Introduction

South Africa’s globalised food system is based on a history of violence, dispossession and accumulation through ecocide (the mass-scale destruction of human and non-human nature), which has been devastating for the natural commons (land, water, biodiversity, creative labour, energy and the earth system).Footnote ¹ Land redistribution, which is essential, cannot be separated from how the natural commons have been abused, polluted and damaged by a mono-industrial agrarian structure and the implications this has for socio-ecological relations. After the first democratic elections, the African National Congress made commitments to redistribute 30 per cent of land, but instead it globalised the food system, further concentrating the agrarian structure. Deracialising agrarian capitalism, as part of a deep globalisation class project, has not been transformative. In this context, the land question has become increasingly polarising in South Africa. Land justice is crucial for South Africa, but expropriation without compensation, even through a new law to create a new class of monopoly black capitalist farmers locked into a globalised and ecocidal agrarian structure, reduces redistributive justice to a farce, is not transformative and perpetuates inequality.

Moreover, in the context of the worsening climate crisis, South Africa’s redistributive land discourse must be rethought. This chapter argues the land question in South Africa has to be located in the context of the emergence of climate famines and the risk of more intensive climate shocks (extreme droughts, floods and heatwaves, for instance). Agrarian thought and redistributive land justice must be shaped by climate justice and vice versa. Given the systemic risk posed by the worsening climate crisis, we have to ask what the most appropriate food system is, as part of a deep and just transition, to ensure we meet the needs of all in the country. How do we ensure that the right to food and water, ecological justice and ethics of care inform the making of such a food system? Ecological justice in this chapter is conceived to include climate, land and social justice; it straddles social and natural relations by recognising the intrinsic worth of human and non-human life forms. In this regard, ecological justice stands for the defence of the natural commons (land, water, biodiversity, creative labour, energy and the earth system) as the basis for the reproduction of life.

In the post-apartheid period, land redistribution policy discourse has been about either a state- or market-centric approach. A third approach, centring the commons in local spaces and on a macro-scale, and based on building a food sovereignty commons system through a politics of democratic systemic reforms, central to climate justice politics, is a crucial alternative to be considered. Such a bottom-up transformative approach to the land question has been pioneered by food sovereignty campaigning in South Africa across variegated interstitial spaces, both urban and rural. This approach is based on a conception of claiming the constitutional right to food and water, championing ecological justice, and practising non-anthropocentric ethics of care. To appreciate the ecological justice underpinnings of this perspective, this chapter delves into four crucial aspects of food sovereignty thinking in South Africa.Footnote ² First is the critique of globalised agrarian capital’s ecologies and its connection to the larger general crisis of socio-ecological reproduction. Second, the place of the commons in understanding the making of South African capitalism and historiography is examined in order to learn critical lessons from this past for food sovereignty commons system building and ecological justice. This is also a decolonial imperative. Third, the ecocidal logic of South Africa’s globalised industrial agricultural food system is laid bare by highlighting its role in constituting several dangerous ecological rifts. Finally, the chapter returns to the challenge of re-agrarianising South Africa through food sovereignty, with an emphasis on its normative, systemic and agential practices.

Globalised Food Systems, Systemic Shocks and the General Crisis of Socio-ecological Reproduction

The ecologies of globalised, carbon-based, mono-industrial agricultural food systems go to the heart of the contemporary and general crisis of socio-ecological production in the world. The agricultural sector is one of the most exposed and vulnerable in terms of climate shocks such as droughts, floods, cyclones, heat waves and wildfires. Transboundary agricultural trade is revealing major risks. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the globalised food system displayed acute stresses in terms of problems with supply lines, logistics and changing food habits. Food prices have also been edging upwards. However, in 2021 to early 2022, globalised food markets were reeling from a multi-dimensional shock (Hodgson & Bernard, Reference Hodgson and Bernard2022). In 2021, Brazil experienced severe frosts in its coffee belt, sending prices to a seven-year high, while heat waves and drought in Canada hit pea production hard, more than doubling the prices of plant-based meat alternatives. The prices of Belgian potatoes surged after flooding devastated large swaths of Europe during the continent’s summer. In the United States, oat production was its lowest since 1866 due to heat and dry weather sapping the yield potential in major growing states (Hirtzer & Carey, Reference Hirtzer and Carey2021). In this context, the Stockholm Environment Institute issued a report which stated climate change would: ‘dramatically impact agricultural production all around the globe’ (Adams et al., Reference Adams, Benzie, Croft and Sadowski2021). The report goes on to caution that with warmer temperatures, the ‘risks are greater than the opportunities’. From its risk assessment, it highlights maize and rice, important staples, as facing a major risk. The Russian invasion of Ukraine compounded the famine conditions in Africa, pushing up food prices, including staples and input costs (Kroll, Reference Kroll2022). Africa imports about 40 per cent of its wheat from Russia and Ukraine. In this context, many United Nations (UN) and food aid organisations have publicly asserted that Africa is set to face increasing hunger due to worsening climate conditions (RFI, 2022).

However, the 2021–2022 multi-dimensional shock on the globalised food system fits into a pattern that has occurred repeatedly over the past two decades. As food systems have been restructured, financialised and externalised to integrate with global circuits, severe vulnerabilities have been revealed as various shocks have hit. For instance, in 2006–2008, 2009–2011, 2014–2016 and 2018, shocks have impacted the globalised food system (Satgar & Cherry, Reference Satgar and Cherry2019). In each of these moments, multiple causal factors have been identified, ranging from climate impacts, biofuel production, the geopolitics of oil price increases to financial speculation, amongst others. In 2018 it was the price of crude oil, which spiked at US$80 a barrel with ramifications throughout the global economy, including the food system (Vaughan, Reference Vaughan2018). The 2014–2016 shock was regionalised and impacted Southern Africa dramatically, with almost 40 million in food stress due to an El Niño-induced drought. This was the first major climate shock in the region after a 1°C increase overshoot on a planetary scale in 2015. The second shock (2009–2011) fed into the revolutions of the ‘Arab Spring’, with calls for ‘bread, freedom and justice’ reverberating through the streets. The first shock (2006–2008) led to food riots in various countries.

Besides the fragilities of a deeply globalised food system, the carbon emissions of this system paradoxically create their own climate shock feedbacks. As a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, such a globalised food system generates its own systemic risk and is locked into a ‘climate crisis trap’. It is the second largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in the world. Some estimates suggest that the global food regime contributes 20–30 per cent of all human-associated greenhouse gas emissions (Garnett et al., Reference Garnett, Smith, Nicholson and Finch2016). While emissions from agriculture and associated land-use change account for 24 per cent of human-made emissions (IPCC, 2014), 14.5–19 per cent of this comes from livestock alone (Herero, Reference Herero2016; Reisinger & Clark, Reference Reisinger and Clark2018). Packaging, retail, transport, processing, food preparation and waste disposal contribute an additional 5–10 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions (Garnett et al., Reference Garnett, Smith, Nicholson and Finch2016).

