What Happened to the “Promised Land”? A Fanonian Perspective on Post‐Apartheid South Africa

Abstract: This paper reviews post‐apartheid South Africa through Fanon's critical analysis of decolonization. Since, for Fanon, apartheid represented the purest form of the Manichean politics of space that characterizes colonialism, a Fanonian perspective on South Africa asks to what extent has the geographical layout of apartheid been remapped? Addressing this question necessitates shifting the “geography of reason” from technical discourses of policy‐makers to the lived reality of the “damned of the earth”. From this perspective, Fanon's critique becomes relevant in two ways, first as a prism to understand the rise of xenophobic violence as a symptom of the degeneration of the idea of South Africa's “promised land” and second as a way to listen to a new grassroots shack dweller movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo, that is challenging both neoliberal and progressive assumptions by advocating a quite different geographic layout for a “truly democratic” society.     

The Adaptative Nature of Neoliberalism at the Local Scale: Fifteen Years of City Improvement Districts in Cape Town and Johannesburg

Abstract: By unravelling the adoption and adaptation of the North American Business Improvement District (BID) model in South African cities, this paper considers the way neoliberal principles are making their way in the post‐apartheid context. Drawing on a comparative approach of BIDs in Johannesburg and Cape Town, we analyse the tensions and conflicts surrounding their implementation and unpack the resilience of this model. As unexpected as this resilience might be in such a context, that is, far away from the heartland of neoliberalism, we argue that this resilience is linked to the permeability of the local contexts and to the plasticity of the model itself at the city and neighbourhood levels, reflecting a capacity to adapt to inherited regulatory frameworks, patterns of territorial development and embedded socio‐political alliances of the local terrains, as well as an ability to accommodate post‐apartheid issues through the crafting of what we refer to as “local Third Ways”.     

South Africa in world development: Prospects for a human economy (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

South Africa was once notorious for an extreme system of racial inequality known as apartheid. It is still a world leader in economic inequality, but the racial situation is confused. In the meantime something like apartheid has become universal. The Southern African regional economy has some features that point to a more humane alternative to unequal society, to a “human economy”. The world needs a new free trade movement that would begin to dismantle the institutions of national privilege and insist on movement as a human right.     

THE OWL OF MINERVA AND THE IRONIC FATE OF THE PROGRESSIVE PRAXIS OF RADICAL HISTORIOGRAPHY IN POST‐APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA

Despite its title and stated objectives this edited volume does not provide a broad and inclusive survey of post‐apartheid South African historiographical developments. Its main topic is the unexpected demise in the post‐apartheid context of the radical or revisionist approach that had invigorated and transformed the humanities and social studies during the 1970s and 1980s. In the context of the anti‐apartheid struggle the radical historians had developed a plausible model of praxis for progressive scholarship, yet in the new post‐apartheid democratic South Africa radical historical scholarship itself encountered a crisis of survival. This should not be confused with a general “crisis” of historical scholarship in South Africa, as some of the uneven contributions to this volume contend, as that remains an active and diversely productive field due also to substantial contributions by historians not based in South Africa. If the dramatic and ironic fate of radical historical scholarship in the context of the transition to a post‐apartheid democracy is the volume's primary topic, then it unfortunately fails to provide serious and sustained critical reflection on the origins and possible explanations for that crisis. A marked feature of the accounts of “history making” provided in this volume is the (former) radical historians' lack of self‐reflexivity and the scant interest shown in the underlying history of their own intellectual trajectories.     

Neoliberal Capitalism and Conservation in the Post‐crisis Era: The Dialectics of “Green” and “Un‐green” Grabbing in Greece and the UK

“Green‐grabbing”, in which environmental arguments support expropriation of land and resources, is a recognized element in neoliberal conservation. However, capitalism's strategic interest in promoting the neoliberalization of conservation is accompanied by attempts to exploit hitherto protected natures without any pretence at “greenness”. In this paper we explore the dialectics between “green” and “un‐green” grabbing as neoliberal strategies in the reconstruction of nature conservation policies after the 2008 financial “crash” in Greece and the UK. In both countries, accelerated neoliberalization is manifested in diverse ways, including initiatives to roll back conservation regulation, market‐based approaches to “saving” nature and the privatization of public nature assets. The intensification of “green” and “un‐green” grabbing reflects capitalism's strategic interest in both promoting and obstructing nature conservation, ultimately leaving for “protected natures” two choices: either to be further degraded to boost growth or to be “saved” through their deeper inclusion as commodities visible to the market.     

