give a man a fish by james ferguson

8/9/2019 Give a Man a Fish by James Ferguson

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Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution

JAMES FERGUSON

give amana fish


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GIVE A MANA FISH

Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution

JAMES FERGUSON Foreword by Thomas Gibson


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© 2015 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States o America on acid-ree paper ∞

Designed by Natalie F. Smith

Typeset in Quadraat Pro by Westchester Publishing Ser vices

Library o Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ferguson, James, 1959–

Give a man a sh : reections on the new politics o distribution / James Ferguson.

pages cm—(The Lewis Henry Morgan lectures)

Includes bibliographical reerences and index. 978-0-8223-5895-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)

978-0-8223-5886-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)

978-0-8223-7552-4 (e-book)

1. Economic assistance, Domestic—Arica. 2. Public welare—Arica.

3. Arica—Economic policy. 4. Arica—Social policy. 5. Neoliberalism—

Arica. 6. Capitalism. 7. Poverty—Arica. . Title. . Series:

Lewis Henry Morgan lectures.

800.963 2015

361.96—dc23

2014037998

Cover photo: © Oliver Asselin / Alamy. A man counts money he has

just received rom a social cash transer program in the village o

Julijuah, Bomi County, Liberia, 2012.


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Contents

Foreword by Thomas Gibson vii

Preface and Acknowledgments xi

Introduction.

Cash Transfers and the New Welfare States

From Neoliberalism to the Politics of Distribution 1

1. Give a Man a Fish

From Patriarchal Productionism to the Revalorization

of Distribution 35

2. What Comes after the Social?

Historicizing the Future of Social Protection in Africa 63

3. Distributed Livelihoods

Dependence and the Labor of Distribution in the Livesof the Southern African Poor (and Not-So-Poor) 89

4. The Social Life of Cash Payments

Money, Markets, and the Mutualities of Poverty 119

5. Declarations of Dependence

Labor, Personhood, and Welfare in Southern Africa 141

6. A Rightful Share

Distribution beyond Gift and Market 165

Conclusion.

What Next for Distributive Politics? 191

Notes 217

References 237

Index 259


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Foreword

The Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures were originally conceived in 1961 by

Bernard Cohn, who was then chair o the Department o Anthropology

and Sociology at the University o Rochester. A ounder o modern cul-

tural anthropology, Morgan was one o Rochester’s most amous intellec-tual gures and a patron o the university; he lef a substantial bequest to

the university or the ounding o a women’s college. The lectures named

in his honor have now been presented annually or over fy years and

constitute the longest-running such series in North America.

The rst three sets o lectures commemorated Morgan’s contribu-

tions to the study o kinship (Meyer Fortes in 1963), native North Ameri-

cans (Fred Eggan in 1964), and cultural evolution (Robert M. Adams in

1965). They were originally delivered to public audiences on Tuesday andThursday evenings over a period o two to three weeks and published as

book-length monographs. A public lecture is now delivered on a single

evening, ollowed by a day-long workshop in which a draf o the planned

monograph is discussed by members o the Department o Anthropol-

ogy and by commentators invited rom other institutions. But the public

lecture and the monograph are still intended to present an example o

current anthropological thinking to a general audience.

The present volume is based on the Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture

that Proessor James Ferguson delivered at the University o Rochester


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viii

in October 2009. The ormal discussants who participated in the work-

shop that ollowed the lecture included Marina Welker (Cornell), John

Western (Syracuse), Dunbar Moodie (Hobart and William Smith), Mary

Moran (Colgate), Douglas Holmes (Binghamton), and Daniel Reichman

(Rochester). Ferguson’s argument touches on many o Morgan’s key in-terests, including the development and transormation o communal

and individual orms o property, the role that kinship and the state play

alongside the market in the distribution o economic resources, and the

way that non-capitalist societies around the world can serve as “concrete

orms o political inspiration” or the uture.

Ferguson’s primary concern is with new orms o distribution that are

emerging across the global South in nations like South Arica, Namibia,

Mexico, Brazil, and India. In view o the act that the current phase o

global capitalism has rendered a growing proportion o the population

in these nations chronically unemployed, many political activists have

begun to question the assumption shared by both capitalists and Marx-

ists that only waged workers have a right to a share o the social product.

Ferguson notes that many gures in the radical democratic tradition,

such as Tom Paine and Peter Kropotkin, argued that value is produced

by society as a whole, that all members o society should be regardedas shareholders in a collective enterprise, and that everyone thus has a

right to a share o the total social product. Others, such as Marcel Mauss

and Julius Nyerere, developed different arguments about the just distri-

bution o the collective social product without basing it on the labor o

individuals.

One o the most radical proposals circulating in South Arica and Na-

mibia today is that every member o society should receive a basic income

grant without reerence to their age, gender, employment, or amily con-guration. Ferguson notes that such a grant would help undermine the

value system associated with industrial capitalism in which it is socially

demeaning or adult men to be dependent on anyone but themselves

while it is socially acceptable or women, children, and the aged to be

dependent on male kinsmen or on state benets. This value system per-

petuates both gender inequality and the criminalization o the long-term

unemployed. By contrast, in the kinship-based societies and subcultures

traditionally studied by anthropologists, the cultivation o economic and

moral interdependence within a network o effective kin is one o the


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main goals o social lie. Proposals like the basic income grant seek to

scale this sort o morality up to the level o the nation-state and beyond.

Just as previous studies by anthropologists o actually existing orms

rather than o ideal models o capitalism and socialism provoked politi-

cal economists to think about the role o markets and planning in a new way, Ferguson’s study o the actually existing orms o mutuality that are

emerging across the global South should provoke political activists to

think about social justice in a new way. The book seeks to go beyond the

now-amiliar critiques o neoliberal capitalism and open up a new debate

about what a better uture might look like or us all. In doing so, it re-

mains true to the radical spirit o anthropology that Lewis Henry Morgan

himsel practiced.

Thomas Gibson

Editor, Lewis Henry Morgan Monograph Series


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In the course o doing critical studies o “development” over a period o

many years starting in the early 1980s, I was ofen asked by would-be “de-

velopers” some version o the question “Well, then, what should we do?” I

elt this was in important ways the wrong question (see epilogue to Fergu-son 1990). But seeing the way money was being poured into project afer

project with little positive effect on the lives o the supposed beneciaries,

I was sometimes tempted to answer the question by suggesting that better

results could be obtained i the project unds, instead o being spent on

Land Cruisers and oreign consultants, were simply handed over directly to

the “target population.” Over the years, several other anthropologists have

conessed to me having had the same impulse. I remember one who even

proposed, hal-seriously, that the money spent on development projects besimply scattered out o helicopters, so that local people could harvest it.

The act that such thoughts could only take the orm o suppressed

impulses or cynical humor reects the power o a long-standing anxiety

about simply “giving” money directly to poor people. From the time o its

birth, a key imperative or capitalism has been to drive people into labor,

and any plans to directly distribute resources to those who lack them have

been met by powerul worries about undermining what is politely called

“the incentive to work.” Such considerations have long made it sel-

evident that development projects should prepare people or such work,

Preface and Acknowledgments


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xii

not provide them with sources o livelihood independent o it. Handing

out cash was simply not in the cards, and proposing such a thing could

only be understood as some sort o joke.

