalising
the African peasantry. Radical political economists emphasise how this slow and uneven process eventually transformed the peasantry into a proletariat (Levin and Neocosmos, 1989).
However, this assumption of ‘linear proletarianisation’ is hotly debated in the literature.
Beinart et al., (1986), for example, emphasize the rich diversity of regional experiences and the uncertain outcomes of capitalist development. Switzer (1993: 5) describes the results of the extension of capitalist relations in the Ciskei, which
“…gradually undermined and destroyed the reproductive capacity of African household production […] A growing portion of the African population- landless peasants, agricultural workers, urbanites who did not participate formally in the capitalist sector and were not employed by government, and women in a variety of occupations- operated on the fringes of the wage-labour economy and collectively composed the most disorganized and repressed social category. The vast majority of blacks would eventually be reduced to these super-exploited ‘excluded classes’ ”.
It is true that the oppressive character of the labour regime constrained rural class formation in the homelands to some extent (Cousins, 2010). However, there has been an unfortunate tendency to overstate this homogeneity. Neocosmos and Levin (1989: 238) highlight the lapse in reasoning that underlies this view: “the assumption of linear proletarianisation underlying Wolpe's thesis obscures the fact that wage remittances may be necessary to subsidise agricultural petty commodity production rather than the reverse”. Several authors emphasize that in the apartheid period wages and remittances were central to sustaining agricultural production (Murray, 1981; Spiegel, 1986; James, 1985; Beinart, 1982). This issue was explored in the Ciskei by authors such as de Wet (1985: 90), who asserted that it is “a family's participation in the migratory wage labour economy that provides it with the money necessary to cultivate”.
In more recent studies, Hebinck and van Averbeke (2013) emphasises that agrarian activities continue to contribute significantly to household reproduction in spite of their contribution to monetary income being relatively low. Chapter 10 of this thesis will engage further with debates around the extent of ‘proletarianisation’ in the former ‘Bantustans’, and provide evidence that illustrates that households within these settlements are highly differentiated.
South Africa’s agrarian question is noted to be “extreme and exceptional” (Bernstein, 1996).
Its trajectory differs both to the forms which emerged in the context of Europe and to those which materialised across the African continent. This is notably to do with the character of settler colonialism, which was probably more extensive, systematic and arguably more violent than elsewhere on the continent. Thus the resulting development of capitalism in South Africa was peculiar and complex.
Cousins (2011) argues, for example, that Lenin’s widely applied typology of class differentiation cannot be applied to the South African context. This is because of the emergence of an African peasantry that was deliberately constrained by the creation of the
homelands as labour reserves, and by the appropriation of large farms for the engineering of a
‘white capitalist farming class’.
Oya (2007) also notes that South Africa stands out as an exception on the African continent.
Unlike other African contexts, the focal of studies is on the growth of agrarian capitalism and the role of ‘rural (agrarian) capitalists’. However, he points out that this ‘impression’ that South Africa is a peculiar case also has to do with disagreements and divisions among agrarian political economists on the Left, as to the character of capitalist development in Africa. Oya’s (2007) research illustrates that in Senegal, for example, one also finds ‘agrarian capitalists’.
The sparse mention of agrarian capitalism elsewhere on the continent is embedded in the impression “that the system has integrated ‘small-scale farmers’ (petty commodity producers) rather than ‘agrarian capitalists’ ” (p.455) into the global economy. However, South Africa is still peculiar in that it “is associated with settler capitalism and not so much with indigenous agrarian capitalists” (Oya, 2007: 455).
Although the roots of agrarian capitalism in South Africa may be ‘peculiar’, this trajectory is now transforming somewhat. This is illustrated by more recent studies, which provide evidence of examples of ‘accumulation from below’ among ‘indigenous agrarian capitalists’.
However, accumulation strategies have remained somewhat constrained by a number of factors (see Cousins, 2013; Hornby, 2015). Overall however, the agrarian economy has remained largely untransformed with white agrarian capital remaining indisputably dominant and maintaining a monopoly over resources and power (Genis, 2012; Cousins and Walker, 2015).
2.4 Conclusion
The investigation of South Africa’s agrarian question in this chapter has provided a fuller understanding of the context in which JVs are taking place. This enables an evaluation of how they might fit within (and impact on) processes of agrarian change in South Africa. This will be explored in the final chapter of this thesis, after the impact of JVs on livelihoods, land rights and social differentiation has been fully explored in the context of the concrete case studies.
