Part III - Imagining Alternative Futures of Redistributive Justice in South Africa

10 Ecological Justice, Climate Shocks and the Challenge of Re-Agrarianising South Africa through the Food Sovereignty Commons

Vishwas Satgar

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).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.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, 2022). 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, 2021). 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., 2021). 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, 2022). 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, 2019). 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, 2018). 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., 2016). 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, 2016; Reisinger & Clark, 2018). Packaging, retail, transport, processing, food preparation and waste disposal contribute an additional 5–10 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions (Garnett et al., 2016).

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.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.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, 2013). 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.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.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, 2005).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, 2005; Pampallis & Bailey, 2021).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.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, 2021). Frontier wars were actually wars of defending the commons mode of production, from a subaltern perspective. As Marx (1976: 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, 2017). Marx critiqued capitalist agriculture in its ‘second agricultural revolution’ from 1830 to 1880, with the growth of the fertiliser industry and soil chemistry (Foster, 1999: 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 (1999), 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 (2018: 97) points out, the conditions under which ecological rifts are engendered entail the following:

Inequality in a capitalist society – a class-based socio-economic system with its social metabolic order based on accumulation and the privatized, racialized, and gendered control of the vast majority of the land and productive infrastructure – results in an elite minority having more power to determine how production is organized, under what socio-ecological conditions we labor, and to what ends.

(Holleman, 2018: 97)

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. (2020) 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, 2018: 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, 2018). 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, 2014)

  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 exchange¹⁰ – 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., 2019). 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.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.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 (2001: 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),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.

Right to Food and Water, Ecological Justice and Ethics of Care

In section 27 of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 provision is made for sufficient food and water for the citizens of the country. As argued, this is a formal right to food that will not be realised through the existing food system. Ecological rifts and the ecocidal and profit-making logic of the current system mitigate against the constitutional right to food. In its essence: food as a commodity is central to food inequality, and this challenge cannot be resolved through capitalist agrarian relations and narrow liberal constitutionalism. Hence the right to food has been claimed as the basis of an alternative food sovereignty commons system by the South African Food Sovereignty Campaign (SAFSC) (COPAC, 2015). Such a claim is about transformative constitutionalism, which seeks to challenge shallow ‘food security’ thinking about the right to food and which merely affirms the existing agro-industrial power structure. Taking this further, the SAFSC has developed the Peoples Food Sovereignty Act, 2018 (PFSA) through three food sovereignty festivals, research and a people’s parliament. The PFSA is a political hack to incite the imagining of a new food system paradigm as part of the deep and just transition to survive and prepare for worsening climate shocks. In other words, the SAFSC demonstrated that both transformative policy and legal thinking are required to end the systemic food crisis in South Africa and build the next food system. Around water, the SAFSC has worked with drought-affected communities and developed bottom-up approaches to claiming water rights as part of the water commons (COPAC, 2017).

The SAFSC conception of justice challenges liberal philosophies of justice from three perspectives:

1. (i) the legal subject is not just human beings but also non-human nature. There is a recognition that social and natural relations are interconnected, such that humans are socio-ecological beings while non-human life also has intrinsic value;

2. (ii) positive freedoms and the transformative role of the state is crucial for historical redress and addressing legal harms; and

3. (iii) communities and collectivities matter.

Deriving from this emancipatory ecology philosophy is a strong commitment to ecological justice within the imaginary of the SAFSC as expressed in its Climate Justice through Land Justice activist tool, which states: ‘Ecological justice goes one step further than environmental justice (which looks at justice for people). Ecological justice includes justice for all living animals, plants, humans and the ecological systems within which they exist’ (COPAC, 2019: 2). In this sense, the human is decentred and coexists amongst other life forms.

Moreover, this comes through in how the SAFSC understands both land justice and water sovereignty. In terms of land justice, the discursive framing is grounded in a premise that replacing white farmers with black farmers is not transformative, and nor is it just. In its Food Sovereignty for the Right to Food activist tool, it states:

Agrarian reform means more than land reform: to change relations in the countryside and in the farming sector, we need to do more than just hand over existing land from white capitalist farmers to new emerging black capitalist farmers. Agrarian reform means that we should question whether it is just and feasible for only a few people, whether black or white, to own vast amounts of land, while millions more lack access to land and the means of production. Agrarian reform means that we should increase the number of people that have access to land as well, and increase their rights and control over it. This means looking at smaller farm sizes rather than the massive farms we are used to in South Africa and which on each farm only a very small variety of crops are actually grown.

(COPAC, 2015: 23)

Through its elaboration of land justice discourse, the SAFSC has married the land question to addressing historical injustice in a transformative manner and as part of a new food sovereignty commons system. Such a commitment is expressed powerfully through the PFSA and the pluri-vision of the Climate Justice Charter (CJC): Feeding Ourselves through Food Sovereignty.¹⁴ The CJC is committed to a commons approach to climate and, more generally, ecological justice. These positions stand against merely reproducing the existing agro-industrial food system, which in turn replicates its existing ecological rifts, as well as its profit-making and ecocidal logic. Moreover, within such an ecological justice approach, land is located within life-enabling commons systems. Hence, the SAFSC advances a perspective on the ‘eco-social function of land’ (SAFSC, 2018: 8). Land is not conceived as a thing, an object, that humans can just exploit. Still, it is part of larger living ecosystems and must be utilised in a manner that enhances life in these relations. Similarly, water justice is located as part of water sovereignty. The SAFSC espouses the following conception: ‘water sovereignty is about people preserving the water cycle and controlling water storage, use, access, and supply in a manner that realizes people’s rights to water while meeting the needs of nature and defining the path towards a sustainable water commons’ (COPAC, 2017: 2). In short, justice in this framework is about meeting human and non-human nature’s needs, while ensuring the agency for affirming rights and claims lies with citizens, as socio-ecological beings.