In this context, world hunger is on the rise. Current UN estimates suggest 811 million people in the world are food deprived. As a concept, famine refers to food deprivation followed by hunger and mortality in a particular context, such as a community or parts of a country. Essentially, almost 1 billion human beings on our planet are facing famine despite the vaunted abundance of the corporate-controlled global food system. From 2015, when the world overshot a 1°C increase in planetary temperature since prior to the industrial revolution, the risk of climate-induced famines increased. Several places on the planet, including Zimbabwe, Honduras, Madagascar, Ethiopia (particularly the Tigray region), Mozambique and Puerto Rico, have faced this challenge. Madagascar makes for a tragic example, with its globalised food system heavily reliant on the export of monocrops such as vanilla, cloves, fruits, cocoa, sugarcane, coffee, sisal and cotton. In mid-2021, a severe drought in the southern part of the country placed an estimated 1 million people in famine conditions. On top of this, and more recently (late January and early February 2022), within two weeks of each other, cyclones Ana and Batsirai smashed into the island, washing away villages and exacerbating famine conditions (United Nations, 2022). In general, these situations have upended the conception of famine in the academic and humanitarian literature in three respects. First, climate extremes (cyclones, droughts, heatwaves, wildfires and floods) have impacted these countries sometimes in combination, within short periods of time, forcing their globalised and mono-industrialised food systems to collapse or climate extremes have been a serious contributory factor to socio-ecological collapse and conflict. Second, climate famines in the Global South, particularly Africa, are a direct result of the climate apartheid of the Global North, with its historical emissions and continued use of oil, coal and gas. Third, climate famines are one of many symptomatic expressions of the larger crisis of capitalist civilisation (circa 2007 to the present). This is the fourth general crisis of capitalism, and it brings to the foreground from within the deeper structural divides of capitalism – production/reproduction, nature/society, polity/economy – dangerous systemic crisis tendencies, including globalised food system collapse, worsening hunger and famines.Footnote ³ The ecologies of globalised, carbon-based and mono-industrial agrarian capital are directly implicated in this crisis.

The Commons Mode of Production, Farming and the Making of Capitalist South Africa

The concept of the commons refers to (i) a commonwealth of life enabling socio-ecological systems; (ii) governed together by a community of commoners (iii) to ensure their lives are reproduced and that such systems thrive; as a mode of production, it seeks the general good through organising human labour and natural relations.Footnote ⁴ In world history, the natural commons have been at the centre of the relationship between humans and nature for about 200,000 years. The oldest commons relationship is in Africa, the origins of our species, and it demonstrates a coeval relationship between humans and ecosystems. In this context, cooperation also marked social relations; humans were not homo economicus (the embodiment of a colonial and imperial conception of what it means to be human). Even with settlements, there were communal and marine tenure systems to ensure that socio-ecological relations thrived (Ricoveri, Reference Ricoveri2013). In Rome, a distinctive role was provided for res communes (or property held in common); in the 1300s in medieval Europe a Forest Charter was adopted to ensure co-governance; and, in general, custom played an important role in providing rules for the commons in Europe.Footnote ⁵ Unlike Europe, in which there was a transition from feudalism to capitalism, South Africa followed a different historical sequence, from the commons mode of production to militarised mercantile slavery and then settler capitalism.Footnote ⁶

What follows is not a history of farming in South Africa and its relationship to capitalism but rather a few critical views on how to rethink the history of South Africa, farming and the making of capitalism from the standpoint of the food sovereignty commons. The concept of the commons mode of production is used as a heuristic to engage in informed conjecture based on academic evidence (Lowy, Reference Lowy2005).Footnote ⁷ At stake is how we overcome the last great dispossession of the natural commons so we can take commoning to a new level to sustain life. Moreover, revisiting the historical archive about the commons mode of production is crucial for how we decolonise South African history but also think about emancipatory ecologies in the present, in the context of advancing food sovereignty and ecological justice. Three crucial issues need to be foregrounded in this regard.

First, most of the historiography on South Africa provides cursory insights into hunter-gatherers (San), nomadic herders (Khoikhoi) and then, over the past 2,000 years, pastoralists and cultivators (Bantu) made an appearance as they moved into the southern part of the continent (see Feinstein, Reference Feinstein2005; Pampallis & Bailey, Reference Pampallis and Bailey2021).Footnote ⁸ What is not fully appreciated in the historiography of South Africa is the ‘commons mode of production’ that existed before the colonial encounter. The commons mode of production expresses the first attempts by the human species to establish a human-in-nature relationship. The palaeontological and anthropological record is developing and giving us glimpses of the most intimate human relations with nature: our first diets, the importance of indigenous biodiversity, eco-spiritualities, adaptation to difficult environmental conditions, complex renderings of rock art, fishing, farming practices and conceptions of human–nature relations that were opposed to conquering nature.

Second, a gaze back is not romantic but about trying to think critically about the materialities of the past – a straight line from the commons mode of production to present struggles for food sovereignty – to learn critical lessons about adaptation, subsistence and survival.

The role of the natural commons features in the history and reproduction of San, Khoikhoi and Bantu peoples. This was the first food sovereignty commons. The San lived with an eco-spiritual ethic in nature as hunter-gatherers. They were egalitarian, shared food and did not seek to dominate nature. Ocean fish traps, hunting and gathering happened in the context of natural abundance. The Khoikhoi herders utilised pastoral spaces with healthy grazing, carrying capacity and accessibility. If they lost their livestock due to theft or drought, the Khoikhoi easily resorted to hunting and gathering. Bantu mixed farmers were allowed land for households and for agricultural cultivation by chiefs but land, in general, was commons, not owned by anyone and ‘usufructory rights’ (rights of use) were conferred. While cattle was an important source of wealth, and control of female and unmarried young adult labour played a crucial role in organising households, land, pasture, forests, wild veld, rivers, wetlands and, in some instances, the oceans were all part of the commons.Footnote ⁹ While stratification existed in the latter form of commons-based subsistence societies, these were not static societies, and agricultural techniques changed over time to also work with ecological conditions. The incorporation of maize production is one instance. Moreover, chieftain control of such social orders was unstable, given that land and the commons were available beyond the aggregated household group.

Hence, in a climate crisis world, it is important to appreciate that the early commons mode of production informs us that:

1. (i) millet is a drought-resistant crop;

2. (ii) indigenous botanical knowledge is crucial to inform the science of agroecology to ensure resilient polyculture practices;

3. (iii) customary land (about 20 per cent of South African land is still considered customary) should be used in a manner that is more ecologically sustainable;

4. (iv) retrieving practices to protect seeds and biotic resources, developing more localised diets (‘eating what’s there’) and more conscious water use practices in a water-scarce country, are some crucial areas for further research and decolonial knowledge production to ensure commoning is taken to a new level.

These are concerns of the South African Food Sovereignty Campaign.

