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This is the first collection of its kind. It presents a critical political economy of the agrarian question in post-apartheid South Africa, informed by the results of research undertaken since the transition from apartheid started in 1990. The articles, by well-known South African, British and American scholars, cover a variety of topical theoretical, empirical and policy issues, firmly rooted in an historical perspective.
Based on an in-depth analysis of several contrasting agricultural regions, this book aims to assess South Africa's ongoing agrarian reform and the country's agrarian dynamics. Without fundamentally questioning the highly specialized, fossil energy and synthetic input dependent, oligopolistic entrepreneurial agricultural production model, which is presently structuring the sector and is guiding the reforms, a more equitable redistribution of resources and value-addition will by no means be possible. This book examines and contributes to the structural questions that underpin the current stagnation of South Africa's agrarian reform. Presenting fresh approaches in analysing agrarian issues and tools to assess farming systems and agricultural development, this incisive study will be an important resource to policy makers, academics and those with an interest in agrarian reform.
This empirically grounded study provides a critical reflection on the land question in Africa, research on which tends to be tangential, conceptually loose and generally inadequate. It argues that the most pressing research concern must be to understand the precise nature of the African land question, its land reforms and their effects on development. To unravel the roots of land conflicts in Africa requires thorough understanding of the complex social and political contradictions which have ensued from colonial and post-colonial land policies, as well as from Africa's 'development' and capital accumulation trajectories, especially with regard to the land rights of the continent's poor. The study thus questions the capacity of emerging neo-liberal economic and political regimes in Africa to deliver land reforms which address growing inequality and poverty. It equally questions the understanding of the nature of popular demands for land reforms by African states, and their ability to address these demands under the current global political and economic structures dictated by neo-liberalism and its narrow regime of ownership. The study invites scholars and policy makers to creatively draw on the specific historical trajectories and contemporary expression of the land and agrarian questions in Africa, to enrich both theory and practice on land in Africa.
This comprehensive volume advances heterodox reconstructions of agrarian Marxism on the occasion of Marx’s 200th birth anniversary. While Marxists have long criticized ‘populists’ for ignoring capitalism and class, populists have charged Marxists with historical determinism. This ongoing debate has now reached something of an impasse, in part because new empirical work addressing the complex contemporary patterns and conjunctures of global agrarian capitalism offers exciting new horizons, along with new and generative theoretical reconstructions of Marxism itself. This book helps to point the way beyond this impasse, and illustrates that agrarian Marxism remains a dynamic theoretical program that offers powerful insights into agrarian change and politics in the twenty-first century. This book was originally published as a special issue of The Journal of Peasant Studies.
There are about four million peasant families in Tanzania. They farm on the smallest scale, the average farm being two acres in size. The principal agricultural equipment is the hand hoe. Since the onset of the colonial era, those in authority have pursued policies to dominate the peasantry. It is argued that the small scale of operations has contributed to the widespread poverty among farmers. There is still good agricultural land that is not farmed, but the current land tenure of peasants reproduces itself on new farmland. The conclusion is that in order to accelerate agricultural development, land tenure must be institutionalized.
Henry Bernstein argues that class dynamics should be the starting point of any analysis of agrarian change. Providing an accessible introduction to agrarian political economy, he shows clearly how the argument for "bringing class back in" provides an alternative to inherited conceptions of the agrarian question. He also ably illustrates what is at stake in different ways of thinking about class dynamics and the effects of agrarian change in today's globalized world. CONTENTS: Introduction: The Political Economy of Agrarian Change. Production and Productivity. Origins of Early Development of Capitalism. Colonialism and Capitalism. Farming and Agriculture, Local and Global. Neoliberal Globalization and World Agriculture. Capitalist Agriculture and Non-Capitalist Farmers? Class Formation in the Countryside. Complexities of Class.
Xenophobia is a political discourse. As such, its historical development as well as the conditions of its existence must be elucidated in terms of the practices and prescriptions that structure the field of politics. In South Africa, its history is connected to the manner citizenship has been conceived and fought over during the past fifty years at least. Migrant labour was de-nationalised by the apartheid state, while African nationalism saw it as the very foundation of that oppressive system. However, only those who could show a family connection with the colonial/apartheid formation of South Africa could claim citizenship at liberation. Others were excluded and seen as unjustified claimants to national resources. Xenophobia's current conditions of existence are to be found in the politics of a post-apartheid nationalism were state prescriptions founded on indigeneity have been allowed to dominate uncontested in condition of passive citizenship. The de-politicisation of a population, which had been able to assert its agency during the 1980s, through a discourse of 'human rights' in particular, has contributed to this passivity. State liberal politics have remained largely unchallenged. As in other cases of post-colonial transition in Africa, the hegemony of xenophobic discourse, the book shows, is to be sought in the character of the state consensus. Only a rethinking of citizenship as an active political identity can re-institute political agency and hence begin to provide alternative prescriptions to the political consensus of state-induced exclusion.
This collection celebrates T.J. Byres' seminal contributions to the political economy of the agrarian question. Uniting the various themes is the demonstration of the continuing relevance of a critical, historical and comparative materialist analysis of agrarian question.
A compelling and critical destruction of both the English agricultural revolution and the theory of comparative advantage, upon which unequal trade has been justified for three centuries, this account argues that these ideas have been used to disguise the fact that the Northfrom the time of colonialism to the present dayhas used the much greater agricultural productivity of the South to feed and improve the living standards of its own people while impoverishing the South. At the same time, the imposition of neoliberal reforms in the African continent has led to greater unemployment, spiraling debt, land and livestock losses, reduced per capita food production, and decreased nutrition. Arguing that political stability hangs in the balance, this book calls for labor-intensive small-scale production, new thinking about which agricultural commodities are produced, the redistribution of the means of food production, and increased investment in rural development. The combined effort of African and Indian scholarly work, this account demands policies that defend the land rights of small producers and allow people to live with dignity. "