The SAFSC was born at the onset of the first climate-induced drought (2014–2021) in South Africa. A strong praxis of ethical care came to the fore through a Hunger Tribunal in 2015 (together with the Human Rights Commission and faith-based communities), drought speak-outs and a bread march through the streets of Johannesburg in 2016, food sovereignty festivals (2015, 2016, 2017), the development of the PFSA, several tools for grassroots pathway building and the CJC process. The care for human and non-human life coalesced around three strands of thinking. First, a realisation that radical humanism, which had its hegemonic moment with the rise of the organised working-class movements of the nineteenth and twentieth century, had been pushed back by the neoliberal class project and the post-modern rejection of universals. In this context, the SAFSC attempted to reforge a non-anthropocentric but radical humanism, appreciating that humans are socio-ecological beings. A subaltern eco-humanism was being validated, recognising our imbrication in natural relations, human dependence on nature and the limits of nature. Second, eco-socialist-feminist thought highlighted the crisis of socio-ecological reproduction in households. Many women from rural and working-class communities (although not self-identifying as eco-socialist-feminists) gave testimony at the Hunger Tribunal about depredations of hunger, the powerful role of women as seed savers and educators, and their frontline commitments to advancing food sovereignty placed care labour and its ethics at the heart of the SAFSC. Third, the suffering of drought-affected communities and the development of the CJC elaborated a South African conception of climate justice, which is centrally about preventing harm to the most vulnerable in our society and ensuring systemic transformation to preserve life. This praxis of care was easily extended into the COVID-19 pandemic as many food sovereignty activists rose to the challenge of feeding their communities and demanding the ‘food commons be unlocked’.¹⁵ The latter was an act of solidarity with informal traders, small-scale farmers, micro-gardeners and subsistence fishers. Grassroots women activists have been central in providing leadership in this conjunctural moment (Morgan & Cherry, 2023). Ultimately the food sovereignty system the SAFSC is reaching for is about preventing the destruction of human and non-human life; it is about creating an ecologically conscious and caring society.

The Peoples Food Sovereignty Act, Democratic Systemic Reform and the Deep and Just Transition

For the SAFSC, food sovereignty is defined as follows: ‘the right of people to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define and control their own food and agriculture systems. It is an alternative to the corporate food system’ (SAFSC, 2018:8). Such a conception, vision and articulation is a direct challenge to the African nationalist globalising class project and seeks to re-embed the food system in socio-ecological relations and to transform it. This is grounded in reimagining the governance of the commons for soil, water, biodiversity, energy, creative labour, the earth system and the cybersphere, so grassroots power from below prevails. It is about resetting the economy–nature divide. In this regard, the PFSA seeks to entrench new forms of subaltern class power – systemic, movement, direct and symbolic – that are constituted from below, not above, as part of remaking the food system.¹⁶ In less abstract terms, this is about the democratic planning of the food system. Such an approach is not about state-centric agrarian transformation and top-down technocratic rationalities. Instead, the organic and tacit knowledge of small-scale farmers, informal traders, the landless and communities is crucial for democratic planning. In chapter 9 of the PFSA, provision is made for crucial institutional mechanisms to enable such a democratic planning approach: a national food sovereignty fund, a national food sovereignty council, a national food system democratic planning commission and local communal councils.

Central to the PFSA is utilising a democratic planning approach to the land question and, more generally, the construction on a national scale of a food sovereignty commons system anchored in local food sovereignty commoning pathways and practices. This is an alternative to a market-led approach or an authoritarian, state-centric, populist and nativist approach. Moreover, this is located within the large-scale socio-ecological transformation required for the deep and just transition and, as envisaged in the CJC, to ensure we have a food sovereignty commons system that can feed South Africa and break out of the climate crisis trap. Hence it is worth looking more closely at what the Act specifies in terms of the role of government in securing the right to land in section 10:

1. (1) The government shall ensure regular land audits and maintain a proper land registry to prevent land theft and ensure fast-track redistribution to small-scale food producers.

2. (2) The government shall utilize participatory mechanisms provided for in this act (in Sections 26, 27, 28, 29) to undertake proper spatial planning to ensure the development of a food sovereignty system in rural and urban areas.

3. (3) The government shall deconcentrate all large farms and pass on ownership to small-scale food producers over the next 20 years. Every 5 years, 10,000 commercial farms must be deconcentrated in accordance with the Constitution.

4. (4) The government shall recover costs and do what is necessary to rehabilitate land that has been damaged through pesticides, industrial farming and mining and other types of pollution.

5. (5) The government shall prohibit land speculation for agricultural land.

6. (6) The government shall ensure that land regulation in towns and cities does not hinder or prohibit agroecological food production, farming and food sovereignty pathways.

7. (7) All these actions by government shall be informed and determined by the national food sovereignty council envisaged in this Act.