Third, working with a commons mode of production approach to South African history also provides a more ecologically centred perspective on the genealogies of oppressions and the making of capitalism in South Africa. Most histories on the making of capitalism in South Africa, including liberal and Marxist, while successfully highlighting the connections between race, class and capitalism have occluded ecological relations. For instance, the original colonial encounter, ‘frontier wars’, land dispossession, the making of agro-industrial farming and ruling class projects (imperial, white nationalist, apartheid and globalising African nationalism) are all about historical waves of dispossessing the commons mode of production, instrumentalising natural relations as a ‘thing’ and entrenching a logic of ecocide (Satgar, Reference Satgar2021). Frontier wars were actually wars of defending the commons mode of production, from a subaltern perspective. As Marx (Reference Marx1976: 873–942) highlights in Capital, appropriation, racism, theft and domination are central to processes of primitive accumulation. Accumulation through ecocide in South Africa has happened through four waves of enclosure, with each being destructive for human and non-human life:

1. (i) the first wave is militarised Dutch mercantile imperialism;

2. (ii) British imperial expansion constitutes the second wave, also for about a century and half;

3. (iii) Afrikaner nationalism with its racist, religious and modernising imaginary is the third wave; and

4. (iv) globalising and financialised African nationalism from 1994 to the present is the fourth wave.

These historical waves of enclosure and destruction of the commons mode of production have serious implications for ecological justice and its place in contemporary struggles.

The Ecological Rifts of Globalised Industrial Agriculture in South Africa

The non-productivist Marx, particularly in Capital (in relation to the destruction of soils) and his Ecological Notebooks (with regard to concerns for the destruction of forests and robbery from soils), recognised more clearly the antagonism capitalism develops against nature (Saito, Reference Saito2017). Marx critiqued capitalist agriculture in its ‘second agricultural revolution’ from 1830 to 1880, with the growth of the fertiliser industry and soil chemistry (Foster, Reference Foster1999: 373). Marx’s awareness of the nature–society divide was already present in his early conception of alienation in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. For John Bellamy Foster (Reference Foster1999), the metabolic rift Marx was concerned with assists in recognising how labour mediates the relationship with nature – the flows of energy and resources – and how this rift is implicated in a structural divide between capitalism and nature. This has evolved into ecological rift theory and analysis. As Holleman (Reference Holleman2018: 97) points out, the conditions under which ecological rifts are engendered entail the following:

South Africa, with its history of colonialism, segregation and apartheid, has produced a farming system with concentrations of racialised and gendered control of land. In the post-apartheid period, the liberalisation and financialisation of farming concentrated power even more. From about 64,000 commercial farmers in the early 1990s, today, after almost three decades of neoliberal restructuring, farming is concentrated in 40,122 units, with a few big farms (2,610) with incomes over R22.5 million, constituting 6.5 per cent of the total number of farms in the commercial agriculture industry, and accounting for 67.0 per cent of total income and 51.4 per cent of total employment. The agro-industrial farming system, with its concentrated power dynamics, in the context of one of the most unequal countries in the world, has generated several ecological rifts:

• Super-exploitation of humans and non-human nature (soil and water) – Agriculture in South Africa has a long history of slave-like conditions on farms, going back to colonial society. Race, gender and class shape this reality. Today, there are about 769,594 farm workers (461,693 permanent and about 295,934 seasonal). Recent attempts to mitigate the working conditions for farm workers through minimum wages has met with fierce resistance from farmers. In a recent study, Deedat et al. (Reference Deedat, Van der Merwe, Grawitzky and Smith2020) highlight that the agricultural sector has an 82 per cent share below the national minimum wage (second to domestic work), non-compliance was highest in agriculture at 76.4 per cent in 2019 and, in some instances, farmers withdrew non-wage benefits (such as food, transport, hospital fees and accommodation) to adjust for minimum wage compliance.

  Soil is absolutely crucial for most food consumed in South Africa and the world. Half the topsoil in the world has already been lost over the past 150 years in a context in which soils take decades and sometimes centuries to revitalise. Around the world, ploughing and chemical fertilisers, which are short-term fixes, have contributed to serious soil degradation and the loss of 30 per cent of the world’s arable land (Holleman, Reference Holleman2018: 21). Moreover, planetary boundary scientists have demonstrated that industrial agriculture, through its use of phosphorous and nitrogen, has contributed to an overshoot of these boundaries and to changing the chemistry of our planet. The disruption of land ecologies by industrial farming has prompted a global debate about the return of ‘dust-bowlification’. South Africa has dry and poor soil in most areas, with our most arable soils in Mpumalanga (46.4 per cent), but this is being destroyed by coal mining (Smallhorne, Reference Smallhorne2018). The degradation of soils is a major challenge, with erosion, ploughing and chemical fertiliser use. According to Le Roux and Smith:

  In quantitative terms, the average predicted soil loss rate for South Africa is 12.6 tons/ha/year, while the average soil loss rate under annual cropland (grain crops) is 13 tons/ha/year, which is much higher than the natural soil formation rate of fewer than 5 tons/ha/year. This simply means that we are losing much more soil than we gain.

  (Le Roux and Smith, Reference Le Roux and Smith2014)

  Under British colonialism in the nineteenth century, imperial science contributed to dam building in South Africa and on farms. Furthermore, to enhance industrial agriculture in South Africa, from the depression in the inter-war years to the 1960s, there was massive state investment in farming irrigation systems. As a result of this, agriculture is responsible for 61 per cent of water use in South Africa and 5 per cent of water storage capacity due to private dams. In a drought-prone country with acute water inequalities that are further exacerbated by climate shocks, water control by agro-industrial farming is a recipe for conflict.

• Unequal ecological exchangeFootnote ¹⁰ – This relates to the larger ecological implications of trade relations. Occluded from immediate monetary valuation are other forms of value.

  Agricultural exports from South Africa, including forestry and fisheries, was valued at R177.25 billion in 2018 (primary products were R85.91 billion and secondary products R91.34 billion). The export destinations for these products were mainly Europe, Africa and parts of Asia. Imports for the same year amounted to R129.45 billion, mostly made up of imported secondary products such as books. In monetary terms, this was a net gain and a positive in terms of trade. What these figures do not measure is the energy used (including the carbon footprint of transportation), the topsoil degraded, the biodiversity loss and even water. If these costs were priced in, South Africa’s positive terms of agricultural trade would likely become negative. The narrow monetary value of exports does not give a real measure of ecological value. A full cost accounting of ecological value remains a challenge to understanding the real exchange dynamics of agricultural trade.