It is no longer a joke. I began to notice this as I watched the steady

expansion in recent years o a system o paying cash grants to the poorin South Arica. As I puzzled over the apparent paradox o a “neoliberal”

regime sending monthly checks to a steadily expanding roster o citizens

that now exceeds 30 percent o the population, I gradually realized that

the new willingness to “just give money to the poor” (as the title o a re-

cent book has it [Hanlon, Barrientos, and Hulme 2010]) was not a South

Arican peculiarity but an emerging reality across much o the world. As

this book details, recent years have seen the spread o major programs o

direct distribution o cash to the poor (so-called cash transers) all across

the global South, ofen with the support o established development in-

stitutions (such as the World Bank) that would not long ago have recoiled

in horror at the very idea. This has happened at the same time that in-

creasingly large populations nd that they have no access to wage labor—

the orm o livelihood that has long been understood both as a historical

telos o economic development and as an anchor o progressive politics.

How are we to understand this new situation? And what is the sig-nicance o the global trend toward cash transers to the poor, in south-

ern Arica and beyond? This book is, in the rst instance, an attempt to

answer these questions, and to propose at least some preliminary ideas

about how we might think about the emergence o what I call a new poli-

tics o distribution. The argument that unolds in the ollowing chapters

is that the current conjuncture is pregnant with both new political pos-

sibilities and new dangers. At the same time, I suggest that a sustained

reection upon certain practical puzzles and impasses o the present po-litical moment reveals that some o the oundational assumptions that

have guided critical social theory or generations are in signicant ways

out o step with our new realities. Moving the question o distribution

rom the periphery o our theoretical concerns to the center, I will argue,

both opens up new political possibilities and sheds new light on a host

o analytical issues ranging rom labor and livelihoods to markets and

money to dependence and personhood.

I approach these questions through a long engagement with a spe-

cic regional history. While the empirical cases that will be most ully


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explored here are those o South Arica and Namibia, the account I seek

to provide o distributive processes extends to much o the wider south-

ern Arican region and has involved pursuing lines o investigation I have

worked on or years while revisiting (and in some cases reinterpreting)

some o my own earlier ethnographic research in Lesotho and Zambia.But ar more important than my own work here has been the work o

countless others. The book is, in no small measure, an attempt to review

and synthesize that work in hopes o bringing the insights o an excep-

tionally important and high-quality regional literature into a wider circle

o discussion. Studies o the southern Arican region (especially the de-

tailed and richly empirical accounts that eature in the best o its ethno-

graphic research) are, I suggest, o broader signicance and import than

has sometimes been recognized. And i, as I will argue, our ability to con-

ceive o real political alternatives in these neoliberal times has suffered

rom a certain poverty o the political imagination, this rich ethnographic

archive may contain resources that might be o some use as we seek to

nd new ways both o understanding the present and o envisioning pos-

sible utures.

Beyond my intellectual debt to this outstanding body o literature, I

also have personal debts to many o the scholars who have produced it,scholars who have in one way or another inspired or assisted my work over

the years. Some I have known or decades now, and many have been di-

rectly supportive o me and my work. Especially helpul have been Patrick

Bond, Jean and John Comaroff, Ben Cousins, Donald Donham, Andries

du Toit, Harri Englund, Gillian Hart, Achille Mbembe, Donald Moore,

Nicoli Nattrass, David Neves, Francis Nyamnjoh, Stephen Robins, Jeremy

Seekings, Andrew Spiegel, and Eric Worby. I am very pleased to have held

honorary appointments in recent years at both the Department o SocialAnthropology at the University o Cape Town and the Department o So-

ciology and Social Anthropology at the University o Stellenbosch, and

I am grateul or my wonderul colleagues at both institutions.

In the course o this project, I also came to realize how much can be

learned rom the people I came to think o as “policy intellectuals”—

sophisticated thinkers engaged with pragmatic issues o social policy in

settings as various as s, think tanks, universities, government de-

partments, trade unions, and political parties. I have interviewed many o

these people, ormally and inormally, over the last decade. For the most


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part, they are not named in the text, either because they were promised

anonymity or simply to avoid causing them embarrassment. But I am

grateul to all o them. In South Arica, I am especially grateul to the busy

offi cials at the Department o Social Development who so generously

took the time to share their perspectives with me, while in Namibia I havespecial debts to Dirk and Claudia Haarmann and Uhuru Dempers o the

Basic Income Grant Campaign or their kind assistance and generosity.

The heart o this book was originally presented as the Lewis Henry

Morgan Lectures at the University o Rochester in October o 2009. I am

grateul to the Department o Anthropology at Rochester, and especially

to Tom Gibson and Bob Foster or inviting me and providing warm hos-

pitality during my visit, as well as to Dan Reichman and Eleana Kim. I am

also indebted to the discussants or the lectures—Douglas Holmes, Dun-

bar Moodie, Mary Moran, Marina Welker, and John Western— who pro-

vided a host o valuable suggestions and questions. In developing this

volume or publication, I have tried to keep the eel o a series o lectures.

As its subtitle suggests, the book is intended less as an authoritative re-

port on research than as a series o “reections,” whose goal is less to

explain the new distributive programs I describe than to reect on their

meaning and signicance. The chapters are envisaged as an ordered se-quence o independent essays. While they are meant to t together into

an integrated whole when read in sequence, my intention is that each

chapter can also be intelligible i read separately. My hope is that the

reader will orgive a certain amount o redundancy that must inevitably

accompany this strategy.

Support or this project was provided by the Stanord Humanities Cen-

ter, where I held the Ellen Andrew Wright Fellowship in 2010–11, as well

as by the Stellenbosch Institute or Advanced Study, where I was a el-low in the spring o 2011. I am grateul or the intellectual stimulation o

the colleagues with whom I shared ellowship time at both institutions,

and especially to members o the research group with which I worked

at Stellenbosch: Ben Cousins, Henry Bernstein, Bridget O’Laughlin, and

Pauline Peters. I am also grateul to the Vrije Universiteit o Amsterdam,

where I had the opportunity to serve as international ellow rom 2008

to 2010. O those colleagues who generously hosted me while helping

me to rene my ideas, I would especially like to thank Freek Colombijn,

Marjo de Theije, Birgit Meyer, and Oscar Salemink. I also beneted rom


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being part o the seminar “Markets and Moralities” at the School or Ad-

vanced Research, Santa Fe, New Mexico, which was held in May 2009.

I am grateul to all o the seminar participants, who pushed my thinking

orward in important ways, and especially to the seminar organizers, Ted

Fischer and Peter Benson. A version o chapter 4 appeared in the volumethat emerged rom this seminar, Cash on the Table: Markets, Values, and Moral

Economies, edited by Edward Fischer (Santa Fe: School o Advanced Re-

search Press). A version o chapter 2 appeared in Registration and Recogni-

tion: Documenting the Person in World History (Proceedings of the British Academy

182, 495–516), while a version o chapter 5 appeared in the Journal of the

Royal Anthropological Institute 19 (2): 223–42.

Tania Li has been a wonderul source o ideas and questions or many

years now, and I have greatly beneted rom her comparative thoughts

about distribution and what she once called “worlds without work.” Liisa

Malkki, as always, has been a ont o insightul questions, inspired sugges-

tions, and new ideas. I have received very valuable comments rom many

other readers o sections o the book, including Keith Breckenridge, Jean

and John Comaroff, Harri Englund, and Hylton White. I also beneted

rom an extensive discussion with Lawrence Cohen, Stephen Collier, and

Tobias Rees. Austin Zeiderman and Sarah Ives both did very valuable work as research assistants and have my thanks.