‘To Save a Soul’: Catholic Mission Schools,Apartheid, and the 1953 Bantu Education Act

The Bantu Education Act of 1953 was enacted by the government of South Africa to bring about the election promise of apartheid (separateness) among the races. For the Roman Catholic Church in South Africa, the Education Act was a direct attack on its apostolic work in the country as the church was responsible for educating 15 per cent of the black student population by 1953. Regardless of the Catholic contribution to South Africa’s educational system, the church was viewed as a threat — die Roomse gevaar — to its architects of apartheid. Catholic precepts regarding the unity of the human race under “the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of man” and the belief in the equality of all people as children of God challenged the apartheid ideology of racial separateness and differentiation. Eliminating Catholic control of Bantu education would neutralise the Roman threat. Passage of the Education Act left church leaders with two choices: fight or surrender. They chose to fight, launching the “Catholic Bishops’ Campaign for Mission Schools and Seminaries” in 1955. Although overlooked by most scholars, the campaign was an important part of a larger resistance movement that challenged the legitimacy of the apartheid regime in the 1950s.     

Governing Post Apartheid Spatiality: Implementing City Improvement Districts in Cape Town

Abstract: To achieve a world‐class city capable of attracting business in a competitive global market, the municipal government of Cape Town, South Africa, like many cities of the global North, has adopted a model of urban revitalization popularized by New York City: business or city improvement districts (BIDs or CIDs). By examining CIDs in city center Cape Town, the paper casts light on the socio‐spatial relationship facilitating the neoliberal post‐apartheid regime and its governance. Analyzing discursive and spatial practices of Cape Town Partnership, the managing body of downtown CIDs, from 2000 to 2006, the paper reveals its difficulties in stabilizing the socio‐spatial relations of a transnationalizing urban revitalization strategy and rejects the view of CIDS as simply a global roll‐out of neoliberal urban policies. It highlights how CIDs are challenged from both within and outside of their managing structures by contentious local issues, and in particular by vast social inequalities and citizens' historical struggle for inclusive citizenship and the right to the city. Whether and how CIDs' inherent limitations can be overcome to address socio‐spatial inequalities is an open question.     

Neoliberal Reason and Its Forms: De‐Politicisation Through Economisation

This paper offers a historically contextualised intellectual history of the entangled development of three competing post‐war economic approaches, viz the Austrian, Chicago and post‐Walrasian schools, as three forms of neoliberalism. Taking our cue from Foucault's reading of neoliberalism as a mode of governmentality under which the social is organised through “economic incentives”, we engage with the recent discussions of neoliberal theory on three accounts: neoliberalism is read as an epistemic horizon including not only “pro‐” but also “post‐market” positions articulated by post‐Walrasian economists who claim that market failures necessitate the design of “incentive‐compatible” remedial mechanisms; the Austrian tradition is distinguished from the Chicago‐style pro‐marketism; and the implications of the differences among the three approaches on economic as well as socio‐political life are discussed. The paper maintains that all three approaches promote the de‐politicisation of the social through its economisation albeit by way of different theories and policies. © 2013 The Author. Antipode © 2013 Antipode Foundation Ltd.     

Land Reform in the Time of Neoliberalism: A Many‐Splendored Thing

Abstract: Over the past 20 years, land reform – defined here as the redistribution of land from large to small properties – has emerged as an important political issue in the Global South. Actors with widely differing ideological perspectives have claimed land reform as central to their political, social and economic platforms. In this paper, I compare reforms championed under the neoliberal auspices of the World Bank (the so‐called Market Led Agrarian Reforms) with those supported by popular grassroots actors such as the Movement of Landless Workers (the MST) in Brazil. I argue that although these two approaches to land reform are often considered antithetical to one another, they share a common theoretical foundation. Both are rooted in a labor theory of property that attributes the fruits of one's labor to the laborer. Where the two differ is in their interpretation of the “original sin” through which land and labor came to be misaligned: neoliberal actors see the state as the key source of land‐related inefficiency while popular grassroots actors identify the market as the key source. I analyze case material from northeastern Brazil and suggest that the institutionalization of the labor theory of property (across civil society, state and market in the region) has generated insecurities for new land reform beneficiaries who must protect their property rights with visible evidence of their productivity.     

