Debating the Politics of Land Occupations

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This essay reviews a provocative but flawed volume of case studies of land occupations in Africa, Asia and Latin America and critically examines the arguments advanced by Moyo and Yeros in their introduction and co-authored chapter on Zimbabwe. The editors’ core proposition is that the agrarian and national questions are linked in the periphery of capitalism because industrial transformation is incomplete, ‘disarticulated’ forms of accumulation predominate and dependent states are unable to exercise true sovereignty. The chief agent of struggles for agrarian reform, and the social base of rural social movements that occupy land as a key tactic, is identified as ‘the semiproletariat’. The political characteristics of these movements are discussed in the introduction, three continent-wide overviews and several case studies. Most chapters tend not to support the editors’ arguments, and sometimes contradict them. These arguments are in any case reductionist and over-schematic. The categories ‘semi-proletariat’ and ‘peasantry’ are often elided, and differences of conditions and trajectories are seldom acknowledged. A tendency to economism vitiates discussion of the politics of land. These problems are also in evidence in the chapter on Zimbabwe.