The land question is about social relations as well as race

Land has been a highly contested issue in South Africa since the period of colonial conquest. The eyes of the world are watching now that this contest has gone global. 

For many, the land question in South Africa is purely a question of race. It is irreducibly a question of race, but for the left it is also a question of class and of what land is used for and how it is managed.

These kinds of questions are asked by radical social movements around the world, and have been asked for centuries. In the spring of 1649, as England reeled from civil war, a small band of radicals took to the commons of St George’s Hill in Surrey. Led by Gerrard Winstanley, these “Diggers” or “True Levellers” sought to reclaim England’s common lands, establishing cooperative farms on what they viewed as a God-given inheritance stolen by the powerful. Their experiment lasted barely a year before landowners and local authorities crushed it with violence and legal persecution.

The Diggers emerged during the English Revolution, when parliamentary victory over absolute monarchy failed to deliver the radical democracy many commoners had fought for. “In the beginning of time, the great Creator Reason made the Earth to be a Common Treasury,” wrote Winstanley in his 1649 manifesto, The True Levellers Standard Advanced. The Diggers’ fundamental claim was that England’s common lands — progressively enclosed and privatised since the 13th century — rightfully belonged to all people equally. They practiced what we might now call “direct action”, occupying land and cultivating it collectively as a practical demonstration of their vision.

The Diggers faced violent repression from authorities defending existing property relations. Local landowners and officials repeatedly destroyed their crops and dwellings. Yet their vision extended far beyond land redistribution to encompass a radical reimagining of society without lords, landlords or the coercive power of the state. Winstanley’s pamphlets advocate a form of direct democracy where communities would govern themselves through reasoned deliberation. This vision proved too threatening for England’s new Commonwealth government, which, despite its republican credentials, remained committed to protecting private property.

The Diggers’ lasting significance lies not in their immediate practical achievements — their communes were crushed within months — but in their radical egalitarian vision that continues to inspire land activists worldwide. Winstanley’s writings, largely forgotten for centuries, were rediscovered by 20th-century historians and have influenced movements from communists and anarchists to ecological land reformers.

More than three centuries after the Diggers’ short-lived experiment, Brazil’s Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), or Landless Workers’ Movement, emerged as another pivotal chapter in the global struggle for land rights and dignity. Formed in 1984 during Brazil’s transition from military dictatorship to democracy, the MST has grown into the largest social movement in the world, with an estimated 1.5 million members across 24 of Brazil’s 26 states.

The MST’s primary tactic — land occupation — echoes the Diggers’ practical demonstration of their philosophy. When MST members identify unproductive estates that violate Brazil’s constitutional requirement that land serve a “social function”, they establish encampments, often facing violent eviction attempts by police or private militias. But, unlike the short-lived Diggers’ communes, many MST occupations have evolved into permanent settlements recognised by the state. Over nearly four decades, the movement has secured land for more than 370,000 families.

For the MST the struggle for land is also a struggle for different kinds of social relations.

“We are fighting for a piece of land so we can build another model of society,” stated João Pedro Stédile, one of the MST’s founders, in a 2004 interview. 

The MST settlements function as laboratories for alternative social relations. Their agricultural cooperatives practice agroecological farming methods that contrast sharply with Brazil’s dominant chemical-intensive monocultures. Their schools, recognised by Brazil’s education ministry, teach not only standard subjects but also the movement’s values of cooperation, environmental stewardship and critical consciousness.

Like the Diggers, the MST has faced severe repression — more than 1,700 MST activists have been murdered since the movement’s founding. Yet the MST’s longevity and the scale of its achievements show that grassroots land movements can not only survive but also institutionalise their gains.

The MST has secured not just land but political influence that the Diggers never achieved. Its members have been elected to local, state and national offices; its educational methodology has influenced Brazil’s national curriculum; and its critiques of industrial agriculture have entered mainstream discourse. This shows that movements can maintain radical visions while strategically engaging with state power — a balance that the Diggers never had opportunity to explore.

In the early 21st century, South Africa’s shackdwellers’ movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo (Residents of the Shacks), emerged in Durban’s Kennedy Road settlement as the newest inheritor of this centuries-long struggle. Since 2005, they have organised against evictions, fought for basic services, demanded “land and housing in the city” and organised numerous new occupations. 

In recent years they have been working to turn occupations into democratically managed communes in which food, mostly vegetables and poultry, is collectively produced and distributed. Despite vicious repression, including assassinations of their leaders, Abahlali has grown into Africa’s largest social movement with more than 150 000 members in close to a hundred branches in four provinces. 

Like the Diggers and the MST, Abahlali baseMjondolo is not only concerned with who has access to land but also with building new social relations on occupied land.

As S’bu Zikode, president of Abahlali baseMjondolo, powerfully said: “Land is dignity. Land is life. Land is the economy. Land is food sovereignty.”

In a march of thousands of people on the Durban City Hall in February 2020, Abahali baseMjondolo made it clear that their struggle for land was also a struggle for new social relations. The memorandum delivered that day declared that: “From the beginning our movement rejected the idea that land should be turned into a commodity, something to be bought and sold. We insisted that land should be distributed on the basis of human need and we affirmed the need for grassroots urban planning, and for the bottom up and democratic management of land. We insisted that women must be full and equal participants in all decisions relating to the allocation and management of land.” 

Like the Diggers and the MST, Abahlali baseMjondolo has endured severe repression including intimidation, arbitrary arrests, torture and assassinations. Like the Diggers and the MST, the movement’s “living politics” transcends narrow materialism. Their general assemblies, open to all, embody a form of participatory democracy far more substantive than South Africa’s formal political system. Their insistence that “the dignity of the poor must be recognised” challenges not only economic inequality but the denigration of impoverished people as less than fully human.

All three movements reject the division of humanity into worthy and unworthy, refusing charity models that position the poor as objects of external intervention rather than thinking, political beings.

There are strong bonds between the MST and Abahlali baseMjondolo, and the insistence of both movements that land should be allocated in terms of social needs, rather than bought and sold, connects directly with the politics of Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers.

As global inequality deepens and environmental crises threaten, these three movements remind us that access to land remains fundamental to human flourishing. Their histories suggest that genuine democracy must be built from below by people acting collectively. Most critically, they show that even in the face of violent repression, the human drive for dignity and self-determination persists across centuries and continents.

From St George’s Hill in England to the MST settlements of Brazil and Abahlali baseMjondolo’s occupations and communes in South Africa, the struggle continues — not simply for bits of land but also for the realisation of more just, democratic and sustainable ways of relating to land and to wider society.

Dr Imraan Buccus is senior research associate at ASRI and research fellow at the University of the Free State.