I continue to benet rom being in the intellectual company o a stel-

lar group o scholars in the Department o Anthropology at Stanord. I am

grateul to them or providing such a supportive and intellectually engag-

ing home base rom which to work, and especially to Thomas Blom Han-

sen and Lynn Meskell or their stimulating reections on the South Arican

scene. In the wider Bay Area, a group o colleagues was kind enough to

read the entire manuscript at a late stage: Don Donham, Gill Hart, DonaldMoore, Lisa Roel, Anna Tsing, and Sylvia Yanagisako. I am deeply grate-

ul or their insights and encouragement. As always, Ken Wissoker has

been the best o editors, whose good judgment and unagging support

have been assets I could count on throughout the process.

Finally, I wish to observe that, like any human production, this book

has only been possible thanks to a long series o prior enactments o ma-

terial distribution and social and emotional care. I thereore dedicate it

to all those who have supported and nurtured me through the different

stages o my lie, and especially to my parents, Jane and Jim Ferguson.


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Introduction.

Cash Transfers and

the New Welfare StatesFrom Neoliberalism to

the Politics of Distribution

Something unexpected has happened in the last two decades. We have

become used to a debate pitting triumphalist accounts o the global

spread o “ree-market” capitalism (decreeing the end o history, or tell-

ing us the world is at) against critical accounts o that same ascendancythat tell a ormally similar story but with the moral polarity inverted. But

both sides o this great debate seem to agree on the story’s undamental

plotline: unettered, “ree-market” capitalism is regnant, and “neolib-

eral,” market-based systems o economy and governance are everywhere

on the march, while the welare state is embattled, in retreat, or barely

hanging on. In this context, it has been prooundly surprising to see that

recent years, in a host o different sites across the global South, have in

act yielded something quite different: the creation and expansion o ex-tensive social welare programs targeting the poor anchored in schemes

that directly transer small amounts o cash to large numbers o low-

income people.

The ideological narratives o market triumph (pro or con) made it easy

to miss this development, since the narratives seemed agreed that neolib-

eralism is (as sociologist Peter Evans [2008, 217] put it) “congenitally blind

to the need or social protection” and that “the poor” thereore must, in

these market-riendly and state-slashing times, receive less attention (not

more) rom national states. But they also made it easy to suppose that


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whatever interventions or innovations were occurring in the world o de-

velopment and poverty policy must be those that t the narratives, lead-

ing to a burst o scholarly attention to such paradigmatically “neoliberal”

things as microcredit and micronance schemes. But now that the smoke

has cleared, it is plain to see that the really big “development” story othe last twenty years is, in act, not microcredit but (as a recent policy re-

view put it) “the rise and rise o social protection” (Roelen and Devereux

2013, 1). And the central mechanism o the new anti-poverty programs

is not credit, securitization, or any other sort o neoliberal predation but

the startlingly simple device o handing out small amounts o money to

people deemed to need it. As the title o one volume o ull-throated ad-

vocacy or such cash transers recently put it, Just Give Money to the Poor.

Whatever one may think o this outcome, it is decidedly not where

dominant narratives o marketization and neoliberalism expected us to

end up. And it is a turn o events that implies some quite different sorts

o politi cal possibilities and dangers than those suggested by the usual

neoliberalism story. This book, then, is a sustained reection on these

new worldwide developments and their political and social signicance,

with southern Arica (a region I have studied or more than three de-

cades) as its key point o ocus.

The book’s goal is less to explain thesedevelopments than to reect on what they might mean and how they may

be transorming the eld o political limits and possibilities, both within

the region and beyond it.

Neoliberal Welfare States? The Surprising Outcome of Political

and Economic Restructuring in Southern Africa

The disjuncture between certain inuential scholarly stories about neo-liberalism and concrete developments at the level o social policy is es-

pecially pronounced in southern Arica. Here, narratives about neolib-

eralism have been central to most critical understandings o the massive

political and economic changes o the last ew decades, as I will describe

below. But at the same time the region has been a widely hailed pioneer

in the expansion in social protection that has swept the globe. South

Arica here has led the way, with an extensive national system o social

payments anchored by old age pensions, child care grants, and disability

payments. But others in the region have ollowed suit, and there are now


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similar major nationwide programs in Botswana and Namibia, along

with smaller ones in Lesotho, Swaziland, and Mozambique, as well as

pilot and regional programs (intended to soon be scaled up to the nation-

wide level) in Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

Southern Arica (and especially South Arica) has sometimes been seennot only as an instance o neoliberalism but even as a paradigmatic case

o it (see, e.g., Klein 2008). And i neoliberalism is, as some accounts have

(rather Eurocentrically) tended to suggest, rst and oremost a worldwide

project centered on the erosion, rollback, or downsizing o the Keynes-

ian “social” states that dominated the post– World War II (Western) world

(see, e.g., Harvey 2007), it seems clear enough in what direction “neo-

liberal” southern Arica must be headed: toward the heartless world o

neoliberal capitalism, in which the welare state withers while the poor

are ever more exposed to the depredations o “the market.” With the is-

sues ramed in this way, even the most astute o the region’s many critical

observers have sometimes paid less attention than they should have to a

remarkable set o events in the region, events that have in act led to sus-

tained expansions (rather than reductions) in programs o social assistance

and indeed to the emergence o what could reasonably be described as a new

kind o welare state. And while many inuential accounts o neoliberal-ism have seen only ever-growing social exclusion, we here must also take

stock o a new kind o inclusion as millions o poor citizens previously

ignored or worse by the state have become direct beneciaries o cash

payments.

The most inuential critical accounts o neoliberalism in southern

Arica center on the region’s economic core, South Arica, so it is impor-

tant briey to review how such accounts understand South Arica’s post-

apartheid transition and the economic changes that came in its wake. Asthe story is generally told, the Arican National Congress () party

that took the reins o government afer the 1994 transition, having aban-

doned its old commitments to socialist economic transormation, opted

or what Patrick Bond (2005, 6) has termed a “homegrown” structural ad-

justment program, yielding without much o a ght to the World Bank/

orthodoxy o the time that called or the opening up o markets (via

deregulation and privatization), in the hopes o making the new South

Arica an attractive destination or international capital investment. Fol-

lowing a brie and transitional commitment to a “Reconstruction and


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Development Plan” () that articulated a broad i vague social demo-

cratic commitment to a “mixed economy,” 1996 saw an offi cial shif to

a new, more “neoliberal” approach, the “Growth with Employment and

Redistribution” ( ) program. At the heart o the plan was the claim

that a business-riendly, “growth-led” strategy would generate suffi cienteconomic growth to secure substantial employment growth and in the

end to lif all boats. But moves to “open up” the economy to “the market”

yielded only limited economic growth, disappointingly ailing to come

close to the optimistic early projections. Even more dramatic was the ail-

ure to generate much employment. Not only was there no burst o new

employment; old standbys like agriculture and mining actually shed huge

numbers o jobs— just the sorts o jobs that had ormerly allowed low-

skilled and low- waged workers to sustain urban and rural livelihoods and

communities all across the region. The result was a rapid acceleration o

a shif that had begun already in the 1970s, rom a labor-shortage econ-

omy to one o massive labor surplus (Seekings and Nattrass 2005; Marais

2011). With persistent mass unemployment (offi cial gures stuck near 25

percent and broader measures generally much higher ), many o those at

the bottom o the economic heap seemed to have little to show or their

supposed liberation. New wealth was certainly being generated, some oit now conspicuously accumulated by black South Aricans (ofen well-

connected elites), but inequality rose to levels exceeding even those

seen under apartheid. This led to a society whose supercial prosperity

disguised ormidable underlying ills, including inequality, mass unem-

ployment, and lack o ull social inclusion.