Maximum Working Class Unity? Challenges to Local Social Movement Unionism in Cape Town

Joint political mobilisation between trade unions and community groups, often referred to as ‘social movement unionism’, has been upheld as a way forward for organised labour in a neoliberal world economy. Analysing the interaction between unions and communities is critical for understanding the potential and actual roles played by trade unions in voicing the concerns of marginalized workers and poor communities. This article examines the efforts of organised municipal workers and urban social movements trying to unite their forces in post‐apartheid South Africa, by looking at the politics of the Cape Town Anti‐Privatisation Forum (APF). While the participants of the APF have in common their opposition to commercialisation and privatisation of service delivery, their political unity is fragile. By contrasting the ‘ideal‐type’ social movement unionism depicted in the contemporary literature on labour and globalisation with the findings of this particular case, we uncover some main dimensions along which this organisational cooperation is challenged. In contrast to the political unity experienced during the anti‐apartheid struggle, the APF initiative operates in a restructuring post‐apartheid economy where bridging internal organisational differences and confronting the hegemonic position of the African National Congress (ANC) in civil society have proved particularly challenging.     

Contesting Neoliberal Urbanism in Glasgow's Community Gardens: The Practice of DIY Citizenship

In this journal, it has been suggested that citizens practising community gardening “can become complicit in the construction of neoliberal hegemony”. Such hegemony is maintained, it is argued, through the day‐to‐day work of neoliberal citizen‐subjects, which “alleviates the state from service provision”. In this paper we acknowledge that community gardens are vulnerable to neoliberal cooptation. But, even where neoliberal practices are evidenced, such practices do not define or foreclose other socio‐political subjectivities at work in the gardens. We contend that community gardens in Glasgow cultivate collective practices that offer us a glimpse of what a progressively transformative polity can achieve. Enabled by an interlocking process of community and spatial production, this form of citizen participation encourages us to reconsider our relationships with one another, our environment and what constitutes effective political practice. Inspired by a range of writings on citizenship formation we term this “Do‐It‐Yourself” (DIY) Citizenship.     

Crisis,Continuity and Change: Neoliberalism,the Left and the Future of Capitalism

Abstract: This essay's point of departure is the coincident economic and environmental “crises” of our time. I locate both in the dynamics of capital accumulation on a world‐scale, drawing on the ideas of Marx, Karl Polanyi and James O’Connor. I ask whether the recent profusion of “crisis talk” in the public domain presents an opportunity for progressive new ideas to take hold now that “neoliberalism” has seemingly been de‐legitimated. My answer is that a “post‐neoliberal” future is probably a long way off. I make my case in two stages and at two geographical scales. First, I examine the British social formation as currently constituted and explain why even a leading neoliberal state is failing to reform its ways. Second, I then scale‐up from the domestic level to international affairs. I examine cross‐border emissions trading—arguably the policy tool for mitigating the very real prospects of significant climate change this century. The overall conclusion is this: even though the “first” and “second” contradictions of capital have manifested themselves together and at a global level, there are currently few prospects for systemic reform (never mind revolution) led by a new, twenty‐first century “red‐green” Left.     

The Uses of Neoliberalism

Abstract: The term “neoliberalism” has come to be used in a wide variety of partly overlapping and partly contradictory ways. This essay seeks to clarify some of the analytical and political work that the term does in its different usages. It then goes on to suggest that making an analytical distinction between neoliberal “arts of government” and the class‐based ideological “project” of neoliberalism can allow us to identify some surprising (and perhaps hopeful) new forms of politics that illustrate how fundamentally polyvalent neoliberal mechanisms of government can be. A range of empirical examples are discussed, mostly coming from my recent work on social policy and anti‐poverty politics in southern Africa.     

Reform and Resistance: A Consideration of Space,Scale and Strategy in Legal Challenges to Welfare Reform

This paper examines the law as a mechanism for resisting neoliberal policy change through a consideration of legal challenges to welfare reform in the United States. The Welfare Reform Act of 1996 marked a sea change in both the content and scale of the American social welfare system. It has entailed a downward shift in policy creation and administration from the national to the state and local level, and conveys a heavy emphasis on the “responsibility” of single mothers to engage in waged labor. In addition to changing the scale at which the social welfare system operates, welfare reform has changed how the more oppressive aspects of this policy might be resisted. While some legal advocates are challenging welfare reform by working within the “policy scale”, others are invoking national level protections by appealing to Civil Rights legislation. By working against the scale imposed by neoliberal social policy, Civil Rights legislation presents the possibility for advocates to “re‐scale responsibility” from that of single mothers to submit to wage labor in order to survive, to the government’s responsibility to protect its citizens against identity‐based discrimination. Herein, I argue both that the law can serve as an important mechanism for re‐focusing the scale of resistance in efforts to challenge oppressive social policy; and that even in the face of policy that imposes a local scale, the national level holds potential as an important terrain of resistance.     