• Biodiversity loss – Industrial agriculture’s contribution to gross domestic product has been declining since the 1960s, from 11 per cent to 1.8 per cent in 2020. Before and during the time span, this food system has been implicated in the destruction of biodiversity loss. The extinction of various animal species from the Quagga and the elephants in the Western Cape is linked to colonial expansion and early farming settlements. More recently, farmers have gained notoriety for killing cheetahs, honey badgers and leopards. According to the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI), out of 23,331 species facing the risk of extinction in South Africa, 48 of these species are now extinct. Further, in the National Biodiversity Assessment of 2019, 14 per cent of South Africa’s plant species and 12 per cent of animal species are threatened with extinction (SANBI, 2020). SANBI’s 2018 National Biodiversity Assessment Report delves deeper into the various structural forces contributing to species extinction in South Africa (Skowno et al., Reference Skowno2019). In this regard, the agro-industrial food system features prominently in relation to abstracting water for dams, with negative effects on ecosystems, bio-chemical run-off into riverine systems, cultivation of crops, plantation forestry and land degradation.Footnote ¹¹

• Carbon emissions – According to the National Greenhouse Gas Inventory Report, in 2017 agriculture contributed 48,641.80 gigatons of CO2e, 9.5 per cent as a sector. This was second to the energy sector at 80.1 per cent. Methodologically, it is unclear how government calculates these indicators and whether carbon emissions across whole value chain activities, including carbon footprints for exports, are measured or government data just points to emissions on farms. Nonetheless, the agro-industrial food system in South Africa is locked into the climate crisis trap and its deadly feedback loops. As a drought-prone country, compounded by planetary heating, South Africa’s recent drought lasted about seven years and broke the three-year cycle. According to climate science, the next drought is likely to be longer; heatwaves will also impact soil conditions, while wildfires and higher-than-average rainfall will also bring challenges.Footnote ¹²

• Hunger – In the first half of the twentieth century, at least half a dozen famines impacted the African majority, while modern white capitalist farming thrived, including through feeding the white population, provisioning mines, accessing international markets and through state support. Wylie (Reference Wylie2001: 59–90) provides crucial insights about three famines impacting the African majority: Pondoland (1912–1913), Lembombo Flats (1927) in the former eastern Transvaal and the Eastern Cape in 1946. We will never know the full impact of these famines, but they give us a sense of the racist and ecocidal logic of modern capitalist farming. This continues into the present. Before COVID-19, about 14 million South Africans went to bed hungry. In the midst of the pandemic, with job losses and precariousness, about 30 million South Africans faced hunger. According to the Pietermaritzburg Economic Justice and Dignity Group (PMBEJD, 2021), since the start of the Household Affordability Index in September 2020 the average cost of the Household Food Basket increased by R416.10 (10.8 per cent) from R3,856.34 in September 2020 to R4,272.44 in November 2021. This is higher than the National Minimum Wage for a General Worker, which in November 2021 was R3,643.92. Moreover, the Child Support Grant of R460 is 26 per cent below the Food Poverty Line of R624 and 38 per cent below the average cost to feed a child a basic nutritious diet of R744.96. Besides exporting food in this context and being implicated in large amounts of food waste (WWF, 2017),Footnote ¹³ the agro-industrial food system has a built-in irrationality. While people starve, the bulk of yellow maize (89.4 per cent of about 5.1 million tons per annum) and soybean production (only 7 per cent produced in the country is used for human consumption) ends up as animal feed (National Agricultural Marketing Council, 2011; DALRRD, 2020).

Re-Agrarianising South Africa through Food Sovereignty

Food sovereignty is a counter-hegemonic concept championed by La Via Campesina, the largest social movement on earth. It was first articulated in 1996 as a counter to the food security paradigm. Today, across the planet, food sovereignty alliances, platforms and campaigns are advancing food sovereignty at different scales. In South Africa, the discourse has travelled into agrarian, food justice, solidarity economy and environmental justice spaces over the past few years. In 2014, the Cooperative and Policy Alternative, together with NGOs, small-scale farmers and activists, hosted dialogues on the food system crisis in all nine provinces. This culminated in a food crisis conference in late 2014, at which it was resolved to build a national platform of convergence for social forces wanting a food sovereignty alternative for South Africa. In 2015 the South African Food Sovereignty Campaign was launched, and it embarked on a journey to translate the concept of food sovereignty for South African historical conditions and challenges. Generally, food sovereignty is understood as a critique of capitalist agriculture, a systemic alternative and movement-building process. In the preceding analysis, I have provided some insights into the emancipatory ecology critique evolving in the South African context. Below I deal with the politics of advancing food sovereignty as a systemic alternative and movement as part of the deep and just transition to achieve climate and, more generally, ecological justice.

Conclusion

Redistributive land justice in South Africa needs urgent political resolution, and it also needs a paradigm shift away from state- or market-centric approaches. A third alternative in the South African context is a food sovereignty commons approach based on strengthening existing food sovereignty pathways from below, a people- and worker-driven democratic systemic reform such as a PFSA, including democratic planning, and ensuring South Africa has a food system with adaptation and regeneration capabilities that can ensure worsening climate shocks are mitigated. Food sovereignty is crucial for a deep and just transition process and building a food commons system in local spaces and on a macro-scale. The SAFSC has been pioneering such an approach in South Africa. Its normative praxis has been grounded in claiming the constitutional right to food as the basis for building a food sovereignty commons system, advancing ecological justice and an ethics of care. The PFSA it has developed is an invitation to think about another way forward for South Africa’s ecocidal food system. It is the product of a subaltern imaginary, affirming aspirations for a future based on defending and enhancing life-enabling commons systems. Underpinning this is a rethink of the place of the commons in South African history and its crucial role in decolonising our present and future. The food sovereignty alternative is about confronting the last great dispossession of the commons, globally and in the country. It is a direct challenge to the post-apartheid state and commercial agriculture to become commoners, committed to ecological justice, to ensure we all break out of the climate crisis trap and the global crisis of socio-ecological reproduction.

Introduction

Three decades after South Africa’s first democratic election, the top 10 per cent of the population owns more than 90 per cent of the total wealth (Davis Tax Committee, 2018: 4), and the country remains one of the most unequal societies on earth (Sulla et al., Reference Sulla, Zikhali and Cuevas2022). Unequal access to land, education, employment opportunities and the spatial design of cities and towns continue to reflect the legacies of apartheid. Prominent among the sources of continuing economic and political inequity has been the failure of post-apartheid land redistribution (Ngcukaitobi, Reference Ngcukaitobi2021). While most agree that inequality detrimentally shapes the life opportunities of the majority of South Africans, there is increasing evidence that it is also undermining the post-apartheid settlement – whether in the form of public protests, corruption or simply increasing disillusionment with the political and constitutional order. It is in this context that land has once again become a central focus of political and legal conflict (Klug, Reference Klug2018).

Since market-led reform policies have clearly failed to produce the necessary redistributive justice required to address apartheid’s legacies, it is time to explore more interventionist options. This raises an important question: might a transformational tax provide the basis for a new social contract that will further the promise of South Africa’s post-apartheid constitutional order? To address this question, I explore a comparative history of wealth taxes to reflect on the forms a proposed transformational tax may take. This comparative approach explains in part why recent debates about an annual wealth tax in South Africa failed to see the potential such a tax presents to address inequality in South Africa. The Davis Tax Committee, appointed in 2013 by then Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan to advise on tax policy, investigated the idea of a wealth tax, focusing its attention on an annual tax, which the Committee found would not offer a significant advance on the existing tax system and would be difficult to implement.