This critique, in its broad strokes, gets a lot right. Both its account o

economic liberalization and its diagnosis o the social ills that ollowed

in its wake are broadly correct. But there are two gaps in such accountsthat make them o only limited value in understanding the region’s new

welare states. First, the critiques are inevitably most articulate about

what they are against (“neoliberalism”) and have ofen struggled to lay out

convincing and realistic alternatives and strategies. Too ofen, in act,

critical accounts o neoliberalism have settled into a politics o denuncia-

tion (what I have elsewhere [Ferguson 2010] analyzed as “the politics o

the anti-”) in which political identities are constituted or consolidated

less by concrete programs o government or political mobilization than

by a declaration o opposition to a malevolent and polymorphic “other”


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5

named “neoliberalism.” The result is a strange state o affairs in which

nearly every intellectual and politician in South Arica today condemns

“neoliberalism” but no major political parties have emerged advocating

any very substantially different policy path (at least until very recently).

The second problem is not unrelated. It is that the now-standard criti-cal accounts o South Arica’s “neoliberalism” ail to attend to the very

substantial ways in which that country (pioneering a path or many o its

neighbors) has taken a turn that, in some respects at least, seems almost

the opposite o the standard neoliberal model: that is, by elaborating an

enormous system o non-contributory social benets that today trans-

ers 3.4 percent o the nation’s directly to “the poor” via non-market

cash payments that are now received by more than 30 percent o the entire

population (National Treasury 2013, 84–86).

It seems clear that this development was the product o a quite partic-

ular conjuncture. For it was at just the moment that the post-apartheid

regime came to power, with a mandate to transorm the economic

conditions o the poor and working-class people who made up its po-

litical base, that a worldwide economic restructuring undermined the

low- wage employment that had long provided the entire region with

its economic core. (On the brutally abrupt collapse o labor markets orlow- wage and low-skilled labor, see Seekings and Nattrass 2005; Marais

2011.) Facing the pressing political need to deliver concrete changes to

the new black political majority, and with “pro-market” economic poli-

cies ailing to yield the rapid economic growth that had been supposed to

“lif all boats,” social protection became a key domain o policy innova-

tion. South Arica and several o its neighbors had long had quite well-

developed social welare systems or whites, but provisioning or blacks

was rudimentary at best (see chapter 2). As part o the transition to thenew, post-apartheid regime, pension rates were equalized across racial

groups, and social assistance rapidly became o much greater economic

value or the majority populations. At the same time, a decision was made

to implement a substantial new nationwide cash benet or those caring

or small children. Similar programs were soon taken up by neighboring

countries Namibia and (to a lesser extent) Botswana, and the range o ben-

eciaries was rapidly expanded (in South Arica, the age limit or a child’s

eligibility was gradually raised rom seven in 1998 to the current age limit

o eighteen). The rapid growth o such programs responded not only


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6

to post-apartheid political expectations but also to another conjunctural

eature o the regional moment: the emergence in the 1990s o a massive

epidemic that was creating huge numbers o orphans even as it lef

many elderly caring or the ill.

The result o this complex conjuncture has been the emergence o a very extensive set o state commitments to provide monthly cash pay-

ments to a wide range o beneciaries. In South Arica, grants are paid to

more than sixteen million individuals (some 30 percent o the total popu-

lation), in the context o a doubling (in real terms) o overall social spend-

ing between 2002–3 and 2011–12 (National Treasury 2012, 78). Nearly

three million South Aricans aged sixty and over receive old age pensions

(each with a 2013 value o 1260 [~US$125] per month), with another

eleven million receiving child support grants (now set at 300 [~US$30]

per child). These benets are non-contributory (i.e., not based on any

payments previously made by recipients) and are paid directly rom the

state treasury. They are nominally conditional on an income test, and in

principle school attendance is required or child support grants. But such

strictures have in practice been only loosely applied (i at all), meaning

that or the most part the grants do not have the strong “conditions” that

have ofen been attached to cash transers in Latin America and otherregions (indeed, the Ministry o Social Development is currently plan-

ning to phase out even the means test or old age pensions). And it must

be noted that the benets (while, o course, tiny when compared in ab-

solute terms with those o Northern welare states) are, in the context o

the lives o low-income people in the region, quite substantial; indeed,

as one recent study has pointed out (Garcia and Moore 2012, 311), the

South Arican old age pension as o 2010 amounted to 1.75 times the me-

dian per capita income. The grants reach a huge swath o the population, with some 44 percent o all households nationwide receiving at least one

grant, a gure that rises to nearly 60 percent in the predominantly poor

and rural provinces o Eastern Cape and Limpopo (Statistics South Arica

2013, 19–20).

Namibia has expanded its old age pension scheme along lines very

similar to those o the South Arican program. It has also introduced the

Child Maintenance Grant, modeled on the South Arican Child Support

Grant, as well as a number o other, smaller programs. Due to a less exi-

ble implementation and poor administration, the child care grants are not


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7

as widely distributed (yet) as in South Arica, but here too both expendi-

tures and the number o recipients have expanded rapidly in recent years.

As o 2008, some 12 percent o Namibia’s total population were receiving

social grants (Levine, Van der Berg, and Yu 2009; Garcia and Moore 2012,

287–90). Botswana also has a comprehensive non-contributory old agepension system as well as a major program providing cash payments to

those caring or orphaned children—no small thing in a country where

some 15 percent o all children are reckoned to be orphans (Dahl 2009).

Social protection schemes are less developed in other southern Arican

countries, but the successes o the South Arican model have inspired

even the poorest states in the region to attempt to emulate it, albeit with

much lower levels o benets. Swaziland, or instance, now has a univer-

sal old age pension, and even Lesotho (long widely regarded as lacking

the nancial means to attempt any sort o social protection) introduced a

modest old age pension in 2004 and is now developing a program o child

care grants (Garcia and Moore 2012, 264).

It is now well documented that these programs, in their own terms,

“work.” For South Arica, where the programs have been studied most

intensively and or the longest time, a robust consensus now exists

that, as one recent evaluation study put it, “South Arica’s social grantshave been extremely successul at reducing poverty” (, , and

2012, 3; see also the authoritative overview o the evidence in

Neves et al. 2009). According to a recent national survey, the percentage

o households that reported experiencing hunger decreased rom 29.3

percent to 12.6 percent between 2002 and 2012 (Statistics South Arica

2012, 4). A recent comprehensive evaluation o the Child Support Grant

program concluded that it clearly yielded “positive developmental im-

pact” not only in nutrition but also in educational and health outcomes while at the same time providing some protection to adolescent recipi-

ents rom “risky behaviors” in the context o the high prevalence. A

recent survey o living standards (based not on reported income but on

concrete liestyle markers such as the presence o running water or ush

toilets and ownership o key goods and appliances) ound that the pro-

portion o South Arican adults alling into the lowest o ten categories

or living standards had allen rom 11 percent o the population in 2001

to just 1 percent in 2011. Major declines were also ound in the other low-

est categories, along with substantial rises in proportions occupying the


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8

middle rungs o the scale. One o the researchers (Georgina Alexander o

the South Arican Institute o Race Relations) provided this explanation

o the results:

The improvement can be attributed in part to the increase in the num-ber o people receiving social payments, such as old age pensions and

the child support grant. In particular, the number o recipients o the

child grant increased by 1200% between 2001 and 2010/11. In 2001

some 8% o South Aricans were beneciaries o grants. This propor-

tion increased to 29% in 2010/11 and accounted or 10% o government

expenditure.