(SAFSC, 2018: 13–14)

Essentially, the vision of the PFSA is not to have a state-centred and -led approach to food sovereignty but to ensure South Africa creates a small-scale farmer food sovereignty commons system to feed communities, villages, towns and cities, that is democratically planned and driven from below as part of the deep and just transition. The Act is framed as a citizen-driven process constituted from below to ensure the state is not the main actor defining, determining and constructing a food sovereignty commons system across urban and rural spaces, as part of accelerating and deepening the just transition. With this approach, the state is being transformed to think and act like a commoner. This disrupts two types of typical agrarian thinking that have informed land reform in post-apartheid South Africa (Cochet et al., 2015). The first is about the state transforming the agrarian structure through land distribution to address historical dispossessions, supporting farming practices in rural areas, defining a place of ‘peasantries’ in social change and state policy support. The second, mainly informed by World Bank thinking, reduces agrarian transformation to ensure the security of legal title to land, liberalisation of the agricultural sector and the establishment of a market for agrarian property transactions. In the main, these have been top-down reform practices reproducing the same food system with high ownership concentrations and numerous ecological rifts.

In contrast, the PFSA is conceived as a democratic systemic reform that can transform the entire food system as part of repositioning South Africa to address the general crisis of socio-ecological reproduction, specifically the worsening climate crisis, while addressing historical injustices (Satgar, 2019). The strategic logic of this non-state-centric concept is about constitutive forms of agential class and popular power deepening the process of transformation and ensuring the state embodies a democratising logic from below, and it in turn strengthens such a logic. Moreover, it specifies an emancipatory, utopian horizon for change while recognising that such reforms can be calibrated to be ameliorative, stronger and transformative over time. In other words, transformative change is never arrested, and its potential is kept alive even when facing historical contingencies. In relation to the land redistribution question in South Africa, such a democratic systemic reform is crucial as the basis for building consensus about a new food system and deepening transformation in a just manner. For instance, most commercial farmers in South Africa are not going to be able to handle climate extremes such as a ten-year drought or too much rain. They are going to have to embrace the deep and just transition out of necessity. In this context, the deconcentration of big farms in South Africa can be part of a process involving subsidies to commercial farmers and as part of the deep and just transition to stabilise commercial farming as it is transformed.

Such subsidies, informed by the PFSA, would entail the following minimum conditions:

1. (i) rehabilitate all land involved in chemical-based mono-industrial farming and transition all farming practices to agroecology and permaculture regeneration systems;

2. (ii) ensure decarbonisation of all farming processes;

3. (iii) all commercial farmers to participate in the national food sovereignty council and local communal councils as part of the just transition;

4. (iv) all large-scale commercial farmers to provide a deconcentration plan, through engagement with local food sovereignty communal councils, to the national food system democratic planning commission to bring in small-scale farmers, including ensuring they have water rights.

Farmers will be compensated fairly through a Food Sovereignty Fund for land allocated to small-scale farmers. Commercial farmers in South Africa, like the state, have to become commoners. The worsening climate crisis and the more general crisis of socio-ecological reproduction requires a politics requisite to the challenges. Democratic systemic reform politics is necessary and appropriate for our times to ensure ambitious transformation can happen in limited time horizons while strengthening and deepening the democratic project.

Commoning through Food Sovereignty Pathways in Communities, Villages, Towns and Cities

The PFSA has been ignored by South Africa’s Parliament and key government departments, notwithstanding the debilitating impacts of South Africa’s drought on commercial agriculture and hunger (2014–2021). Despite a state and power structure indifferent to the food sovereignty alternative for South Africa, in 2017 the SAFSC made a strategic decision to build the SAFSC as a grassroots movement through localised food sovereignty alliances in communities, villages, towns and cities (SAFSC, 2017). In this process, several food sovereignty activist tools were developed to build capacities for pathway building, the Act served as an overarching compass, and the idea of food sovereignty hubs as localised support mechanisms to advance pathway building was experimented with. Initially, this rich undergrowth of pathway and hub building began with thirty sites in urban and rural spaces. In the context of COVID-19, additional pathway and hub-building sites emerged. The difficult work of consolidating these sites and scaling them up institutionally through local food sovereignty alliances, forums and hubs, as part of the deep and just transition, looms large. To assist this process, the SAFSC, together with partners, released a set of case studies covering food sovereignty pathway-building practices in three rural areas, three peri-urban areas, four towns and cities, three universities and one general case study (SAFSC et al., 2022). From these case studies, two examples of successful pathway building, institutional development and commoning the future are crucial to share to understand where these processes are tending.

Wits University, since 2015, has been a crucial site of food sovereignty pathway building. An academic supported students in setting up a food garden, and links were made with the Wits food programme, attempting to feed hundreds of students on a daily basis.¹⁷ In 2016, this relationship led to a petition calling on Wits to provide a space of dignity for food-stressed students to receive their meals and for the university to become a zero-hunger, zero-waste and zero-carbon institution. With over 8,000 signatures, the petition was well received by the university leadership, and the Wits Food Sovereignty Centre was established with its own building. This serves as a hub, which is an eco-demonstration space (including agroecology gardens), and houses a food bank, a communal kitchen for students to use to prepare meals, convenes a monthly inner-city small-scale farmers market, hosts cultural events to promote slow food and healthy local food alternatives and is linked to six agroecology gardens and an experimental food forest. The success of this pathway-building process has led to Wits agreeing to build a food commons at the university, with more fruit trees and agroecology gardens on the campus, and it has committed to setting up a second food sovereignty hub, also involving community participation. Many of the agroecology gardens at Wits have been established with campus and public involvement, such that participants have been encouraged to found pavement, backyard and community gardens as part of food sovereignty pathway-building processes. Over 150 people in and around the inner city of Johannesburg have been involved in this learning process. The food sovereignty pathway-building work has been shared with and has had knock-on effects for the University of the Free State, Stellenbosch University, the University of Cape Town and the University of Pretoria.

