Mining, capital and dispossession in post-apartheid South Africa

Abstract

ABSTRACT Some Marxist political economists use accumulation by dispossession to explain processes in which natural resources are enclosed and their users dispossessed through extra-economic means. However, accumulation by dispossession takes an overly omnibus and materialistic approach in trying to cover a wide range of global processes. This article therefore distils accumulation by dispossession’s three central features of coercion, non-voluntary consent and corruption to enhance its local explanatory power of material and incorporeal dispossession in post-apartheid South Africa. This approach magnifies how a triumvirate of traditional leaders, state officials and Ivanplats platinum mine dispossessed people living on customary land in Limpopo, with detrimental effects.