Abstract
In Delivery as Dispossession: Land Occupation and Eviction in the Post-Apartheid City, sociologist Zachary Levenson sets out to explain why the South African state, seemingly committed to constructing housing and redressing the harms of apartheid and colonialism, regularly orders the eviction and dispossession of its own citizens. The explanation Levenson provides, drawn from 20 months of ethnographic research and careful readings of social theorists from Gramsci to Sartre to Stuart Hall to Asef Bayat, sharpens our understandings of the post-apartheid state and struggles for shelter, but it also resonates far beyond the novel insights it contributes to the nature of state power, the character of social movements (and nonmovements), and articulations of civil society.
The dispossessions carried out by South Africa's apartheid government, which ruled from 1948 to 1994, are well known and include the forced removal of roughly 3.5 million Black South Africans to racially homogeneous townships outside of cities. Yet, as Levenson reminds us, the apartheid state not only dispossessed; it also delivered housing. In fact, housing delivery in the townships, he explains, was carried out to facilitate the ends of dispossession. Under the post-apartheid state, the logic is reversed, or so his informants in Cape Town's housing offices claim. After the end of apartheid in 1994, South Africa's newly democratic government launched an ambitious housing program to reverse the longstanding effects of dispossession. While the post-apartheid state has constructed and delivered around four million houses, housing needs far exceed delivery, and millions wait for the houses they were promised. No longer able to wait, some desperate South Africans construct their own homes as part of the many land occupations underway across the country. Although Levenson's rich ethnography reveals that the residents are motivated by the desperate need for housing near economic opportunities, housing officials perceive them as thieves, greedily “jumping the queue” ahead of those waiting patiently for promised houses. Evicting these occupations, officials explain, is necessary for the effective implementation of its housing programs: dispossession in service of delivery. However, Levenson reasons, because the occupations are visible reminders of the government's inability to deliver on its promises, their removal constitutes attempts to hide these failures and deflect from the housing shortfalls that remain pervasive.
How the state sees residents—in this case, as criminals or in need—as well as how residents see the state and see themselves, underpins Levenson's rich analysis of state-society relations, and its relevance extends far beyond South Africa. In addition to questioning the very fact of post-apartheid evictions, the book addresses the question of their unevenness. Why are some occupations tolerated while others are evicted? How does the state's perception of the residents, of their leadership, and of the wider occupations ultimately shape the determination of who gets evicted?
The book's ethnographic material focuses on two land occupations in Cape Town: one was evicted and the other was allowed to remain. The divergent outcomes between the occupations of Siqalo and Kapteinsklip, whose distinct organizational structures were perceived differently by the state, are explicated through Gramsci's characterization of civil and political society as integrated and dialectally connected. Consistent with his perspective of the “integral state” as reliant not only on coercive power, but also on the exercise of ideological and cultural influence that generates consent, society for Gramsci is also simultaneously civil and political. As Levenson demonstrates, the actions of residents and of their leaders in civil society are also articulated within political society and are perceived by the state in ways that do not always match their intentions. Levenson attributes the eventual eviction of Kapteinsklip to its articulations in political society and perception by the state's administrative and judicial arms as opportunistic, disordered, and thus undeserving. Siqalo, on the other hand, whose actions in civil society were more unified and confrontational, was perceived by the judiciary as organized, orderly, and motivated by need, and was therefore allowed (at least for now) to stay put.
The divergent outcomes for Kapteinsklip and Siqalo (two occupations and one eviction) could have been interpreted more simply as a consequence of their distinct organizational structures, attributing Siqalo's success to its more effective self-organizing and collective action. But this interpretation would have failed to account for multifaceted and seemingly contradictory interests of the state. For Levenson, as for Gramsci, the state is not an autonomous entity that operates outside society and imposes its will on a passive population. The autonomous perspective of the state is more commonly invoked in studies of mass evictions and development-induced displacement, in which a unified state is understood to order evictions to facilitate capital accumulation or impose discipline. But these accounts fail to explain which occupations the government evicts and which it tolerates, or why evictions often fail to generate the capital that presumably motivates them. Rather, by understanding the state as integral, acting through both coercion and consent, we can better understand its distinct and seemingly contradictory responses to land occupations and what is ultimately the political character of evictions.
Levenson’s sophisticated analysis of post-apartheid evictions through a relational perspective of the state provides an important corrective to more simplistic characterizations of evictions and housing struggles. Better able to account for a state that not only delivers housing, but also dispossesses, and does so unevenly, this framework can also explain the political implications, although often unintended, of civil society activities—both organized movements and those not deliberately political. Throughout the analysis, including the presentation of his rich ethnographic material and his careful theoretical readings, particularly of Gramsci, Levenson productively unsettles conventional conceptualizations of the state, social movements, and civil society. Given the rich insights it provides, I expect this book to be widely read and debated by ethnographers, sociologists, and interdisciplinary scholars working with these concepts. And going forward, I expect that scholars working on the bourgeois state and civil society will have to engage with and respond to these insightful reformulations.