It is not only quantitative surveys that attest to the effi cacy and impor-

tance o the expanded programs o cash transer. Among the scores o ex-

perts and ethnographic researchers whom I have consulted in the course

o this project, many with very long and intimate amiliarity with the so-

cial realities o the region’s poverty, none doubted that social grants are

playing an absolutely vital role in sustaining poor households and com-

munities and in preventing the worst sorts o destitution. When I asked

one such highly knowledgeable researcher what South Arica would be

like without the grants, he paused beore replying simply, “Apocalyptic.Off the chart.”

In Namibia, social protection programs have been less well studied

and assessed, but what data is available suggests that the effects o the

programs have been broadly similar to those in South Arica. A recent

overview ound that these schemes are making “a substantial and grow-

ing contribution to poverty reduction” and concluded that social cash

transers have lowered the number o “poor” individuals by 10 percent

and the “very poor” by 22 percent (Levine, Van der Berg, and Yu 2009,49, 50). The report also nds the programs to be broadly sustainable in

scal terms, projecting a gradual reduction in social grant expenditures

(as a percentage o ), since growth is expected to outpace the

projected growth in number o recipients (Leving, Van der Berg, and Yu

2009, 42, 45).

Not surprisingly, these programs have been generally popular among

those receiving the cash payments. What is perhaps more surprising

is that a broad acceptance o these programs appears to extend across

nearly the whole range o society, with eelings about the legitimacy o


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9

public assistance quite widely shared across both class and race divides.

Jeremy Seekings has shown that, when asked about both specic social

assistance programs and a range o scenarios in which a person in a

certain situation might or might not “deserve” government assistance,

South Aricans o different races proved to have surprisingly similar views(Seekings 2008c). At least in South Arica (and thanks to a history that

I trace in chapter 2), it seems to be broadly accepted that it is a normal

and proper part o the mission o the state to issue monthly cash pay-

ments to a wide range o people deemed to be in need. Indeed, despite

their substantial size and cost, the programs o social grants that I have

described here are not a particularly contentious or embattled eature o

the political landscape in any o the countries I have reviewed here. To my

knowledge, in act, no major political party has ever proposed eliminat-

ing them, or even reducing their amounts.

How did this come about? In South Arica, especially, it is very clear

that the original ambition o the post-apartheid regime was hardly to

create a welare state catering to those excluded rom the world o wage

labor. Its rst political imperative, on the contrary, was to generate jobs

and to improve the condition o workers. The , o course, had its in-

tellectual roots on the political Lef, and it has governed rom the start aspart o a “tripartite alliance” linking it with the powerul trade union ed-

eration and the South Arican Communist Party. Partly or this

reason, a high value has long been placed on labor as the central mode o

social incorporation, and on “the workers” as the guration o those to

whom the government must answer (see Barchiesi 2011). But in the con-

text o new economic realities, as the country went through a wrenching

economic restructuring that shed jobs as much as it created them, more

and more o the population looked to government as a direct providerand provisioner. “Ser vice delivery” was the new slogan, and increasingly

black South Aricans sought their “liberation” in the orm o direct state

provision o such goods as housing, electricity, water, sanitation, and

social ser vices. “Ser vice delivery protests,” indeed, became a amiliar

eature o everyday lie in poor and working-class neighborhoods across

the country. In this context, a patchwork o older programs o social as-

sistance (inherited rom the apartheid regime and newly deracialized)

provided the starting point or the development o a vast institutional ap-

paratus that would make it possible or the new state to provide highly


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10

visible and very effective support, in the orm o direct cash transers, to

its electoral base—a way o “delivering” something tangible and valuable,

even in the absence o jobs.

This was a matter o practical politics and pragmatic policymaking.

But along with the political and institutional innovations I have describedhere, it is also possible to trace the emergence o new ways o thinking,

new ways o reasoning about matters o poverty and distribution. As Mi-

chel Foucault once remarked, the work o governing always involves at

least a certain amount o thinking (Foucault 1988, 152–56). I am inter-

ested, then, not only in the new programs o social assistance but also in

the new ways o thinking that are growing up alongside them, new “ra-

tionalities” o poverty and social assistance that, I suggest, may be under-

stood as both harbingers o, and intellectual resources or, an emergent

politics. This is what I term a “politics o distribution,” and it involves

new ways o thinking about a range o things that includes labor, unem-

ployment, the amily, and the meaning o “social” payments. We will not

get ar, I suggest, by either simply condemning these new ways o think-

ing or simply celebrating them. Instead, I wish to think both about them

and with them, hoping thereby to gain a better understanding o both the

political possibilities and the dangers o the present moment.An older way o thinking (shared, at some undamental level, by both

offi cial apartheid planners and their most radical critics) saw the majority

black population rst o all as a source o labor. Black populations con-

ned to rural “homelands” or “Bantustans” appeared principally as “labor

reserves,” providing a steady supply o low- wage migrant labor, most o

all to big employers such as the mines. While a permanently settled work-

orce would have provoked both political demands and a need or higher

wages (high enough, at least, to cover the costs o the work orce’s ownreproduction), state control o black movement and residence attempted

to solve both problems by orcing labor to remain “migrant.” As Marxist

critics pointed out, this was accomplished only by off-loading the costs

o social reproduction (including raising children and caring or the sick

and aged) onto already-impoverished rural communities, thus enabling

a kind o “super-exploitation” that affl icted not only workers themselves

but also their communities and regions o origin. For those who would

replace the nakedly exploitative and repressive system o apartheid with

something better, the starting place was thereore the idea that it was not


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11

only those directly employed by capitalists who were exploited by capital-

ism. People rom the poor rural peripheries o the southern Arican po-

litical economy, even i not directly employed, were not at all marginal to

the production system. On the contrary, thanks to the role they played in

the reproduction o labor, they were in act central to the massive produc-tion o wealth that was occurring at the industrial centers o this regional

system. This was an analytical claim (i.e., that even the region’s most pe-

ripheral people and locales were in act vital or capitalism, “reproduc-

ing the labor orce”) that contained embedded within it both a unctional

imperative (“social reproduction” could only take place via the provision

o at least some minimal “social wage” enabling it) and an ethical claim

(those who were helping to generate wealth were also entitled to share

in it).

But the developments o recent years orce us to question the logic

that allowed an earlier generation o critics to link the productivity o

the industrial economy to the entire society in such a direct and com-

pelling way. In a labor-scarce politi cal economy, even the most remote

rural reaches o the southern Arican region could plausibly be under-

stood as providing vitally needed labor reserves or a vast and encom-

passing system o production. Today, however, a restructured capitalismhas ever less need or the ready supply o low- wage, low-skilled laborers

that the migrant labor system generated. As Tania Li (2010) has argued in

an Asian context, the marginalization and impoverishment o so many

today cannot be regarded as “a strategy o global capital” but is instead,

in her terms, “a sign o their very limited relevance to capital at any scale”

(2010, 67). This point was made to me most dramatically in the comment

o a South Arican social researcher with long experience working with

poor rural communities. “I wish this weren’t true,” he said, “but the actis that there are at least ten million people out there who could drop dead

tomorrow and the [Johannesburg Stock Exchange] wouldn’t register

so much as a ripple.”

Under such circumstances, it has become more and more diffi cult to

argue that the value produced at the region’s industrial centers is gener-

ated by the suffering o those at its periphery; instead, the suffering o the

poor and marginalized appears as unctionally isolated rom a production

system that simply no longer has any use or them. And i such people in-

creasingly receive social payments, this cannot plausibly be understood as


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12

part o a vital and necessary unctional logic o reproducing a workorce,

or there is simply no demand or the kind o labor such payments might

plausibly “reproduce.” On the contrary, insoar as today’s social protec-

tion programs do support a sort o social reproduction, it is the reproduc-

tion o precisely that class o people who have increasingly slim prospectso ever entering the labor market at all.

