Dominant understandings of globalization, according to Gillian Hart, are “disabling.” By measuring the effect of the “global” on the “local,” conventional impact studies rely on a flawed conceptual opposition of time and space: the “global” is temporal and dynamic, the “local” spatial and static (12–13). This drives the lament, heard in post-apartheid government circles, that “there is no alternative” to the pro-globalization policies adopted when the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) was displaced in June 1996 by a plan known as Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR). “The central premise of GEAR was that an orthodox neoliberal package—tight fiscal austerity, monetary discipline, wage restraints, reducing corporate taxes, trade liberalization, and phasing out exchange controls—would lure investment . . . unleash rapid growth, tighten labor markets, and drive up wages” (20). A few years later, poverty had grown among the poorest and unemployment remained high.

What is the alternative? Is there an “enabling” account of globalization, one that will guide effective practical action? Can one steer a course between the twin dangers of voluntarism and determinism? Hart thinks that there is an alternative, one based in land reform and an emphasis on the local state. After noting a neglect of the agrarian question by the African National Congress (82), Hart compares two places in Kwazulu-Natal, Newcastle-Madadeni and Ladysmith-Ezakheni (the hyphens indicate a merging of former white towns and black townships). Once nodes of apartheid-era industrial decentralization, and destinations for Africans forcibly removed from agricultural land (96–110), they are, for Hart, dynamic spaces: imposing conditions on actors, they are constitutive rather than simply reflective of globalization patterns.

The weight of Hart's book falls on Newcastle, where globalization is not metropolitan but south-south: Taiwanese settlement, and investment—first drawn by incentives in the 1980s—in spinning and knitting. Their venture is not an unalloyed success. The factory owners clash with their workers, and their prices are eventually undercut by cheaper knitwear from China. A prominent Taiwanese industrialist allies himself with the Inkatha Freedom Party and proposes a free-trade zone where union activity would be illegal; life would have been better, some say, had they settled in China instead (198).

Accordingly, Hart turns in a transnational comparison that makes her book invaluable to theorists of globalization more broadly, and to Taiwan and southwestern China (where many Taiwanese opened factories during these same years). She does this not to refute the industrialists' assumptions, but rather to argue that dispossession of land is not, as South African Marxist historians have often assumed, an essential precondition for industrial development. Hart views access to land not only in terms of individual land-restitution claims but as a “social wage.” Such a reconceptualization links urban and rural issues, and may, she argues, promote alliances between organized labor and other political groupings acting in the arena of participatory democracy offered by the local state (309–12).

Hart is at pains to distinguish her argument from the pro-capitalist one for which access to land as an alibi for low wages: “I [am] not proposing land reform as a way of subsidizing low-wage, highly exploitative forms of industrialization, but rather a broader strategy to secure livelihoods” (230). It is clear enough that Hart's advocacy is on behalf of workers, and that she has little sympathy for their bosses. Objectively, however, the complicity of Disabling Globalization with the interests of the latter is inevitable; the land reform that it advocates is likely to “enable” both parties. This, of course, raises an ethical and political question that has never ceased to trouble Marxists: If, as Hart says, “emancipatory alternatives might be prefigured within already existing capitalisms” (292), does such complicity matter?