A second example of food sovereignty pathway building is the hub-building work of Ukuvuna, a grassroots NGO and partner in the SAFSC. It is a powerful example in a rural part of Limpopo Province. Ukuvuna was established in 2005 and has trained over 8,000 households to grow their own food through regenerative permaculture methods. One of the key food and knowledge hub sites that Ukuvuna has built up over the years has been in the Hamakuya community in Thulamela Local Municipality in the Vhembe district, where the local hub works with 165 smallholder farmers, mainly women. In this district, there are over 1.2 million people, 54 per cent of them female, and with a 37 per cent unemployment rate for women. Through the hub, Ukuvuna has, over the past eight years, developed a smallholder support system. The system encourages indigenous knowledge sharing, food sharing, seed saving, shorter food supply chains in the community, regenerative agroecology training, networking and local trade expos.

With this food and knowledge hub as a support system, all participants have been encouraged to establish successful household food schemes. In this process, clusters of 10–15 communities have been organised. These are led by elders, women and youth to ensure knowledge transfer. Cluster leaders encourage exchange visits and skills transfer. Hub-linked clusters also work with local schools and community organisations to encourage community involvement. Throughout the cycle of farming activity, the hub provides support and training. Through its participatory action research methodology, it has also been involved in climate literacy. This process has further grounded the links between agroecology knowledge and skills around water management, soil conservation, indigenous seed revival, seed saving and plant nurseries for regenerating biodiversity.

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.

11 Redistributive Justice, Transformational Taxes and the Legacies of Apartheid

Heinz Klug

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., 2022). 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, 2021). 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, 2018).

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, 1991). 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, 1994). 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, 1959: 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, 1946). 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.

Sharing the Burdens of Reconstruction: The German Equalisation Tax

One of the more significant and ambitious capital levies in world history came out of West Germany immediately following the end of World War II. Most post-war levies were intended to combat inflation or supplement ordinary public spending (Robson, 1959: 28–32). The German levy, however, was, from its start, intended to distribute the harms of war as equitably as possible (Robson, 1959: 28–32). Hitler’s regime intentionally ran up German war debt during the war with the promise of compensating citizens out of the plunder of conquest (Hughes, 1999: 1). The defeat of the Nazis left the nation, like most of Europe, physically and economically destroyed. German cities suffered extensive destruction. Hamburg alone took more damage than all the bombed cities in Britain. In Western Germany, over 20 million people were homeless when the war ended (Botting, 1985: 123–25).

The destruction was not, however, uniform across Germany. Where some were left completely destitute, with homes and businesses destroyed, others escaped largely uninjured (Hughes, 1999: 2–3). While all war-damaged countries implemented some level of post-war aid to citizens, Germany is largely unique in its attempt to distribute wealth so that pre-war levels of property ownership were restored (Hughes, 1999: 2–3). However, the money for this rebuilding could not come from everyone equally, as many had nothing to give (Berghahn & Poiger, 1945–1961: 7). The solution became known as a Lastenausgleich or ‘equalisation of burdens’. The burden of rebuilding the country would fall upon each German proportional to their own needs and surviving property (Berghahn & Poiger, 1945–1961: 2). Social justice would be the driving factor, with those least harmed by the war being levied to compensate those most harmed (Heller, 1949: 227).

The Lastenausgleich represented not only a shift away from Nazism but also a break from the pre-war German republic. The programme sought both to balance out the harms of the war and assist the nation in becoming more prosperous for all. Article 20 of the newly adopted Basic Law (Constitution) mandated that German society maintain itself as a ‘democratic and social federal state’ (Berghahn & Poiger, 1945–1961: 7). Beyond the immediate social benefits of the programme were also geo-political concerns. The perceived threat of the Soviet Union in East Germany pressured the Western Allies to ensure that a quickly rebuilt Germany could play a part in its own defence (Berghahn & Poiger, 1945–1961: 9; Hughes, 1999: 168), especially in the emerging ideological struggle of the Cold War.

Taking the asset base of 1948, the Equalization Law set a 50 per cent tax rate on surviving post-war assets and spread the tax debt over the next thirty years, which saw the tax being collected quarterly until 1979 – raising, it is claimed, 42 billion Deutsche Mark (DM) over this period (Bach, 2012: 6). Additional features of the Equalization Tax include the fact that it was mainly assessed on property and business assets (including state-owned enterprises), while financial assets were granted a relatively high exemption of 150,000 DM. In addition, a tax allowance of 5,000 DM was granted for natural persons with leviable assets up to 25,000 DM, with a gradual decline to zero exemption for those with assets over 35,000 DM. To place these numbers in context and demonstrate their nominal value, the average annual pensionable income in post-war Germany in 1952 was 3,850 DM. As Stefan Bach concludes, ‘[d]ue to high growth rates of national product and income, [the] … economic significance and burden gradually decreased in subsequent decades. At the same time, it was possible to mobilize significant resources for reconstruction and the integration of displaced persons and refugees. In this respect, burden sharing was a financial, economic, and sociopolitical success’ (Bach, 2012: 6). In its implementation, the Länder (German states or provinces) were directed to ‘devote 85 percent of the income for Lastenausgleich purposes, such as housing construction for war damaged individuals’, and the Länder were required to transfer 15 per cent of the income to the central authorities for ‘supra-regional balancing out’ (Hughes, 1999: 74).

