Book Review: Disabling Globalization by Gillian Hart

Gillian Hart, in her Introduction to Disabling Globalization: Places of Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa outlines the personal history that results in her engagement of the political and economic chaos of Post Apartheid South Africa. A child of South Africa, she fled the country during Apartheid’s power for the States where she was educated and taught. She returned to South Africa within the early years of post Apartheid changes.

Her research centers around the history of land dispossession, the development of manufacturing with the political developments of labor and youth movements, the acquisition of foreign investment and its resulting problems. She then describes the chaotic years following Apartheid including early failed attempts at land redistribution, the meager beginnings of democracy and the new land demarcations.

Hart spends considerable time discussing the multiple trajectories of globalization and the political, geographical and historical particularities that affect the varying success and failure of transnational investment in both South Africa and various locations in China. Hart argues convincingly that dispossession of the land is an essential contributing factor in the failure of the Taiwanese industrialists in South Africa. Unlike South Africa, the Taiwanese transnational industries have a much greater success rate in China where the people are still connected to the land and able to secure a basic livelihood from it (i.e. farming). Hart refers to this as the social wage. In addition China provided other basic social safety nets, sometimes including housing which took pressure off the need for increased labor wages. A final difference Hart notes is the cultural expectations among family members for advancement of the young men and the care of family laborers in the Taiwanese companies. None of these advantages were transported to South Africa.

Hart believes that two basic components must be addressed in post-Apartheid South Africa for a successful future: land redistribution and localization of power. Her outline of suggestions on p 326-27 is most instructive. Her basic assumption is that escalating poverty is a danger for all of South Africa and must be addressed firstly in the issue of land redistribution for the provision of a social wage. She also believes that neoliberal globalization can be altered. She would like to see some regulation and tariffs imposed to limit the massive job losses. She would also like industry and agriculture to focus on providing for basic local goods and services. Hart believes that local government can best develop manufacturing and agricultural industries for a given region.

I am taken with Gillian Hart’s critique of the free reign of neoliberal economics and the faith in the market to direct a nation’s economy, particularly in light of the economic crisis we face in the US. Clearly there is a place for a more “development” approach to economics that utilizes regulation to protect and sometimes slow the development of foreign investment. I am intrigued by her turning to the land as a solution for the social wage, although I am uncertain that this poses much help in our American society that is so far removed from agriculture. I also think there is merit in focusing in on creating goods and services that are useful to the local economy.