Without the blanket of the land: agrarian change and biopolitics in post–Apartheid South Africa

ABSTRACT

This paper connects Marxist approaches to the agrarian political economy of South Africa with post-Marshallian and Foucauldian analyses of distributional regimes and late capitalist governmentality. Looking at South Africa's stalled agrarian transition through the lens of biopolitics as well as class analysis can make visible otherwise disregarded connections between processes of agrarian change and broader contests about the terms of social and economic incorporation into the South African social and political order before, during and after Apartheid. This can bring a fresh sense of the broader political implications of the course of agrarian change in South Africa, and helps contextualise the enduring salience of land as a flashpoint within South Africa's unresolved democratic transition.

KEYWORDS:

• Governmentality
• biopolitics
• de-agrarianization
• critical theory
• South Africa

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the BICAS international conference Rural Transformations and Food Systems – The BRICS and Agrarian Change in the Global South on 20–21 April 2015 at the University of the Western Cape. Key points have also been recapitulated in Development and Change (Du Toit 2017). As usual, my intellectual debts are many and various, and too large to be paid back in either coins or land. Most of the arguments set out here come from what I have learned Henry Bernstein, Grace Davie, Jim Ferguson, Keith Hart, Francie Lund, David Neves, Michael Noble, Jeremy Seekings and Gemma Wright. Any original ideas found here may safely be credited to them; this paper mainly connects the dots. Thanks are also due to Lynette Maart, Patrick Cairns, Craig McKyne, Erin Torkelson and David Carel, who helped me understand the activities of Cambist, Net1, Grindrod Bank and CPS. I am also indebted to the anonymous reviewers of the paper, who contributed greatly to whatever rigour and coherence it has.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Andries du Toit http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5845-0774

Andries du Toit is the Director of the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. His research interests include the social relations of production in commercial agriculture, the dynamics of structural poverty and inequality, and the political formations of neoliberal governmentality and democracy in contexts of agrarian change. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 An earlier version of this paper was presented at the BICAS international conference Rural Transformations and Food Systems – The BRICS and Agrarian Change in the Global South on 20–21 April 2015 at the University of the Western Cape.

2 ‘Biopolitics’, in other words, is not, as is often supposed, about the management of biological life ‘in itself.’ As Stephen Collier points out, this depends on a notion of ‘biology’ as a separate realm of knowledge that did not exist at the historical time Foucault was concerned with (Collier 2011, 17). Rather, it refers to the emerging apprehension of human society as a knowable totality ‘defined at the “finitudes” of life (biology), labor (economic activity), and language (sociocultural existence)’ (ibid).

3 For an alternative reading of the poem, see (Krog 2015).