The Lastenausgleich proceeded in two distinct phases. Recognising that a comprehensive levy and distribution would take years, the German government first rushed out a smaller levy intended to provide more immediate aid to those facing imminent harm due to the destruction (Hughes, 1999: 73). Taking effect in 1949, this levy imposed a 2 per cent tax on the value of real property with an exemption of 3,000 DM, increasing to 3 per cent for property with a value of more than 15,000 DM. This levy also distinguished between ‘necessary’ and ‘excessive’ material assets, taxing the former at 4 per cent and the latter at 15 per cent. The proceeds of 2.75 billion DM were used to great effect as a welfare-like entitlement (Heller, 1949: 229). Those who had been expelled from their homes, who had had homes destroyed, who had lost their money in the currency revaluation and who had been politically persecuted were eligible for payments even if they demonstrated only a relatively low threshold of loss. For example, a person expelled from their home could get monthly aid for showing a loss of 300 DM in assets. This levy also provided support for those who could not work due to disability or age as well as supplements for the worker’s dependants (Hughes, 1999: 77). Most importantly, this levy established as precedent the principle that future levies would be calculated using the value of a person’s property on 21 June 1948 (Hughes, 1999: 78).

The second phase saw a major levy of assets meant to assist in the rebuilding of German society and economy. At its core, the levy was a one-time tax on the value of an intact property. The Lastenausgleich law imposed the tax at a rate of 50 per cent on real property. The payments to discharge this levy were to be made over a period of thirty years (Robson, 1959: 31). This number came from an analysis done in 1950, which concluded that the German economy could not afford to levy more than 1.5 billion DM a year (Hughes, 1999: 151). The government decided to apply the 50 per cent rate on the theory that it would demonstrate the equal nature of the levy. Amortising payments over thirty years would result in a yearly revenue of about 1.5 billion DM (Hughes, 1999: 151). Further exemptions for the first 5,000 DM of leviable assets ensured that lower and middle-class German citizens would not be overburdened. Exemptions on the first 150,000 DM were available to Nazi victims whose property had been restored after the allied victory. Complete exemptions were available for property given to successor organisations when the true heirs could not be found (Hughes, 1999: 153). This was clearly in the interest of not taxing the victims of war for the costs of those defeated.

The second capital levy raised a total of 42 billion DM, around twenty times the amount raised with the first and 60 per cent of the nation’s 1952 gross domestic product (GDP) (Bach, 2012: 6). The money raised was distributed based on a number of criteria. First, those with recognised legal claims for things such as property loss and damage were given direct compensation (Hughes, 1999: 155–56). Others without legal claims were allowed to make use of generous loans to support economic reintegration (Hughes, 1999: 156). Those who had lost goods rather than real estate were also entitled to payments. Persons who had lost at least 50 per cent of their household goods were entitled to graduated yearly sums of at least 800 DM for twelve years based on the amount of income they had at the time of the payment (Hughes, 1999: 157). Importantly, the claims of those who had lost money in the currency reform were not recognised under the second levy; this was on the theory that the other forms of compensation would be available to them anyway (Hughes, 1999: 158). Furthermore, the final law placed no maximum on the amount of compensation a single person could get, though the amount they received was proportionally reduced the more their claims rose (Hughes, 1999: 163).

One of the most surprising aspects of the entire programme was how relatively few barriers to implementation it faced. The elites of Germany had stood firmly against similar attempts at reform following World War I. The disaster of World War II, however, seemed to leave a bad taste towards any kind of war or post-war profiteering. Simply being rich in post-war Germany might indicate a failure to make or at least appreciate the sacrifices made by the populace. The Lastenausgleich was seen to be a part of the general denazification of the state where the immoral profits of the past would be collected and used for the public good (Hughes, 1999: 113). The result was mass popular support by most sections of West German society and among the Western Allies (Hughes, 1999: 81, 113).

Building Democracy: Capital Levies in Post-War Japan

The Japanese case saw a one-off capital levy imposed in 1946–1947 as one component of a sweeping political and economic overhaul that included tax reform, land reform and constitutional reform. The levy’s first objective was to reduce the internal debt burden inherited from wartime. The second objective was to provide finance for the recovery programme, and the third was to reduce income inequality. The goal of this last objective was to reduce the wealth holdings of a small minority of exceptionally rich individuals – the Zaibatsu – owners of the great holding companies who were considered responsible for promoting the war and had profited well from it. The wealth tax was imposed on families whose property was worth at least 100,000 yen as of 3 March 1946. The rates of the tax rose from 10 per cent on the lowest bracket to 90 per cent on estates worth more than 15 million yen. As a result of the existing inequality, the levy was only imposed on 2–3 per cent of the richest families.

World War II left the country physically and economically destroyed. The Japanese government had insured nearly every private war enterprise and guaranteed numerous loans from private banks (Shavell, 1948a: 133). Indeed, some 80 per cent of the total expenditure for the war came from borrowing. By the end of the war, Japan had accrued over 100 billion yen in debt, more than twice the total capital reserves of all Japanese businesses combined (Kurihara, 1946: 844). Many capital levies in the post-war world were intended to address these staggering levels of debt. Like other nations, Japan’s economy underwent extreme restructuring at the behest of the occupying United States (Bisson, 1954: 1).