Trafficking in Liquor,Trafficking in Heritage: Beer Branding as Heritage in Post‐apartheid South Africa

A burgeoning literature on post‐apartheid heritage configuration has largely overlooked the use of branding in the creation of heritage discourses in South Africa and the significance of liquor for national identity. This article brings these two concerns together through an examination of two heritage‐scapes—the SAB World of Beer and the SAB Newlands Brewery Heritage Centre—constructed by South African Breweries (SAB) in 1995. It suggests that the commercial construction of heritage as branding provided a vehicle for a powerful corporate capitalist narrative in the post‐apartheid rhetorical contestation over a desired path for the future. It also suggests that dissonance within and between these corporate visitors’ centres mirrored a wider uncertainty over the meaning of national identity in early post‐apartheid South Africa.     

The Value of Rents: Global Commodity Chains and Small Cocoa Producers in Ecuador

Drawing on the Marxian theory of ground rent, this paper develops an analysis of “global commodity chains” (GCCs) with agrarian roots. There is an acknowledgement that the concentrated downstream governance of primary commodity‐based GCCs has created a set of “asymmetrical” power relations which blocks the transmission of value upstream towards small producers. This paper argues that this research under‐specifies what is meant by value and rent, and in doing so marginalises the analysis of value production before its journey through inter‐firm relations. We demonstrate the importance of theorising the value constitution of commodities produced on the land and the forces that contest the payment of ground rent and thereby shape the geography of GCCs. Based on empirical research conducted around Ecuador's “post‐neoliberal” cocoa re‐activation plan, we identify the class politics and production mechanisms through which value and rent escapes the hands of a stratified network of small owner producers.     

The Spaces of Capital: The Political Form of Capitalism and the Internationalization of the State1

Abstract: In the course of the neoliberal globalization offensive capital has become more international. This development has placed the question of the state on the agenda once again. The central issue here is the extent to which the existing plurality of states should be seen as a historically contingent state of affairs which might not in principle last indefinitely, or as a structural component of the capitalist mode of production. One important aspect of this issue is the question of how the relationship between the “political form” of capitalism and “institutions” is understood. More often than not, even approaches that use Marxist theory have tended to address this question in an unsatisfactory manner.     

Emergent Geographies of International Education and Social Exclusion

This paper explores the socio‐spatial implications of recent developments in the internationalisation of education, which includes the growth in numbers of foreign students and the establishment of offshore schools. It demonstrates the relationship between emergent geographies of international education in the “West” and social reproduction in both student “sending” and “receiving” societies. Drawing on fieldwork in Hong Kong and Canada, it argues that international education is transforming the spatial scales over which social reproduction is achieved: on the one hand, upper‐middle‐class populations in East Asia are able to secure their social status through the acquisition of a “Western education”, thereby creating new geographies of social exclusion within “student‐sending” societies. On the other hand, primary and secondary schools in Canada are able to harness the benefits of internationalisation in order to offset the negative effects of neoliberal educational reform, thereby facilitating local social reproduction.     

Brazil's Amazon Fund: A “Green Fix” between Offset Pressures and Deforestation Crisis

Emissions trading and nature-based solutions, particularly REDD+, have lent themselves to the critical literature on the “socioecological fix” in neoliberal capital accumulation and state regulation. Prone to reversals, land conflict, and leakage, these mechanisms displace the burden of carbon emissions reductions to global South countries, promote new green commodities, and thus increase rather than curb the chance of capital accumulations by big polluters. Studies of existing REDD+ projects register the privatisation of forest management on the one hand and “aidification” on the other, suggesting impediments to fully commodifying forest carbon ranging from social movement resistance to technical issues. This case study of Brazil's national Amazon Fund points to global South protagonism in constructing and negotiating REDD+, challenging Northern and market hegemonies. Progressive Southern actors use the political space of the fix to defend rural communities' territorial rights and demand resources in line with historic responsibilities and climate justice.     

From the Guerra Del Agua to the Guerra Del Gas: Resource Governance,Neoliberalism and Popular Protest in Bolivia

Recent resource protests in Bolivia have crystallized broad sets of claims involving livelihood rights, political participation, regional autonomy, and the meanings of citizenship and the nation. In both the 2000 “Water War”, and the 2003 “Gas War”, protestors objected to the restructuring and re‐scaling of resource governance that has taken place under recent waves of neoliberal reforms in Bolivia. In both cases, protestors demanded greater participation in decision‐making regarding resource management, more equitable distribution of the economic benefits derived from resource exploitation, and a more socially oriented alternative to Bolivia's neoliberal model of economic development. In spite of these similarities, however, these struggles were characterized by markedly uneven geographies of popular protest. The water and gas wars had different spatial dynamics, stemming in part from the biophysical differences between water and natural gas, and the ways these resources enter into social life. Moreover, the protests had very uneven social effects, and in some respects excluded the most marginalized sectors of Bolivia's poor.