The Agrarian question and politics in the ‘New’ South Africa

Abstract

New right and neo‐liberal ‘development’ discourses have heavily impacted on the politics of agrarian restructuring in South Africa. Mechanisms for resolving agrarian contradictions are being discussed and presented as abstract planning decisions to be made by agricultural and rural development experts. This legitimation of ‘neo‐classicism’, if unchallenged, will reproduce and support current neo‐apartheid forms of restructuring. In this article, we argue for a process of agrarian transformation where rural political mobilisation and the establishment of viable agricultural production systems are complementary. The paper is not an exercise in proposing specific (top‐down) ‘solutions’ or ‘models’, which has become a recent pre‐occupation in South Africa. Rather, we write with the objective of supporting a process whereby democratic transformation in rural South Africa remains possible.