Land Reform in Southern Africa in World-Historical Perspective

This paper attempts to place issues of land reform in South Africa and Zimbabwe in a ‘world-historical’ perspective. ‘World-historical’ is used in two senses. The first is that given by the ‘classic’ agrarian question and its tradition, concerning the role of agrarian transformation in the transition to capitalism, and especially industrial capitalism, in general general. The second applies to the trajectories, and mutations, of the ‘classic’ agrarian question in the development of capitalism on a world scale and its historical and spatial coordinates. It is suggested that the moment of ‘globalisation’ from the 1970s signaled the end of the ‘classic’ agrarian question, as the agrarian question of capital, without its resolution in most countries of the South. At the same time, however, the ‘fragmentation’ of labour associated with and intensified by the global restructuring of capital discloses possibilities of (new) agrarian questions generated by the struggles of labour for means of livelihood and reproduction. This is illustrated in relation to South Africa and especially Zimbabwe as social formations that combine key aspects of previous phases of capitalism, given their belated, and limited, national democratic revolutions, and of the current phase of ‘globalisation’ and its fragmentation of labour. While schematic in presentation, the aim is to illustrate the relevance and utility of some wider theoretical and historical ideas to debate of land redistribution in South Africa and Zimbabwe today.