From South Africa to China: land, migrant labor and the semi-proletarian thesis revisited

ABSTRACT

The semi-proletarian thesis, formulated by Marxist scholars in the 1970s, posits that semi-proletarian conditions, in which rural households earn income from both farming and labor migration, are in the best interest of capital because the non-wage agricultural income subsidizes part of the costs of labor reproduction. The thesis has been applied to both South Africa and China. In light of the new developments in the two countries, this paper argues that the key issue of semi-proletarianization today is less about how rural economies subsidize capital and more about whether peasant and migrant families can hold onto land rights in an era of heightened precarity, widespread land grabbing and rampant capitalist expansion. As such, we propose to reorient the focus of the thesis from the subsidy function of rural land for capital to its importance in livelihood security for semi-proletarian workers.

KEYWORDS:

• Semi-proletarianization
• land
• migrant labor
• China
• South Africa
• livelihood security

Acknowledgements

Ben Scully would like to acknowledge and thank Akua Britwum, Edward Webster and Hlengiwe Ndlovu, who were part of the team who conducted the fieldwork in the Eastern Cape from which this contribution draws. Shaohua Zhan's field research was partly supported by a Tier 1 grant (No. 2016-T1–001-166) from the Ministry of Education of Singapore. An earlier version of the paper was presented at the 5th International Conference of BICAS (RANEPA, Moscow) on 13–16 October 2017. We thank the editors and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Shaohua Zhan http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9996-8833

Shaohua Zhan, an assistant professor of sociology at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, studies historical and contemporary rural development in China, internal and international migration, the hukou system, land rights and food politics. His works have appeared in The Journal of Peasant Studies, World Development, Journal of Rural Studies, Journal of Agrarian Change, The China Journal, etc. His forthcoming book examines the contrasting development paths of industrious revolution and agrarian capitalism in rural China. Corresponding author: [email protected]

Ben Scully is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. His research focuses on labor, social welfare and development in Africa, with a focus on South Africa. His papers have appeared in Theory and Society, Studies in Comparative International Development, Global Labour Journal, Review of African Political Economy and The Journal of World Systems Research. He serves as an editor of the Global Labour Journal.

Notes

1 This paper focuses on migrant households. There are, of course, semi-proletarian households that are not migrants – for example, urban households that combine informal non-wage income and wages. Our following argument that semi-proletarian livelihood strategies have increased in importance with informalization can also apply to these other types of semi-proletarian households. Wallerstein and others suggest that semi-proletarianization reflects uneven development in the capitalist world-system, with it being most prevalent in peripheral and semi-peripheral countries (Wallerstein 1983, 38–39; Moyo and Yeros 2005). The findings in this paper may be most applicable to countries in the Global South, though semi-prolerianization is not limited to peripheral economies.

2 This excludes local non-farm workers who some scholars count as migrants; but because these workers do not leave their land and family behind they are very different from those migrating long distance.

Additional information

Funding

Shaohua Zhan's field research was partly supported by a Tier 1 grant (No. 2016-T1-001-166) from the Ministry of Education of Singapore.