There are a number of key ‘framing debates’ and specific ‘concepts’ that have been reviewed in this chapter, which will be useful in analysing empirical data.
Firstly, as a broad ‘framing debate’, Bernstein’s (2011a) rendering of the agrarian question of labour has compelled our attention towards the wider crisis of employment under modern capitalism, and how classes of labour battle to meet their simple reproduction needs. It is this tension which is often at the core of struggles over land, its use and its meaning (Arrighi and Moore, 2001).
Struggles emerging in the countryside are implicitly, therefore, also part of broader social and political struggles. Conflicts and contestations, which appear to be between specific actors located in a rural locality, might actually involve actors outside the countryside and be (at least symbolically) part of larger struggles e.g. against the state and systemic and historical class
oppression. Conflicts emerging in the context of JVs need to be embedded within this wider crisis of reproduction. This thesis therefore also investigates the wider pressures placed on household reproduction, and how they interweave in complex ways with the JV intervention to produce particular outcomes.
The review also highlights the difficulty in understanding class, because of the myriad ways in which class place is fragmented. Bernstein, (2010/1) argues that in most rural areas of the Global South, households would be best characterised as ‘fragmented classes of labour’. In studies of classical agrarian transition, what at least appeared to be somewhat more ‘pure’
forms of landed property, agrarian capital and agrarian labour, fit awkwardly with the messy contemporary social realities, and overlapping spaces people locate themselves in to pull together their livelihoods.
Lenin’s (1967) framework of poor, middle and rich peasants, has been widely utilised to describe general tendencies towards class differentiation in a plethora of different contexts. As discussed above, however, Cousins (2010), has argued that it cannot be applied to the South African context, because the emergence of a differentiated African peasantry was deliberately constrained by the creation of the ‘homelands’. The complexities and specificities of the South African context, thus pose a challenge to research employing a class lens.
The approach in this PhD thesis is to avoid reproducing existing class typologies, which fail to represent the complexities of class in the South African context. Instead, I use the concept of
‘general tendencies’ towards class formation, to get to grips with the specificities of local realities. The framework for my approach is based in part on Patnaik’s (1987) Labour Exploitation Criterion, which is embedded firmly in the Marxist tradition. Patnaik’s empirical index, distinguishes peasant classes based on “the degree and type of labour exploitation relative to self-employment, as the single most important indicator of class status” (ibid.: 51).
In Chapter 12, I will discuss Patnaik’s (1987) Labour Exploitation Criterion and elaborate more fully on how it has influenced my approach to understanding class dynamics.
Class dynamics are, however, not the only ones at work, and are intermeshed with many other
‘determinations’. Class place is thus complex, contingent and subject to processes of constant change (Scoones et al., 2012; Cousins, 2010; Bernstein, 2010). The challenge is in theorizing the ways in which class difference relates to other aspects of social difference. Marxist feminists, for example, have typically struggled to explain the way in which these multiple oppressions and privileges are experienced, sometimes as distinct relations and at other times as a part of a social totality in different spaces in society and in the home. ‘Intersectionality feminism’ provides a useful way of understanding social differentiation. It emphasizes how different aspects of social difference are produced and continually reproduced in a dynamic relationship with each other (Ferguson, 2016).
Peters (2004) also notes that “differentiation takes many forms- including youth against elders, men against women, ethnic and religious confrontations- these also reveal new social divisions that, in sum, can be seen as class formation” (p.291). This PhD will make use of this nuanced
and fluid understanding of class formation and social differentiation, as a way to try and grapple with the complex intragroup struggles emerging in the wake of these JV interventions.
The focus of my research is on understanding how class interacts with other aspects of social difference such as gender, kinship, ethnicity and generation (Bernstein, 2011a).
The concept of social reproduction is another central concept I will make use of in this PhD.
Hornby (2014) and Manenzhe (2016) have highlighted the tensions which capitalist farming introduces in arrangements such as JVs and commercial farming undertaken by CPAs.
Difficult choices must be made between capital accumulation and furthering the aims of the farming enterprise, or paying out profits in the form of dividends to meet the urgent demands of social reproduction experienced by poorer households. The idea of social reproduction also allows us to take account of the multiple values and uses of land and labour in maintaining life in its fullest economic, social and cultural forms. It also allows for relationships of gender, kin and generation, for example, to be placed centrally in defining people’s relationship to land and as a key signifier of power (Chung, 2017).