At the same time, people whose labor is no longer wanted have acquired

other kinds o power—specically, political rights within a democratic

regime whose political base is precisely the impoverished and histori-

cally excluded masses o “the poor.” And this regime has elt the need

to “deliver” a range o goods and ser vices to people whose claims are in-

creasingly based neither on labor nor its reproduction but instead on such

things as citizenship and political pressure. In this context, a “neoliberal”

program o selective privatization and marketization has been combined

with a ar-reaching expansion o programs o direct distribution that are

increasingly decoupled rom issues o labor and labor supply.

A Worldwide Shift: The Cash Transfer Revolution and Its Meaning

These developments are not unique to southern Arica. It is true thatsouthern Arican programs, especially those providing old age pensions,

have their own, quite specic, historical roots (reviewed in chapter 2).

But as I suggested at the start, their recent rapid expansion is clearly part

o a much larger, worldwide trend.

In act, the last two decades have seen the rise o new kinds o welare

regimes all over the world. The programmatic element that has been at

the heart o this transormation has been “cash transers,” most with at

least nominal “conditions” (typically school attendance or children andclinic visits or improved health) attached to them (thus “conditional

cash transers” or s). These programs, in their modern orm, can be

traced to Latin American roots, in particular the Opportunidades pro-

gram in Mexico (Molyneux 2007a, 2007b; World Bank 2009), ollowed by

the Bolsa Familia program in Brazil, both ocused principally on ami-

lies with children. The latter, in particular, has served as something o a

global model and inspiration, delivering benets as it does to more than

eleven million amilies, with what has been claimed to be both a strong

anti-poverty impact and the amiliar Keynesian benet o enabling con-


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13

sumption and thereby stimulating the economy (Soares et al. 2010; c.

Lo Vuolo 2013). But what was once largely a Latin American phenom-

enon has gone global. A 2009 World Bank report traced the growth o

cash transer programs across scores o countries worldwide, noting that

“countries have been adopting or considering adopting programs ata prodigious rate” (2009, 1). Hanlon, Barrientos, and Hulme (2010) have

characterized this shif as a “development revolution rom the global

South” and pointed to “a wave o new thinking” rooted in the conviction

that “it is better to give money to poor people directly so that they can

nd effective ways to escape rom poverty” (2010, 1). A recent literature

review done by the United Kingdom’s offi cial development aid agency

identied the spread o cash transers as a “quiet revolution” and noted

that such programs are now estimated to reach between 0.75 and 1 billion

people ( 2011, i).

Southern Arica, as I have noted, arrived at such programs via its own

route, and due to a unique history. But beyond southern Arica, social

protection schemes elsewhere on the continent were until recently ru-

dimentary or nonexistent. In act, only a ew years ago, social assistance

hardly seemed to be in the cards or a continent renowned or “weak

states” characterized by eeble scal capacity, bureaucratic dysunction,and widespread corruption. Yet in the wake o the much-touted success o

cash transer programs elsewhere (and especially the examples in nearby

southern Arica), today there is an explosion o new programs or trans-

erring cash to “the poor” across a number o Arican states (albeit at sig-

nicantly lower levels o benets than those seen in southern Arica). A

recent World Bank review identied no ewer than 123 cash transer pro-

grams in operation across the continent and provided detailed reviews

o programs in 28 countries (Garcia and Moore 2012; see also Ellis, De- vereux, and White 2009; World Bank 2009).

Most o the discussion about these programs has been in the public

policy eld—asking questions about whether or how well such programs

“work,” how they can be improved or scaled up, and so on. I have sug-

gested that the empirical evidence (at least or southern Arica) strongly

indicates that these programs do in act yield powerul improvements to

a range o measurable “development” goods (or reviews o similar evi-

dence worldwide, see Hanlon, Barrientos, and Hulme 2010; 2011).

There is a strong case, that is, that these programs have amounted to


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14

good public policy. But I wish to argue that there is even more at stake

here than pragmatic gains in ameliorating the worst orms o poverty.

Instead, I want to suggest that these new modalities o distribution are

associated with both new kinds o political claim-making and new pos-

sibilities or political mobilization, even as they are also bound up withnew ways o thinking and new rationalities o poverty. These new devel-

opments point both to the exhaustion o older orms o politics and to

vital possibilities or new ones. In this respect, both the new offi cial will-

ingness to “just give money to the poor” (Hanlon, Barrientos, and Hulme

2010) and the new kinds o distributive politics associated with it are o

deep interest and, rom the point o view o progressive politics, simul-

taneously exciting and deserving o critical scrutiny. My aim, then, is to

describe a certain sort o new thinking in the domains o social policy

and distributive politics while at the same time attempting to think both

about it, and along with it.

Perhaps the rst question that must be answered is whether, or all the

talk o a “development revolution,” the programs and perspectives I have

here pointed to are in act as novel as they pretend. There is, afer all,

nothing new about welare states giving money to the disadvantaged—

indeed, “the dole” is perhaps the most widely known and discussed othe many “social” programs associated with the classic welare states o

the global North. And the idea that it might be benecial, both or eco-

nomic growth and or the well-being o the underconsuming “poor,” to

put money into the hands o those most likely to spend it is not some

sort o new discovery but a standard element o the Keynesian common

sense that supported the creation and growth o the classical Northern

welare states o the twentieth century. Is the “revolution,” then, really

just a matter o the South catching up, belatedly achieving the sorts osocial assistance that were pioneered elsewhere more than a century ago?

The answer to this question is no. As a number o authors have pointed

out, the new regimes o social assistance in the South have a number o

distinctive eatures that distinguish them rom their older and better-

studied Northern cousins.

First o all, there is real novelty in the very idea that “less developed”

countries could even consider having extensive nationwide welare insti-

tutions. As detailed in chapter 2, the architects o the European welare

states assumed that such programs presupposed both a “developed” in-


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15

dustrial economy and something approaching ull employment, at least or

male “heads o household.” Where “welare” institutions were developed

in the colonial world (as in South Arica and a ew other places in Arica),

they were chiey or whites and a ew privileged others. In colonial settings

in which huge proportions o the population were both impoverishedand outside the wage economy, “inormal” social security such as “the

Arican extended amily” was the only solution that could be imagined.

Then, too, the conditions under which payments are received in the

new welare states o the South look quite different rom earlier Northern

models. In the North, the central conception was typically o a “saety net”

that could provide social support or a “breadwinner” (ofen presumed to

be a male “head o household”) and his “dependents” in conditions either

o the worker’s old age or death or those exceptional contingencies that

might interrupt wage labor (accident, disability, temporary economic

slumps). And the usual mechanism or ensuring such payments was a

kind o insurance system, based on payments made into a “system” by

those who might one day need to be caught by the “net.” But the south-

ern Arican schemes I have reviewed here are non-contributory, meaning

that they are paid out o general treasury unds and make no reerence

to prior “contributions” by beneciaries.