This was not the first proposal for a wealth tax in South Africa. That came from the African National Congress (ANC) in October 1991 in a report from a commission on land at a conference on affirmative action organised by the ANC Constitutional Committee in Gqeberha (then Port Elizabeth). The commission reported to the conference that to address the history of colonial dispossession and apartheid forced removals, as well as the exclusion of Africans from the land market since 1913, there would need to be a significant redistribution of land. In this context, it proposed a wealth tax to serve as a source of funding to compensate those whose land would be expropriated to enable restitution or redistribution. Compensation would ensure that individuals would not bear the brunt of a process designed to address historical legacies. At the time, the ancien regime and the establishment press vociferously rejected the idea of a wealth tax (Krige, Reference Krige1991). It is worth noting that while often rejected as either utopian or unworkable, the idea of a wealth tax in South Africa is not (now or then) an outlandish idea. In fact, in the immediate aftermath of the first democratic election, a small one-off ‘transition levy’ of 5 per cent ‘on individuals and companies with an income in excess of 50,000 rands’ a year was successfully used to cover the costs of the democratic transition (Carlin, Reference Carlin1994). Now, after over a quarter of a century in which the legacies of apartheid persist, and the country has experienced economic, political and pandemic disruptions, the need for a new social compact is being recognised. In this new context, compensation for necessary expropriations will be one among many needs a transformational tax might address. In fact, identifying specific needs, including rural and urban land reform, would be an important aspect of any new social compact. It is also clear that while a relatively moderate threshold exemption on wealth would exclude the vast majority of black South Africans from the tax, it would apply to all with wealth over the defined threshold, regardless of their earlier status among the oppressed. The burden of the tax could be moderated by imposing a sliding scale so that a higher rate applies to the very wealthiest 1 or 2 per cent of the population.

Before describing a proposed transformational tax, this chapter first presents a brief historical survey of different forms of wealth taxes in several countries. This comparative analysis demonstrates that capital levies have been a more effective means of ensuring redistribution compared to annual wealth taxes. The conclusion to be drawn from this is that any plans for a transformational tax to address the legacies of apartheid and gross inequality must consider the imposition of a capital levy. The final section of this chapter applies the analysis of former experiences with capital levies to imagine the outlines of a transformational tax for South Africa.

International Experience with Wealth Taxes

Over the twentieth century, there were distinct periods in which wealth taxes were proposed and implemented in various countries. The first period, around World War I, saw wealth taxes used as a means of reducing public debt. The second period occurred in the aftermath of World War II, when wealth taxes of different forms were introduced in many countries, including France, West Germany and Japan. Finland resorted to a capital levy twice in the 1940s, once to address the plight of Finish citizens who were expelled from the Karelia Peninsula, which the Soviet Union took in 1940, and then again in 1944. A third period followed the 2008 financial crisis, while the economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have produced new proposals for wealth taxes.

Within this history, it is important to distinguish between annual net wealth taxes and one-off wealth taxes or capital levies, as each form has distinct goals and means of implementation, with significant consequences for the idea of a transformational tax in South Africa.

Annual net wealth taxes are what are most regularly considered when reference is made to a wealth tax. The prime examples include the Swedish wealth tax introduced in 1910 and taken up in various European countries in the 1970s and again after the global financial crisis in 2008. Many of these annual net wealth taxes were ended in the 1990s, and while some were reintroduced post-2008, others have faced constitutional and other challenges. In the case of Germany, where wealth taxes of various forms have been repeatedly used and are provided for in the Basic Law, the failure to regularly update real property values led in 1995 to a Constitutional Court challenge, which struck down the annual net wealth tax as unconstitutional for violating the Basic Law’s equality clause. Annual net wealth taxes, as well as the utopian idea of a global tax on capital suggested by Thomas Piketty in his 2014 book, Capital in the 21st Century, are quite distinct from the idea of a capital levy or one-off wealth tax like the German Lastenausgleich or equalisation of burdens tax that was adopted in the wake of World War II. A capital levy may be ‘defined simply as an extraordinary tax which is assessed on capital owned at a given date’ (Robson, Reference Robson1959: 23). If we focus on these one-off wealth taxes, or capital levies, which sought to achieve more than debt relief, we encounter a few very particular historical cases from the period after World War II. In the case of France, the levy served both to raise public finances and also to punish those who had profited by collaborating with the Nazi occupiers. The levy was 25 per cent on capital as of 1945, plus 100 per cent on additions to capital during the occupation from 1940 to 1945 (Carroll, Reference Carroll1946). Four countries – Germany, Japan, Finland and Korea – adopted versions of capital levies whose overall goals were reconstruction, equalisation and democratisation. The German case was initiated by the process of financial reform imposed by the occupying powers in 1949 and was incorporated into the sharing of burdens law or Lastenausgleich (Equalization Law of 1951) in 1952. In the case of Japan, the occupying forces imposed a 90 per cent capital levy on the top 2–3 per cent of the population, who were considered beneficiaries of Japanese militarisation and aggression. Finally, Finland and South Korea introduced programmes linked to land redistributions that effectively served as forms of one-off capital levies.

The Comparative Advantage of Capital Levies over Annual Wealth Taxes

For most of the twentieth century, the central goal of the wealth tax in Europe was to repay state debts (most commonly war debts), alternatively to address either economic inequality more broadly or a specific economic, political or social crisis, such as the needs of displaced war refugees and those who lost their property due to war – the war-damaged. In Asia, wealth taxes in Japan and Korea served quite different purposes, although they were also imposed in conflict or post-war contexts. In the case of Japan, the decision to impose a high capital levy on the Zaibatsu was justified both on economic grounds and, perhaps more significantly, as a means of securing democracy. In Korea and Taiwan, the land-to-the-tiller land reforms of the 1950s served to redistribute wealth (granting opportunities to tenant farmers to own land) and to direct capital investment into industrialisation. Despite these diverse histories, capital levies have shared a common set of goals – debt relief, sharing the burden of significant economic and social crises, constraining inequality and securing democracy.

Annual wealth taxes seem, by comparison, to be mostly geared towards raising revenue and reducing inequality. Implicit is an assumption that the expenditure of this revenue will be for the benefit of the less fortunate through the funding of social welfare programmes. While this general assumption may have justified annual wealth taxes in European social democracies, the diffuse nature of the benefit has meant that unless left-leaning political parties were in power and defended the programme, governments found it relatively easy to abandon annual wealth taxes, especially if the revenue stream was rather modest.

