The Political Economy of Social Reproduction and Survival: Urban Land Occupations in Stellenbosch, South Africa
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Date
2024
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University of the Western Cape
Abstract
Across the world, urban land occupations have emerged as prominent features and
manifestations of contemporary global crises. This trend of land occupation continues to
grow exponentially as intensified commodification, labour precarity, and immiseration
deepen the crisis of reproduction faced by working people primarily in cities of the Global
South. As the cost of survival rises – financially, temporally, and emotionally – social
reproductive labour has become more significant than ever. Women perform the vast
majority of this reproductive work, yet are often overlooked in studies on land occupations
which tend to take a gender-blind approach. This research seeks to shine a light on what is
generally invisibilised – women’s daily and generational struggles for survival. Through the
case study of Enkanini and Azania, two urban land occupations in Stellenbosch - the
birthplace of South African agrarian capital - this research examines how women’s survival
strategies are responding to intensified pressures and the consequences of these strategies
for women’s organisation and resistance. By taking three women’s cases, I look at how
different household compositions and locality structure social reproduction strategies.
Focusing on nuances in women’s strategies provides insight into how women are navigating
complex gender relations and competing reproductive squeezes. This study utilises Social
Reproduction Theory (SRT), grounded in Marxist feminist political economy and employs
analytic lenses of time and space. Empirical insights are drawn from qualitative and
quantitative fieldwork in the form of light time-use diaries, semi-structured in-depth
interviews, focus group discussions, and key informant interviews, conducted between
March and July 2022.
The study draws from the argument in SRT that despite capitalism’s reliance on reproductive
work in its path of relentless accumulation, capitalist labour processes do not ensure this
reproduction through a living wage. In Stellenbosch, women’s engagement in increasingly
precarious waged labour reveals the immiseration tendency of capital, as reproductive
capacities are undermined through the lengthening and intensification of the working day.
This thesis argues that migrant rural women living in the city, whose labour is largely
expendable to the needs of capital and who have to a large extent been abandoned by the
state, are forced to look beyond the state-capital nexus for alternative means of
reproduction. The main argument of this thesis is that for ‘agrarian and rurally-rooted
migrants’ residing in urban land occupations, social reproduction relies on, and is shaped by,
the dynamic interaction of four institutions; family-households, markets, states, and
commons and commoning. In Enkanini and Azania findings reveal these alternative means,
differentiated across households and space, primarily include; a) kinship structures, whereby
people, money, and ideas are redistributed across reproductive nodes through processes of
trans-local householding, b) land, primarily for growing food for self-provisioning, and c) the
commoning of reproductive strategies through the collectivisation and socialisation of
money, knowledge, and activities. Responding to their households’ immediate needs, within
the confines of what is spatio-temporally and materially viable, women collectively organise
for the common, establishing networks and groups to overcome and withstand household
deficits and stressors, and combat violence and insecurity within and outside the household.
As women (re)configure their social reproduction strategies in response to intensified
pressures on the urban periphery, they tend to simultaneously compound and resist
structures of gender inequity.
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Keywords
Stellenbosch, Social Reproduction, Land, Occupation, Migration