A capital levy was but one part of this post-war reform. Simple economic improvement was not, however, the primary justification for the levy itself. Imperial Japan was a stratified society with massive wealth inequality and an ingrained aristocracy (Shavell, 1948b: 131; Bisson, 1954: 11–13). This old guard stood in the way of the American occupiers who sought to rebuild Japan into a peaceful and democratic partner in the Far East (Shavell, 1948b: 131). To accomplish this, the occupiers made it their primary objective to distribute the concentrated Japanese wealth widely among the population (Shavell, 1948a: 127). The primary design of Japan’s capital levy was, therefore, not primarily a means to pay for government expenses (though this was an element) but, rather, a targeted attack on the richest and most powerful of Japanese society (Shavell, 1948b: 130).

The Zaibatsu, literally ‘financial clique’, was the chief target of the occupation administration (Bisson, 1954: 1). The clique was an interrelated cartel of family businesses that represented just the top 3 per cent of Japanese society but controlled the majority of commercial and financial interests (Shavell, 1948a: 127). Made up primarily of four large organisations, the Zaibatsu exerted almost plutocratic power over Japan and were occasionally even delegated some government functions, such as tax collection and currency distribution (Bisson, 1954: 7). For example, the Mitsui corporation, one of the largest of the Zaibatsu organisations, employed nearly 3 million people within Japan and East Asia in 1945 (Bisson, 1954: 11). Naturally, this kind of power led to extreme concentrations of personal wealth among the families that controlled them. Nineteen families in 1930 had yearly incomes of at least 1 million yen compared to the 84 per cent of the population who made less than 800 yen per annum (Bisson, 1954: 19). Only the Imperial Household itself had personal wealth comparable to these families.

Even after the war, this distribution of economic resources had not changed, and indeed had worsened. By the time the valuation of leviable assets was completed, only 269 households had sufficient assets to be placed within the levy’s top two tax brackets, with combined taxable assets (6.9 billion yen) well above that of the 58,000 households in the lowest taxable bracket (Shavell, 1948b: table 5). The interrelated nature of this clique, representing the executives of practically every major company in the country, drew the attention of the American occupiers, who demanded its dissolution. Indeed, the firms were one of the main drivers of the overall Japanese economy. For example, in 1944 just four Zaibatsu banks lent out 6.7 billion yen or 74.9 per cent of all private money lending (Yamamura, 1964: 540–41). Changing this system would be necessary if the Allies were to successfully rebuild Japan as a democratic nation.

To that end, the levy attacked only those with the highest levels of personal wealth in Japan. This strategy meant that the Zaibatsu would end up paying most of the levy. Real and intangible property starting at a value of 100,000 yen was subject to a graduated one-time tax. This increased from 10 per cent of the first 15,000 yen above the 100,000-yen exemption to a full 90 per cent of assets worth over 15 million yen (Shavell, 1948a: 132). For perspective, the average monthly household income in 1956, well after economic recovery began, was between 5,000 and 6,000 yen (Yamamura, 1965: fn. 21). Household furnishings, clothing and other necessities were exempted from the levy, meaning that only genuinely wealthy landowners ended up contributing to the overall levy. Indeed, over half the total levy was eventually collected from the value of real estate. Critically, however, the final levy specifically excluded taxation of corporate assets on the grounds that this would result in unfair double taxation of those already subject to some of the highest levels of the levy (Shavell, 1948a: 132). Despite their exemption, the old corporate structures were faced with significant regulation by the occupation administration, which intended to break the power of the companies themselves (Bisson, 1954: 120–21).

The greatest problem faced by the levy was from post-war inflation of the yen, which occurred while the government was still attempting to establish the total property value to be taxed (Shavell, 1948b: 132). Between the surrender in August 1945 and May 1946, the average cost of living rose 850 per cent (Kurihara, 1946). Inflation was not truly brought under control until 1949, by which time prices in Tokyo were over 200 times their 1934 level (Bisson, 1954: 94). The government originally intended that the levy be imposed in mid-1946. However, despite the massive inflation in prices, it was not until December of that year that collection actually began. In total, more than a year was allowed to pass between the time that taxable assets were valued and the time of actual collection. This delay resulted in a significant loss to the potential amount of revenue that could have been collected (Shavell, 1948b: 132). However, the levy was recognised as having an overall deflationary effect on the Japanese economy (Shavell, 1948b: 133; Kurihara, 1946: 851–52), thus slowing inflation.

The levy was an overall success, as shown by the absence of significant attempts to dodge the tax, the total amount generated and the reshaping of the economic system. Those subject to the levy voluntarily declared 39 billion yen in total liability by the original deadline (Shavell, 1948b: 133). The finance ministry attributed the success of this portion of the levy to one particular method of enforcement: the government retained the option to mandate the sale of any piece of land at the value originally assessed if it determined that that valuation was inadequate (Shavell, 1948b: 132). The final amount raised was roughly equal to the target yield of 43.5 billion yen, or 120 per cent of total tax revenues for 1946–1947, and 9 per cent of Japan’s total private national wealth in March 1946 (Shavell, 1948b: 131). The Zaibatsu continued to exist and shared in the overall economic recovery, but the concentration of wealth in only a few companies was largely replaced with a much more open and competitive economy (Rotwein, 1964: 263; Yamamura, 1964: 552–53). The top family members saw their personal wealth greatly reduced and were largely excluded from the operational control of their companies (Bisson, 1954: 202). Indeed, some families saw their personal assets decrease by as much as 95 per cent (Bisson, 1954: 93). Most importantly, the control structure of the firms changed dramatically, with many shareholders controlling small portions of the firms where once one family might control an entire industry (Bisson, 1954: 201; Rotwein, 1964: 266).