An alternative approach, more common in the case of capital levies, was to tie the income stream to specific expenditures or spending goals. Thus, the Finnish capital levy was directly tied to compensation for refugees, while the German Lastenausgleich both provided aid to the war-damaged and created a significant fund for reconstruction, particularly for housing. Thus, when considering the objectives of wealth taxes, it is important to distinguish between the different revenue goals as well as plans for the expenditure of the revenue raised by the tax.

While justification for many of the capital levies imposed in the early twentieth century was to address public debt, the imposition of annual wealth taxes was often justified in terms of constraining inequality and raising revenue. Significantly, however, the comparative history demonstrates that annual net wealth taxes do not manage to collect large amounts of revenue as compared, by percentage, to other taxes collected in the jurisdictions studied. Furthermore, annual wealth taxes do not seem to have any significant impact on the distribution of wealth (Wijtvliet, Reference Wijtvliet2014), although if continued over decades, there is some evidence that the degree of inequality may be moderated. In comparison, the imposition of capital levies does seem to have addressed some of the articulated goals justifying the use of wealth taxes as opposed to other fiscal mechanisms.

To secure their goals, the legal frameworks for different wealth tax programmes address a similar range of administrative and legal issues. Among the most ubiquitous issues facing the implementation of wealth taxes are defining the tax base, the valuation of wealth and the relationship to other forms of taxation. There are also concerns about the cost of administration and the likelihood of evasion or tax avoidance. Finally, there is a question, especially in the case of capital levies, whether the revenue should be earmarked for specific purposes or simply be used to pay down the public debt. By exploring the comparative historical experience, we can identify the issues and modalities that need to be considered in constructing and adopting a proposed transformational tax for South Africa.

A Transformational Tax for South Africa?

Instead of focusing on an annual net wealth tax – which has been shown internationally not to produce much income, or reduce inequality, and possibly increases capital flight and tax avoidance – this proposal is to adopt a one-off post-apartheid capital levy or transformational tax to address the continuing legacies of colonialism and apartheid. Furthermore, when considering the adoption of a transformational tax in South Africa today, we need to be very clear about both its purpose and normative basis. There are four main justifications for adopting a transformational tax or capital levy in South Africa. First, there is agreement that South Africa remains a highly unequal society, particularly when it comes to wealth. While the top 10 per cent of earners may now include 40 per cent black Africans and 48 per cent whites (using the standard South African government categories), when it comes to wealth, the distribution is even more skewed, with the richest 4 per cent earning over R750,000 per annum in 2014 and the top 1 per cent controlling 95 per cent of personal financial assets (Makgetla, Reference Makgetla and Khadiagala2018). Second, despite the Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluding that apartheid was a crime against humanity, the question of reparations for that crime has never been addressed. Third, the notion that the market for land, and hence market value, is neutral belies the fact that since at least 1913, this market was reserved for less than a fifth of the population. While the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 (Constitution) provides for land restitution for those who were dispossessed, it is the constitutional duty to engage in land redistribution that must address this broader process of economic exclusion from the land. Finally, since ‘a tax is always more than just a tax: it is also a way of defining norms and categories and imposing a legal framework on economic activity’ (Piketty, Reference Piketty2014: 520), the effect of a significant surcharge on income (which would result from the imposition of the tax on wealth, since payment of the tax will come primarily from income), should produce a change in lifestyle choices that will reduce the conspicuous consumption that only highlights inequalities in the society.

With these explicit premises, it is now possible to imagine a one-off transformational tax to build a legitimate post-apartheid economic foundation, one that addresses two significant questions: who should be compensated, and who should pay? While there has been increasing discussion of the need for a new social compact, there is unlikely to be willing agreement on the imposition of a wealth tax. Instead, we need to understand the imposition of a transformational tax three decades after the dawn of democracy as a ‘democratically imposed social compact’ designed to address the specific legacies of apartheid that are undermining the very legitimacy of the constitutional breakthroughs of 1994 and 1996. While overall inequality in access to income, education, employment and other social criteria need to be continually addressed using the regular budget, it is the failure to advance both land redistribution and urban reconstruction that this proposal targets. With the poorest South Africans still locked in the former ‘bantustans’ and the provision of Reconstruction and Development Programme housing seen to be exacerbating geographic apartheid in our towns and cities, there is a clear need for a dedicated process to fund and address these sources of inequality. Especially in urban areas, the need for investment in infrastructure must be tied to overcoming the legacies of geographic apartheid and the lack of affordable housing that continues to shape, undermine and erode the sustainability of our system of democratic and constitutional governance.

While the informal ANC proposal of 1991 for a wealth tax on existing landowners to cover compensation for land expropriation for the purposes of land redistribution is too constrained to serve present conditions, existing levels of inequality mean that the tax would still fall primarily on the beneficiaries of apartheid. Even if there is now a small group of black South Africans whose wealth would reach beyond the proposed threshold for the tax, adopting a strictly racially based tax would be inconsistent with the country’s constitutional vision. Given the very small number of black South Africans who have actually accumulated significant wealth and the growing concern that entrenched and increasing inequality will undermine the democratic and constitutional project, it seems only just that a transformational tax should be based solely on a criterion of net wealth. Given both the need to address the legacies of apartheid and to create a more equitable and sustainable society, it does seem possible that we might today, in the aftermath of the great recession, state capture, COVID-19 and the attempted 2021 insurrection, achieve greater agreement or at least acceptance of the need for a transformational tax.

Introduction

My knowledge of the debates on two of the core themes addressed in this volume – the issue of ‘expropriation without compensation’ and that of the transformative potential of constitutional law in South Africa – is limited.Footnote ¹ Instead of engaging directly with these concerns, this chapter focuses on the third theme: redistributive justice in contemporary South Africa. It is written as a think piece that is aimed at extending the discussion beyond the issue of land per se. It does so by raising some general issues regarding the nature of distributive justice and distributive politics and probing how they can best be advanced in a society that has not been primarily agrarian for many decades. While my focus is on how to reimagine redistributive justice in terms of what I describe as ‘the rightful share’, I also consider that the perspective on distribution I offer here can usefully inform our understanding of land justice and the question of compensation for privately owned land that is targeted for land reform purposes. At the same time, I recognise that what I describe as the moral politics associated with the ‘land question’ in South Africa can, in turn, invigorate campaigns for ‘the rightful share’, such as that around a basic income grant.

In the first section, I point out some of the limitations of taking land as a kind of general paradigm for issues of justice and redistribution, noting (as others have done before me) some of the specific features of the land question that make it a misleading analogy or model for the larger distributive challenges that South Africa faces today (on this, see also Walker, Chapter 9, this volume). In the second section, I go beyond this fairly familiar critique to identify some points of commonality between recent land politics and other distributive struggles in the region that have targeted income rather than land. Notable here is the campaign for a basic income grant (BIG). While I am most familiar with developments around this in Namibia, I recognise the significance of the BIG campaign in South Africa, which gained significant traction in 2023 (Ndenze, Reference Ndenze2023). In concluding, I suggest that while the long and unfinished struggle over land redistribution offers only a very flawed paradigm for distribution in general, broader distributive struggles may yet be able to learn from the powerful moral politics surrounding ‘the land question’.

