Revisiting the Agrarian and National Questions with Paris Yeros

Rudy joins Paris Yeros editor of Reclaiming the Nation: The Return of the National Question in Africa, Asia and Latin America and Reclaiming the Land: The Resurgence of Rural Movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America for a discussion on the agrarian and national questions in the 21st century, with a focus on the Zimbabwe land occupations of the 2000s. We  discuss the semi-proletarization and land hunger in the Global South,  the relevance of the peasantry as a social class, national sovereignty  and South-South cooperation before moving on to discuss the land  occupations and land redistribution process in Zimbabwe that started in  2000 and how they centered the race and national questions. We also  discuss the challenges Zimbabwe has faced since then, and compare the  militancy of the Zimbabwe occupations to other movements today such as  La Via Campesina and MST in Brazil.

Further reading: Paris Yeros - A New Bandung in the Current Crisis Sam Moyo - The Land Occupation Movement and Democratisation in Zimbabwe: Contradictions of Neoliberalism Sam Moyo & Paris Yeros (2007), The Radicalised state: Zimbabwe’s interrupted revolution, Review of African Political Economy, 34(111), 103–121. Sam Moyo & Paris Yeros (2013), ‘The Zimbabwe model:  Radicalisation, reform and resistance’, in S. Moyo & W. Chambati  (eds), Land and agrarian reform in Zimbabwe: Beyond white-settler capitalism (pp. 331–358). Dakar: CODESRIA.