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.
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Keywords
Commoning, Kinship, Land occupation, Social reproduction, Stellenbosch