Funding Land Reform and Industrialisation: A Capital Levy in South Korea

Where most taxes on wealth are intended to raise money for debt relief or extraordinary spending, the South Korean Land Reform Bill of 1950 sought to change property ownership in Korea from its historical, semi-feudal, tenant economy to a more egalitarian system (Morrow & Sherper, 1970: 25). At the end of the war, some 70 per cent of all farmers in South Korea were tenant farmers paying more than half of their overall crop to aristocratic landlords (Pak, 1956: 2). The American occupiers and newly installed government, like their counterparts in Japan and Europe, feared the growing threat of the Soviet Union and its influence on the working classes. Ending widespread tenant farming was believed to be necessary to curb class conflict. By pursuing an aggressive policy of land redistribution, the US-allied South Korean government sought to retain the support of the tenant class (Morrow & Sherper, 1970: 25). The new Korean Constitution thus mandated land reform to improve the condition of the farmers and increase overall agricultural productivity (Pak, 1956: 2).

In addition to the overall political aims, the programme sought to benefit both the agricultural and industrial economies by the transfer of and compensation for land (Pak, 1956: 2). A farmer who merely rented the land, it was argued, had little incentive to invest his savings in its improvement. More productive land would likely only be met with increased rent. Ideally, by giving the tenant direct ownership, clear incentives for land improvement would be created, resulting in an overall increase in agricultural output. By compensating former landlords for the loss of their land, the Korean government hoped that the new capital would be invested in the industrial sphere (Pak, 1956: 26). In this way, the level of agriculture would be maintained while emerging Korean industry would be funded.

The Final Bill was passed in March 1950 and contained three main features. First, owners of agricultural land were required to cultivate the land themselves. Secondly, the maximum amount of land a single person could own was set at just under 3 hectares. Thirdly, tenancy and the renting of agricultural land were permanently prohibited. The land reform itself was relatively simple. After completing a nationwide survey of agricultural land in June 1949, land was purchased from the landlords with redeemable bonds and sold back to the cultivating tenants for payments in kind, usually unprocessed rice (Jeon & Kim, 2000: 3). The ‘survey’ was completed in less than a year as the size and value of most pieces of land were taken from the records of the Japanese colonial government. The final price of the land was determined by averaging annual crop yields, discounted by 40 per cent to account for decreases in productivity since the Japanese occupation (Morrow & Sherper, 1970: 28).

Those chosen to receive land under the programme were selected by a priority list (Shin, 1976: 9). The first to receive land were those who had actually been cultivating it at the time the law was enacted. They were followed by freeholders of small land plots and citizens with agricultural experience. In practice, most of the land ended up simply being given to those who were currently working it. In just the first two years, a total of 331,766 hectares of farmland was redistributed to 918,548 households (Morrow & Sherper, 1970: 30). Redistribution of the land was completed by the 1960s with most compensation for landlords being completed by 1962 (Jeon & Kim, 2000: 3). The final bond payment took place in 1969, about twenty years after the land reform process began (Morrow & Sherper, 1970: 30).

Perhaps the largest difference between the Korean experience and other countries was the immediate influence of the Cold War. The nationwide survey of landholdings for redistribution began in mid-1949, with the official budget being passed on 27 April 1950 (Morrow & Sherper, 1970: 27). Less than two months later, the Korean War began. However, while the loss of the capital city of Seoul forced a postponement of the programme until its recapture in September 1950, the programme was implemented during the conflict and likely had a major effect on the outcome. Buyers of the redistributed land were required to pay the government back in kind, rice being the primary staple of Korean military provisions (Morrow & Sherper, 1970: 28). Repayment from the new landowners amounted to 1,158,780 metric tons of rice by 1952, a time when the new Korean government was fighting for its survival (Morrow & Sherper, 1970: 29). The land reform programme was thus an immediate success in terms of its political objectives. Land redistribution resulted in a total of 577,000 hectares, or one-third of all Korean arable land, being taken from landlords and sold to the tenants (Morrow & Sherper, 1970: 30). The number of freeholding farmers increased to 1,812,000 in 1950 from 349,000 in 1949 (Jeon & Kim, 2000: 3), with farm tenancy becoming virtually non-existent.

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, 2014), 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, 2018). 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, 2014: 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.

Imagining a Transformational Tax

How may we use the comparative experience with wealth taxes over the last century to best design a transformational tax for South Africa that addresses both the problem of inequality and the concerns of those who, like the Davis Tax Committee, argue that wealth taxes are not really effective? Comparing the historical experience of annual net wealth taxes with those situations in which significant capital levies were imposed demonstrates that one-off capital levies are significantly more effective in raising revenue, breaking concentrations of wealth and promoting democratic goals. There is, however, an important caveat, and that is the fact that significant capital levies have only been imposed in circumstances in which the political opposition to such an intervention is cowed either by the extent of the crisis or by a foreign force, such as the occupation powers in Japan and West Germany, which were in support of the tax. Lacking such circumstances, the only means of securing a significant capital levy, even if there is real democratic support, will be for the wealthy to accept that solidarity in the face of social and economic catastrophe will be the best means of maintaining a social compact that will secure their futures as well as those of the community more broadly. COVID-19 and climate change, as well as the continuing challenge to the legitimacy of the post-apartheid constitutional and economic order, like the collapse of the Iceland economy in 2010 (Philip et al., 2011), may provide just such a circumstance.

