Insurgent Working Class Self-Organization Outside the Wage Labour Relation: Land and Livestock in the City

Ricardo Jacobs ()
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Ricardo Jacobs: University of California

Chapter Chapter 18 in Labour Questions in the Global South, 2021, pp 387-411 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract The chapter focuses on working-class self-organization outside the capital wage relation, drawing on fieldwork conducted between 2009 and 2017 at a land occupation site for livestock raising in Cape Town. I argue that the land occupation is an instance of land reform from below, characterized by a radically democratic and egalitarian organizational form, with immanent progressive potential for anti-capitalist change. This is visible from the way in which they allocate plots of land (including setting equal plot sizes), their fledgling system of solidarity and cooperation, and how they interact with the local informal market, aspiring to supply food to the working class. The combined experience of historical land dispossession resistance and contemporary anti-neoliberal struggles produce an “urban agrarian politics” in the twenty-first century. Insurgent self-organization by an urban semi-proletarian is a critical component of the both the labour and agrarian question today.

Keywords: Land occupations; Urbanization; Working class; Self-organization; Urban agrarian politics; Anti-capitalist change (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-981-33-4635-2_18

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DOI: 10.1007/978-981-33-4635-2_18

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