An Urban Proletariat with Peasant Characteristics:
Land Occupations and Livestock Raising in the City of Cape Town
Ricardo Jacobs
Department of Sociology
Johns Hopkins University
Abstract
Paper to be presented at Workshop on Land, Labor and Environmental Rights and
Struggles: South Africa and India in World-Historical Perspecitve, Arrighi Center for
Global Studies, The Johns Hopkins University, March 25, 2015
In the City of Cape Town long-term urban residents are engaged in land occupations
and raising livestock--a quintessential peasant activity in South Africa. Proponents of
the full proletarianisation thesis argue that this merely represents a survival strategy in
the face of a deepening livelihood crisis in South Africa during the neoliberal phase,
and moreover, that these activities would be abandoned in favor of wage labour if the
opportunity were to arise. In contrast, the re-peasantization thesis scholars assert that
the crisis of subsistence generated by neoliberalism is resulting in a process of repeasantization and semi proletarianisation, driven by the need to forge new
possibilities of social reproduction. They see these land occupations as representing a
fundamental shift and not one that would easily be abandoned in favor of wage labor.
Drawing on in depth interviews and participant observation conducted between 2009
and 2014 at a land occupation site in Cape Town, this paper argues there is what we
might call a “latent reserve army of peasants” in urban South Africa today that would
revert to peasant activities if land were available. The individuals engaged in land
occupations for livestock raising in Cape Town today share key characteristics with a
large percentage of the city's population. As such, the land occupations for raising
livestock observable today are just the tip of the iceberg of potential demand for land
for agriculture by urban residents. Moreover the paper shows that the current land
occupations predate the neoliberal period and therefore cannot just be understood as a
response to the deepening crisis of subsistence induced by neoliberalism in the past
two decades. Finally, the paper analyzes how the dual character of the urban
proletariat is consequential in contesting and reshaping urban space and a politics of
repossession.