SEMINAR: (Immigrant) farm workers and social reproduction in South African land reform

2021 Seminar Series.
THURSDAY 10 June 2021. 1.00pm – 2.30pm

Dr. Mnqobi Ngubane
Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS)

(Immigrant) farm workers and social reproduction in South African land reform

Abstract:

The rich diversity of social relations of production in ongoing redistributive land reform of South Africa seldom feature in too pessimistic views about impacts of land reform on farm labour. Such pessimism, though taken seriously in this paper, obscures continuities of farm work absorption in former white owned farmland; also obscured is the emergence of new forms of self-exploitation and differentiated forms of the capital-wage relation, and attached social reproduction dynamics on redistributed farmland. These dynamics of social reproduction for classes of labour, as employed labour on redistributed farmland, as well as what the author calls the ‘impoverished landed property’ are fleshed out from the bourgeoning reproduction of small-scale capitalist farming in South African land reform, which continues to be wrongfully seen as failed land reform by some sturdy neoliberal and conservative reasoning.