Immigrant farm workers, self-exploitation and social reproduction: the Lesotho–South African land-labour questions

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This article explores social relations of production and reproduction on redistributed farmland by examining capital–wage relations and social reproduction impacts of land redistribution induced small- and medium-scale capitalist farming on fragmented classes of gendered labour. Such diverse, historically determined, social relations seldom feature in pessimistic views about current land redistribution impacts on farm labour. The article examines the immigrant gendered farm work phenomenon embodied in footloose labour from Lesotho to its neighbour, South Africa. It illuminates capital–wage relations, laying bare the far-reaching social reproduction impacts of farm work, and access to land for petty commodity-producing working-class land beneficiaries via self-exploitation and immigrant wage labour. The findings suggest that intensive labour absorption on recently subdivided and redistributed small- and medium-scale farmland deepens capitalist relations in redistributive ways, fragmenting capital and land concentration, widening the social reproduction material base for classes of labour, and partly resolving the agrarian question of gendered labour. The theoretical implications are that mere social reproduction of gendered immigrant farm workers on the land of their forebears that they do not own is not redistributive enough if Lesotho remains a perpetual labour reserve for South Africa. This article iteratively invokes the forgotten Lesotho land question, the immigrant farm workers’ home country, suggesting reparative land restitution in resolving the agrarian question of gendered labour in Lesotho towards generalised heterogenous small- and medium-scale livestock farming and other crop cultivation, as concretely unfolding on recently redistributed farmland in South Africa.