Such payments are made withno reerence to employment histories and are allocated instead based on

such labor-independent criteria as absolute age (or pensions) or num-

ber o children being cared or (or child care grants). What is more, the

large share o the population that has come to rely on such grants strains

any notion o a “saety net” as an extraordinary measure or dealing with

abnormal contingencies. In South Arica today, or instance, 44 percent

o all households receive one or another sort o grant (Statistics South

Arica 2013, 19–20), meaning that, across many o the country’s regionsand neighborhoods, being at least partially supported by social transers

is more the norm than it is the exception. In the poorest communities, in

act, the ability to access an income ofen depends less on one’s ability to

work than on the ability to claim a condition that might give one access

to a monthly cash transer. Anxieties that poor women might decide to

have children simply or the income do not appear to be well ounded

(birth rates have in act gone down or stabilized since the child care grant

was introduced [Macleod and Tracey 2009, Neves et al. 2009]). And econ-

omists’ worries that disability grants may perversely incentivize such


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16

things as contracting tend to rest more on second-hand anecdotes

than on convincing data. But while such worries may be ill-ounded, they

are a response to a very real, and rather startling, new act, which is that

conditions associated (in the “saety net” model) with losing a steady in-

come (illness, old age, disability, needing to care or small children) arenow, or many, more likely to appear as the only plausible way o obtain-

ing one in the rst place.

Yet the incomes thus obtained are, by design, not comparable to the

sorts o incomes associated with ull-time wage labor. While the tradi-

tional “dole” in the North was meant to replace the normal paycheck or

an injured or temporarily unemployed worker, the much smaller cash

transers that are at the heart o the South’s new welare states are explic-

itly not intended to be a substitute or other economic activities but rather

a catalyst—enabling, supporters claim, both “inormal” livelihoods such

as small businesses and sometimes even access to wage employment it-

sel. A recent comprehensive literature review ound very little evidence

that cash transers produce any negative effects on labor market partici-

pation, and noted, on the contrary, that many studies have ound positive

effects, as cash transers cover costs associated with job seeking or create

new employment opportunities by creating new markets in poor and re-mote areas ( 2011; c. Neves et al. 2009). In this respect, cash pay-

ments are less about replacing income lost through inactivity than they

are about the rendering active o people who (due to poverty, poor health,

lack o transportation, and so on) have had their range o economic activ-

ity acutely restricted (c. Ferguson 2007).

Also important is the way that new cash transer programs (at least in

southern Arica) have broken with the ambition (long central to North-

ern welare states) to govern or police the structure o domestic lie. Since 1998, or instance, South Arica’s huge program o child support

grants has had no requirement that the recipients o the grants be in any

prescribed amilial relation, either conjugal or lial. The marital status

o the recipient is not considered, nor is the question o whether or not

they reside with a partner (o either gender). Indeed, the “primary care-

giver” who receives the grant is not required to be a parent, or even a

relative, o the supported child. Unlike traditional Northern systems that

became notorious or seeking to apply moralizing amilial norms via in-

trusive social workers, there is here no attempt to identiy “real parents,”


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17

to impose responsibilities on athers, or to impose “proper” behavior or

amily orms.

Most radically, some new thinking on social policy is beginning to

break rom the central conception o the classic welare states—the con-

ception that social payments are undamentally a way o dealing with theinterruption o a “normal” situation in which adult heads-o-households

(most o all men) earn wages that support their dependents. Until now,

social protection programs in the region have effectively ignored the act

o mass unemployment, supposing that “social” support is needed only

or “dependent” categories such as the elderly, those caring or children,

and the disabled. Working-age “able-bodied” men, in contrast, are all

counteractually presumed to be able to support themselves through

their labor. Directly challenging such conceptions, a campaign in South

Arica and Namibia has in recent years proposed a “basic income grant”

() that would provide a small monthly cash payment to each and every

individual citizen. The amount o the payment was initially set at R100

(N$100) per person (an amount that was, at the time o the initial pro-

posal, worth about US$16). (The proposal is discussed at greater length

in later chapters, especially chapter 6; see also 2002; Standing and

Samson 2003; Meth 2008; Haarmann et al. 2009.) In such a program,there would be no means testing o any kind, so all citizens would receive

the grant (though the better-off would have their $16 and then some re-

couped through the tax system). In this conception, receipt o a social

payment would make no reerence to gender, age, employment status, or

amily conguration, and even “able-bodied” working-age men would be

eligible. In this, the most innovative o the new social payment schemes

recently envisaged or implemented in the region, cash transers to citi-

zens are completely divorced rom calculations about wage labor andamily structure alike.

As discussed in the next chapter, powerul criticisms can be leveled

against most currently existing cash transer programs precisely on the

grounds that they do not go ar enough toward the radical rethinking o

the meaning o social payments that can be observed in the basic income

grant campaign. Indeed, I will argue at some length that social policy

across the region is in too many ways still trapped within the terms o the

old European “social” state, as i that old imagined world o breadwinners

and their dependents could be meaningully mapped onto social settings


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more ofen characterized by mass structural unemployment, “inormal”

livelihoods, and highly uid domestic groups. It is also noteworthy that

existing programs, based as they are on national citizenship, have yet

to nd satisactory solutions to the issues o migration and xenopho-

bia that bedevil all welare states, issues that reveal the conventionallynationalistic particularities that still lie beneath the surace o even the

most ostensibly universal programs (this set o issues is discussed in the

book’s concluding chapter). But i one looks closely, it is possible to see

that there is also some proound and sometimes very challenging new

thinking going on in and around these new programs. And in the end, it

is that new thinking, and not simply the presence o this or that concrete

policy, that makes southern Arica such an interesting site or thinking

about distribution today. Perhaps because o the region’s dramatic po-

litical history as well as the extremity o its current inequalities, one is

constantly struck by both the starkness, and sometimes the boldness,

with which key issues are posed. With inequalities both extreme and (in

large measure) color-coded, they are both especially visible and openly

contested. And while many regions o the world have had to deal with the

consequences o the decline o certain orms o low- wage labor, here the

change has been so abrupt and wrenching as to open up space or thoughtsthat might elsewhere be unthinkable, or only urtively and hesitantly pon-

dered in the saety o private musings or low-level policy conclaves. Here,

the unthinkable is in act being thought, quite publicly, and ofen with a

very high level o intellectual rigor and critical sel-consciousness. Thus,

one might open up a leading South Arican business daily and read the

ollowing remarkable argument (by the well-known political and cultural

analyst Jonny Steinberg):

“I we create enough jobs to keep the youth off the streets, we will be

saved. I we cannot, South Arica will implode.” I put the statement in

quotation marks because it has become a gospel truth. Question it and

you risk being declared insane.

And yet it is wrong. I we are honest with ourselves, we have long

ago given up trying to employ everyone, or even to halve unemploy-

ment. . . . South Arica started bleeding jobs in the mid-1970s, along

with much o the rest o the world. We have been bleeding jobs ever

since. . . . It hasn’t mattered who has been in power or whether our


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political system has been a racial dictatorship or a democracy, or

whether our labour law has been rigid or exible— we cannot employ

everybody. We can’t even come close. To think that we can is to indulge

in millenarian thinking, as i Jesus will come and remake the world, as

i there is a thing called magic.

Deep down, we know this. For while we talk about creating jobs, we

have been doing something else— we have been handing out grants.

Some say that it is a stopgap measure, just to tide us over until jobs are

ound. Others say that it is creating a culture o idleness rom which

there will be no return.

But i we are honest, it is what we do now and what we will keep doing

orever. It is a substitute or work and it holds the country together; it

has saved many millions rom starvation and misery.

I we accept that welare is permanent, we must go the whole hog; we

must start giving grants to the one category o poor people entirely

excluded rom them— young men.