If this is the case, what are the modalities of a transformational tax that will ensure an effective capital levy that can be used for the reconstruction of the physical and social infrastructure and economy that will address the legacies of apartheid? From a review of the historical comparative cases, there seem to be six crucial design elements. First, any transformational tax will need to define the tax base to include all forms of wealth measured globally in the same way the present US tax system includes all individual income from whatever source. Secondly, while a transformational tax should set a high exclusion amount, for example, over R5 or R10 million, it should not create categorical exclusions as to forms of wealth.

Thirdly, when it comes to valuation, the great benefit of the one-off capital levy is that there is no need to conduct continuing processes of evaluation since the law can designate a date – for example, 27 April 2019, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 1994 election or any date prior to the adoption of the tax – and use the market value as of that date. To ensure honesty and prevent the hiding of wealth, there are two interesting legal mechanisms derived from past experiences. One is that any property not declared would be forfeited to the state if discovered. The other is that if the owner of property declares a value that is later discovered to be significantly below market value, the state would be free to either purchase the property at the declared value or place the property on the market at the declared value.

The tax should be imposed on a sliding scale on all wealth as recorded on the date selected. The record of wealth may be based on submissions from the taxpayer (a tax form that offers the opportunity to record all assets as of the relevant date) and checked against the existing government and private data, including property values contained in local government rates records, banking information on mortgages and accounts, insurance company records and prior tax returns. Since this data is already in the system, there is little room for either capital flight or the hiding of assets. The tax would apply to both family wealth and legal entities, thus avoiding the difficulty of capital being distributed through various legal entities such as trusts, shares or other forms of capital holdings. The potential resources from such a tax will not be insignificant since, for example, in 2015 the Annual Financial Statistics reported by Statistical Services South Africa indicated that total company assets in the formal sector amounted to R8 trillion with a GDP of R4 trillion per annum.

Fourthly, to ensure the two central goals of a transformational tax, a significant revenue stream and the liberating of democratic politics from gross inequality and the influence of wealth, the tax rate will also need to be high. In the case of the German Lastenausgleich, it was set at 50 per cent, while in Japan, the rate was set in relation to overall wealth and reached as high as 90 per cent for the top bracket. In Finland, where the tax was indeed an act of solidarity, it was set at 40 per cent. Under present conditions of extreme inequality, it seems that a graduated scale would be most effective since the top 1 per cent now holds extreme amounts of wealth and economic power.

Fifthly, another benefit of the one-off capital levy over the annual net-wealth tax is that there is little opportunity for either tax avoidance or evasion. Capital flight is less likely in a situation in which the amount owed has already been defined, and the only question is how it will be collected. Some economists have argued that the threat of repeated ‘one-off’ capital levies will mean that there is a decline in savings and thus a threat to future economic prosperity; however, there is little evidence of this in the historical record.

Finally, any design of a transformational tax will need to consider whether the revenue generated will simply flow into government coffers or whether it will be effectively earmarked for specific needs. As already indicated, among the continuing legacies of apartheid the obvious target for spending these funds will be, on the one hand, to promote agrarian reform and, on the other, to address urban reconstruction to transform the geographic and social order of our cities and towns. Exactly how these resources will be allocated and whether they should be used as no-interest loans or grants are choices to be considered. While treasury departments across the globe argue that earmarking limits government expenditure choices and is thus to some degree undemocratic, it is important to consider two aspects of this debate. On the one hand, a transformational tax will not be the only source of government funding since it will not replace regular forms of taxation that need to be progressive to prevent a recurrence of the gross inequalities the tax is designed, in part, to address. To this extent, regular government expenditures will remain subject to regular democratic and constitutional procedures. On the other hand, the legitimacy of a transformational tax and the renewed social compact it seeks to establish is that expenditures will address the social and economic conditions that justified the imposition of the tax in the first place.

12 Redistribution of What? Beyond Land in the Moral Politics of Distribution

James Ferguson

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.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, 2023). 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, 2015; Ferguson & Li, 2018; see also Loher et al., 2016), 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, 2008: 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, 2015). 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’:

A society entering into possession of the social capital accumulated by the labor of preceding generations, organizing itself so as to make use of this capital in the interests of all, and constituting itself without reconstituting the power of the ruling minorities. It comprises in its midst an infinite variety of capacities, temperaments and individual energies: it excludes none. It even calls for struggles and contentions; because we know that periods of contests, so long as they were freely fought out, without the weight of constituted authority being thrown on the one side of the balance, were periods when human genius took its mightiest flight and achieved the greatest aims. Acknowledging, as a fact, the equal rights of all its members to the treasures accumulated in the past, it no longer recognizes a division between exploited and exploiters, governed and governors, dominated and dominators, and it seeks to establish a certain harmonious compatibility in its midst – not by subjecting all its members to an authority that is fictitiously supposed to represent society, not by trying to establish uniformity, but by urging all men to develop free initiative, free action, free association.

(Kropotkin, 1898: 9–10)

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, 2015), 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, 2015: 179–83).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, 2022); 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.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.