Land as ‘the Nation’s Wealth’: An Anachronistic Model of Distribution

Viewed from the larger perspective of distributional politics that I have been working with for some years now (Ferguson, Reference Ferguson2015; Ferguson & Li, Reference Ferguson and Li2018; see also Loher et al., Reference Loher, Piart, Schild, Strasser and Haller2016), the heavily land-focused debate on ‘redistribution’ in South Africa often seems to cloud rather than clarify the key questions that an effective distributive politics in the region needs to confront. The most visible way that this happens is when land (and especially agricultural land) is taken as a kind of fundamental or paradigmatic image of the nation’s wealth – offering a ‘master narrative of loss and restoration’ (Walker, Reference Walker2008: 27) which becomes the principal interpretive frame for distributive politics. The ambition and reach of such thinking are in some ways admirable in that they boldly imagine a ‘putting right’ of a centuries-long history of injustices that have culminated in a grotesque maldistribution of land, which can be seen as one of the root causes of poverty and inequality today. But the conception of the relationship between land and the nation’s wealth on which such formulations are based is over-simplified and out of date. Increasingly, it obscures more than it reveals. If we are not able to develop richer and more imaginative conceptions of what societal wealth is and where it comes from, we will continue to struggle – not only with the politics of land reform but also with the broader politics of distribution, of which land constitutes only a small and, as I and others have argued, not particularly representative part.

The evocation of a nation’s wealth that can be claimed as a kind of common possession has always been politically attractive, for understandable reasons, and agricultural land and mining have long been the most convenient exemplars for such a politics in southern Africa. However, under contemporary conditions, a more convincing and non-anachronistic picture of a truly common wealth requires not the resuscitation of nineteenth-century pictures of the economy but, rather, a radically expanded conception of the social basis of both the ownership and the production of that national wealth. Such a conceptual shift would allow us to recognise that the sort of distributive politics that is most urgently needed today is less a matter of an epochal act of seizure involving a lump of valuable stuff (‘land’ or ‘gold’) and more a continuous and ‘always-already political’ process that involves the distribution of the whole social product. One useful lineage of ideas for informing such a conceptual shift can be traced back to the work of the Russian anarchist and communist Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921), as I will further discuss briefly.

But, one may ask, what is wrong with the use of land as a conceptual paradigm for thinking about the politics of distribution in South Africa? Is it not really the perfect symbol of the nation’s wealth and its historic and continuing maldistribution? It is a powerful symbol, to be sure. But the economic realities of the present matter too – and here we have to remember that South Africa is no longer the predominantly agrarian country that it was in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Today agriculture makes up only a small proportion of the national product, considerably smaller than the contribution of industry and the service sector. In 2021, according to the Statista website, agriculture ‘contributed around 2.47 per cent to the gross domestic product (GDP) of South Africa, whereas industry and services had contributed 24.5 and 63.02 per cent of the total value added, respectively’ (Statista, 2023). As Beinart notes in Chapter 8 (this volume), the total value of agriculture within the economy is larger than the GDP figures convey on their own, once forward and backward linkages and the size of the agricultural labour force are taken into account. Nevertheless, agriculture is still dwarfed by the service sector, while over two-thirds of the population (68 per cent in 2021, according to World Bank, 2018) is urbanised. Thus, a commitment to redistributive justice must start with the stark reality that even the most far-reaching programme for confiscating and redistributing farmland would leave the overwhelming bulk of the national economy untouched. The objection to such a programme should, therefore, not be that it is too radical. Rather, the objection should be that it is not nearly radical enough!

However, as I suggested at the start of this chapter, the emphasis on wealth as land is really a symptom of a larger problem – a problem in the first instance of the imagination. How do we imagine the way that wealth is created and distributed? The picture or image of wealth that we hold in our heads necessarily shapes how we imagine any move to ‘redistribute’ it. One way of picturing the national wealth of a country like South Africa is to think of the whole of society as, in some fundamental way, like a very big agricultural estate. No doubt, this metaphoric picture captures something important, especially by foregrounding the question of who owns the estate and how they came to own it. It is thus a picture that has clear implications for understanding and addressing the contemporary maldistribution of ‘the nation’s wealth’.

But what plan of action for a fair(er) distribution of the nation’s wealth does this picture suggest? If the current distribution of this wealth is not only unequal but also, given the history of how it was acquired, unjust, what is to be done about it? And here the understanding of societal wealth as essentially lying in land offers a ready solution to its unequal and unjust distribution: confiscate the big estates, divide the land into small pieces and hand out these pieces to the landless and/or those historically denied access to land. Agricultural experts and economists may argue about the wisdom of such reform, but it is fairly easy to visualise how such a rearrangement of land holdings might look and also to imagine how at least some poor and historically oppressed people might benefit from it. Indeed, it seems likely that the ease with which such ‘redistribution’ can be imagined surely helps to explain its persistent appeal.

The image of land as the quintessential expression of national wealth that the dispossessed might simply ‘take back’ shares key features with another persistent object of redistributive fantasy, that of mineral wealth. In both cases, we have a picture of societal wealth as a tangible ‘thing’ (commercial farms or gold and other mines) which can be physically seized and then redistributed to the state and/or those considered to be deserving (such as mine workers or ‘local communities’). But modern economic productivity does not correspond with this understanding of wealth as constituted by physical resources; contemporary wealth certainly does not take this simple form in South Africa. Today, as already indicated, service industries enjoy an increasing share of the economy (both when measured by GDP and, even more overwhelmingly, when measured by employment numbers). Can this economy still be conceptualised primarily in terms of chunks of wealth that can be physically seized and cut into pieces? Can it be nationalised? What exactly is being produced anyway, and how do we reckon its value? Once one has accepted this perspective, the primary question becomes not ‘How do we redistribute an agrarian economy of farms or even an industrial one of mines?’ but, rather, ‘How do we ensure that the members of society receive their rightful share of the national wealth in a predominantly service-based economy, one that in South Africa is mostly urban, increasingly informal and characterised by exceptionally high levels of unemployment?’ What, in short, does redistribution look like in a service economy?

I have said that we need different ways of imagining what wealth is (or maybe many different ways) and also where it comes from. But we also need new ways of imagining what redistributive justice means in a world where fewer and fewer people are able to subsist by working the land or by selling their labour for wages. The old agrarian social reformers dreamed of fixing mass poverty via land reform – ‘Give them all land!’ Later, industrial modernisers (both on the left and on the right) demanded ‘Jobs for all’. At the same time, while it may be the case that these dreams and demands have become anachronistic, the hunger for a much more equitable distribution of wealth and opportunities that they reflect has not. If the modern service economy of South Africa cannot deliver land, or, as is becoming increasingly apparent, formal jobs for all the region’s poor and dispossessed, that cannot mean that these people are owed nothing. It only means that we must reconceptualise what it would mean for them to receive what I have called their rightful share – rightful because this share is a consequence not of charity or welfarism but of how wealth is a social creation.

