Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses the social relations of property, production, and reproduction in South African land reform. Research findings suggest an emergent form of an impoverished landed property on redistributed farmland, which may have theoretical implications for the Global South.

Paper long abstract:

The South African land reform has produced variegated land ownership entities, from communal to private forms of title. An analysis of social relations of property, production, and reproduction within these forms of land ownership regimes shows an emerging impoverished form of landed property, and a minority of emerging black medium scale farmers transitioning into the middle class via accumulation from below. The concept of an impoverished landed property denotes classes of labour with improved access to farmland through land reform who are too poor to invest in expanded farm reproduction, and forced by the dull compulsion of economic forces to lease out or sell their farmland to fragments of agrarian capital. The impoverished landed property concept may have theoretical implications elsewhere, particularly in some regions of the Global South with recent redistributive land reform in an era of spectacular impoverishment accumulated from centuries of dispossessions, by subaltern communities therein, who have recently gained improved access to farmland through land reform. The formation of an impoverished landed property via land reform is part and parcel of counter agrarian reform processes, as capital mutates to regain control of land lost through land reform, within a neoliberal state, characterised by limited agricultural subsidies for new entrants in capitalist agriculture.