Reworking Apartheid Legacies: Global Competition, Gender and Social Wages in South Africa, 1980–2000

Abstract

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Long Life and Productivity in South Africa: Long Burdensome or Long Healthy?

“…These years, selected using a statistical exercise, also coincide with real important events in South Africa. In the early 1980s, the apartheid government started giving one of the world's most generous incentives to attract labour‐intensive industries in the then industrial decentralization zones, which were largely the former Bantustan areas (Hart, 2002). At the same time, according to Hart (2002), a sharp fall in employment was witnessed in the capital intensive urban industries.…”

“…In the early 1980s, the apartheid government started giving one of the world's most generous incentives to attract labour‐intensive industries in the then industrial decentralization zones, which were largely the former Bantustan areas (Hart, 2002). At the same time, according to Hart (2002), a sharp fall in employment was witnessed in the capital intensive urban industries. The year 1983 in particular also happens to mark the Surplus Peoples Project , which saw some 3.5 million blacks displaced from white South African areas and resettled in the Bantustan areas.…”

Introduction: Agrarian Change, Gender and Land Rights

“…In other words, very unequal forms of land distribution in the countryside have blocked agriculture's potential contribution to capitalist industrialization. This is one interpretation of contemporary agrarian change -a view that is supported by comparative analyses of successful 'late industrialization' in East Asia with less successful attempts in Latin America (Kay 2001) and South Africa (Hart 1996(Hart , 2001. 13 But an important feature of agrarian change and industrialization in contemporary developing societies -which is not problematized by the classical Marxist model of agrarian transition, and is perhaps buried under the inflated figures for 'services' -is the growing prevalence of livelihood diversification, defined as 'the process by which rural families construct a diverse portfolio of activities and social support capabilities in their struggle for survival and in order to improve their standard of living' (Ellis 1998, 4).…”

“…In Latin America, however, the limited extent of agrarian reform coupled with the fact that it was implemented several decades after the onset of industrialization, denied the region this potential widening of the domestic market and created a distorted and inefficient industrial structure. Hart's focus, as the following paragraphs illustrate, is on the contribution that agriculture (and redistributive land reforms) can make to the 'social wage' and the satisfactory reproduction of labour as a precondition for successful industrial accumulation (Hart 2001). Diversification thus refers to several different economic processes and its blanket use to describe all forms of non-farm employment hides important differences.…”

Neoliberalism, Civil Society and Security in Africa

“…In Southern Africa, such synergies do not appear to exist. The history of state subsidization of industrial decentralization has not been successful in South Africa (Hart and Todes, 1997; see also Hart, n.d.). The response to SDIs has so far been weak.…”