It is here that new ways of thinking about direct and universal income distribution could help us see our way to a very different approach to distributive justice than the one that comes so readily to mind when we habitually think of societal wealth in terms of the model of land.

Beyond Land: A Moral Politics of Distribution on the Societal Level

I have elsewhere explored in more depth alternative images of national or societal wealth that are very different from the land-centred images that feature so prominently in the South African distributive imagination (see Ferguson, Reference Ferguson2015). In the current conjuncture, one of these alternatives involves recognition of those who are partly or wholly excluded from the world of productive labour but who nonetheless could make strong distributive claims by styling themselves as members of a collectivity that is obliged to grant them recognition as also rightful or ultimate ‘owners’ of the nation’s wealth.

Marxism, with its labour theory of value and its fundamental understanding of the oppressed as workers, has always struggled with the politics of the non-worker, the so-called ‘lumpen’ masses excluded from the putatively revolutionary class of wage labourers. But progressive intellectuals are heir to a rich set of alternative Left traditions that have more to offer those excluded from having a role in today’s production system. The anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin, for instance, always insisted on starting with universal claims of distribution and advocated a notion of distributive justice that is ultimately rooted in societal membership and not just labour. In his 1898 essay on ‘Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal’, he laid out an alternative ‘conception of society … in which there is no longer room for those dominating minorities’:

Where does our vast societal wealth come from? Why are we so much more productive than our great-grandparents? We are not better people than they were. We certainly do not work harder. Instead, we (all members of society) are able to produce vast riches far beyond what our forebears could have dreamt of only thanks to a massive, worldwide industrial apparatus of production – an apparatus built up through generations of work, sacrifice and invention, across centuries and even millennia of human history, in a process that generated massive suffering for millions all across the globe. Here the case of mining in South Africa and its historical dependence on the migrant labour system that was enforced throughout southern Africa (and rested in turn on the unpaid work of rural households and rural women in particular) is instructive. So once this history is acknowledged, to whom does the vast wealth-producing apparatus of the present era really belong? Surely not only to the corporations and the holders of stocks and shares who now (outrageously) claim to own this wealth outright, but also, and more compellingly so, to the descendants of all those who worked and imagined and suffered and bled to create it – in short, to all of us.

In this conception, the whole system of production must be regarded as a collective inheritance. And it was from this universal claim of common ownership that Kropotkin derived a universal distributive claim. This is that, surely, at least some portion of the entire output must be due to all who are heirs to this inheritance and hence the rightful owners of the collective apparatus of production. Everyone, that is, must receive a share. (Defining the quantum then becomes a matter of politics; what is critical is that the principle should first be accepted.)

Note that it is not the worker (as worker) whose claims are prioritised here. It is the members of society – collectively the inheritors of a great common estate in which each and every one of us has a rightful share. In this view, it is not just labour that is the foundation of that inheritance but also contributions like suffering, bloodshed, care, ingenuity and shared experience. It is thus the entire society that is the source of value. And it is all the members of that society, not only those currently employed as workers, who, as inheritors and co-owners of the whole, are entitled to a share of society’s proceeds.

Such arguments, I have shown elsewhere (Ferguson, Reference Ferguson2015), are not only of academic interest. Indeed, remarkably similar arguments have been put forward by advocates for Namibia’s BIG Campaign, which has proposed that each and every Namibian should be entitled to a monthly cash payment precisely because they, as the nation’s citizens, are the real owners of the country and its mineral wealth, and therefore ought ‘to share in the country’s wealth’ (Ferguson, Reference Ferguson2015: 179–83).Footnote ² In these arguments, receipt of a modest monthly state payment is rendered as simply the receipt of a share that is properly due to an owner. The most basic citizenship right is thus understood not as the right to vote, but as the right ‘to partake in the wealth of the nation’. Direct grants from the state, in this understanding, need not bring with them the shame or stigma of receiving charity or getting a ‘handout’. In receiving a rightful share, Namibian citizens, in this conception, are simply ‘partaking in the wealth’ that rightly belongs to the whole nation. And in doing so, they (as rightful co-owners of that wealth) are not receiving a gift or being offered ‘help’ – they are claiming what is already rightfully their own, their ‘rightful share’. Similar arguments are being advanced in South Africa, where advocacy around BIG stretches back into the late 1990s (Mahafu, Reference Mahafu2022); these arguments have gathered momentum in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and, at the time of writing, are under consideration within the government.Footnote ³

Note that the argument that is being made here is not about welfare support but about recognising the rightful share of the nation’s wealth that belongs to all of society’s members. Significantly, it is the whole economic system and not just ‘the land’ that is understood here as society’s collective inheritance. Furthermore, wealth is not imagined as a fixed substance that might be ‘taken’ from those who currently have it and divided up among those who do not but as the product of a fast and ever-changing global apparatus of production that is rightfully the inheritance of us all. The universalism of this diagnosis fits well with the universalism of the recent thinking about social protection in the region in the BIG campaigns in both Namibia and South Africa. The assurance of a basic income may offer a particularly appealing way of thinking about how to distribute universalistically in what has become a predominantly service economy. As already noted, the mechanisms of how this could be funded and the level at which the amount should be set would need to be determined through the political process. Here one avenue to explore further could be the wealth tax proposed by Klug in Chapter 11 (this volume).

Conclusion

What I want to emphasise, by way of closing, is that, in their focus on sharing income rather than land, BIG activists are not giving up claims to a historic loss linked to colonial conquest or to the idea of a country that rightfully belongs to all. However, the fundamental redress they call for lies not in a share of the land, but in a share of everything – at least some portion of the whole social product must be shared. This shift in argument allows for a demand that is not, in economic terms, backwards-looking – ‘Return the land to us, and we will return to farming!’ – but is very much forward-looking and attuned to current economic realities: ‘Give us reliable cash incomes and this will flexibly empower a huge range of viable rural and urban livelihoods!’ The result is an expression of universalism (everyone is due a rightful share), but it is a universalism that holds onto the powerful moral image of a historic dispossession under colonialism and apartheid and of a people who lost their rightful ownership of their country. It thus does not in any way preclude the commitment to land reform laid out in section 25 (the property clause) of the 1996 Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, the promise, potential and pitfalls of which are reviewed in Parts I and II of this volume.

What needs to be explored in more depth than is possible here is how to connect the kind of powerful moral reasoning historically associated with land injustices and land reform to the broader societal discussions around what I have termed the moral politics of distribution. While seeking concrete and universalistic remedies via programmes of income distribution and monthly cash payments (as in the BIG campaign), these discussions can still draw on histories of colonialism and historical dispossession (including the role of mining and migrant labour in the development of the nation’s wealth) to inform, legitimate and animate this campaign.