A whole series o taboos that govern thought and discourse around em-

ployment all across the world are here summarily discarded as so muchsuperstition. While leaders in every nation promise jobs or all, Steinberg

simply states it as a act that, or a huge swath o the population, wage

labor–based livelihoods are simply not going to return, and new orms o

distribution are a permanent and necessary eature o the new world. Won’t

the expansion o grants create “dependency” and undermine the will to

work? According to Steinberg, “that is dead thinking that made sense long

ago, in a time when jobs were plentiul. There isn’t suffi cient demand to

employ this country’s young men. We will either give them grants or they will get nothing. They are our ellow citizens, afer all. To put some money

in their pockets to spend as they wish is to coner upon them some dignity”

and to bring “lie, not idleness” to the lives o the poor. Indeed, he sug-

gested in a companion column a ew weeks later that in a context in which

millions have inherited structural unemployment rom their parents,

where the promise o decent jobs is “not even a living memory,” arguing

that welare will make people lazy “borders on madness.”

I will return to Steinberg’s provocative arguments in the book’s con-

clusion. For the time being, I offer this short excerpt only as an example


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o the openings that are today allowing bold thinking and heterodox

ideas to emerge and to be articulated even in quite mainstream venues. It

is this, the crisis-born opening up o possibilities or new thinking (over

and above any specic program or policy), that makes the story o south-

ern Arica’s new welare states such an interesting one. And we do not yetknow how it ends.

Toward a Distributive Politics

Beyond the specics o the new programs o social assistance, this book is

also about a broader set o questions that they have provoked—questions

about the general pro cesses o distribution as they unold in contempo-

rary societies, and about the sorts o binding claims and counterclaims

that can be made about these processes. It is this that I reer to as the

politics o distribution, and this volume has the ambition o linking the

recent rise o new sorts o welare states in the global South to the possi-

bilities and dangers o emergent orms o distributive politics that are un-

olding in contexts where ever more “working-age” people are supported

by means other than wage labor.

It is useul to start by considering the issue o distribution in its mostgeneral orm. How are the goods we produce distributed? Which o them

may I have access to? Differently organized societies, economic anthro-

pologists have long pointed out, have provided a wide range o different

institutional answers to that question, ranging rom the obligatory rules

or meat-sharing among hunter-gatherers to such amously elaborate cer-

emonial gifing institutions as the kula ring and the potlatch (Mauss [1924]

2000). But in modern capitalist societies, a standard account would point

out that while I may access certain goods directly by producing them my-sel or receive others as gifs, the normal way that people access most o

the goods and ser vices they consume is via “the market.” Which, then,

o the vast quantity o goods produced each year, are distributed to me?

In the simplest terms, I may have those goods which I can buy. And how

is it that I have a certain quantity o unds to buy goods? The usual answer

to this question is that I work or it. I exchange my labor (or its products)

or money, and then can use the money to buy the quantity o goods

that “the market” allows. Whether one reads neoclassical economists

or their Marxist critics, it would be easy to arrive at the conclusion that


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distribution in capitalist societies is organized by “the market,” that the

exchange o labor is the source o most people’s purchasing power, and

that purchasing power in the market is both the undamental mechanism

o distribution and the underlying source o consumption.

Even some o the most articulate and insightul recent critics o thehegemony o work seem to accept the basic premise that, as Kathi Weeks

(2011, 6–7) puts it, “Waged work . . . is, of course, the way most people ac-

quire access to the necessities o ood, clothing, and shelter” (emphasis

added). But plainly that is simply not the case in much o Arica, where

only small minorities participate in waged work and where a range o

other activities and mechanism allow “most people” to obtain their live-

lihoods. And lest we write this off too quickly as a symptom o Arica’s

“underdeveloped” condition, let us linger or a moment on the suppos-

edly “advanced capitalist” United States, generally taken as a country in

which the wage labor orm is especially dominant. Here, too, I want to

suggest, paid labor may be less central to processes o distribution than

is ofen imagined. Indeed, in the United States, as in the rest o the world,

the question o how people actually gain access to the things they need

turns out to be ar more complicated than simply exchanging their labor.

We are used to tracking a very narrowly dened offi cial “unemploy-ment rate” (the percentage o the workorce that is, at any moment, ac-

tively seeking but ailing to nd employment). The act that this rate is

generally in the single digits (currently around 7 percent) might lead one

to believe that the rest o the population (the ninety-odd percent who

are not “unemployed”) is in act employed. But in act, offi cial labor orce

statistics or 2012 show that only 58.6 percent of the adult population of the

United States is actually in employment . In a total national population o 314

million, just 142 million were (as o 2012) employed. O the rest, only12 million were offi cially “unemployed,” while nearly 90 million adults

were reported as neither employed nor unemployed but simply “not in the

labor orce” (i.e., “those who have no job and are not looking or one”).

These adults o course include traditional “dependent” categories such as

retirees and stay-at-home mothers, but it includes many others, too. In-

deed, a recent article by New York Times columnist David Leonhardt noted

with alarm that even at the core o the classic “breadwinner” group (men

aged 25 to 54), nearly one out o ve were neither employed nor seeking

employment but “managing to get by some other way.”


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Such observations have led conservative ideologues to characterize the

distributive economy o the contemporary United States in terms o a huge

underclass o “takers” living on the productive virtue o their economic

betters. Leonhardt’s concern was directed specically at the expanding rolls

o the ederal disability program, but he might just as well have pointed tothe huge numbers o working-age adults living in households that receive

nutritional support rom the ederal program (some orty-eight mil-

lion Americans, or 15 percent o the population, currently receive so-called

ood stamps) or, indeed, the astonishing number o working-age men

incarcerated as prisoners (at any given time, one out o every orty-eight

working-age men is in prison [Schmitt, Warner, and Gupta 2010, 1]).

But the importance o receiving a livelihood via direct distribution

rather than as a market exchange or labor is not only something one

nds in the lower reaches o the socioeconomic order. As Kimberly

Morgan has recently pointed out, nearly all Americans are recipients o

benets rom one or another government program (96 percent, accord-

ing to her sources) and the receipt o such benets in act ows dispro-

portionately to those in the middle and at the top o the income ladder

(Morgan 2013). And let us remember that, or all the popular antasies

about welare cheats and loaers on unemployment benets, i one really wants to nd idle non- workers nonetheless receiving generous cash in-

comes, the better-off end o the spectrum is surely the place to start. It is

diffi cult to calculate the percentage who live on invested capital, but there

is no doubt it numbers many millions—the super-rich, o course, but also

many upper-middle-class people retired on private pension plans (in-

cluding many who retire early in lie), and young adults supported partly

or wholly by trust unds. And, o course, there are uncounted young

people who have reached adulthood but are still supported by parents orother kin as well as the millions o students (university, graduate, and

proessional) who are supported by some combination o parental lar-

gesse and institutional grants and scholarships. In act, while a certain

common sense tells us that “everybody” has to work or a living, the plain

act is that massive numbers o Americans (indeed, most o them, i one

includes children) do not (at least not the sort o “work” that is counted

by the U.S. Labor Bureau). Instead, they are supported not by exchanging

their labor or its market value but by being granted distributive alloca-

tions rom other individuals, institutions, or both.


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This is, o course, even more true in southern Arica, where massive

unemployment is the norm and a myriad o distributive practices (rom

“inormal” remittances and kinship-based sharing to state programs o

grants and pensions) have long urnished livelihoods to a huge chunk o

the populations (see chapter 3). Yet the distributive mechanisms through which so many Americans and Aricans alike make their way in the world

are widely disparaged. As discussed at some length in chapter 1, a kind o

productivist common sense has too ofen rendered distribution subsid-

iary, invisible, or even contemptible.

This neglect and denigration o distributive modes o livelihood has

continued, even as such livelihoods have become increasingly important

across much o the world. As Mike Davis (2006) has pointed out, vast

masses o poor people across the global South have lef rural livelihoods

or city living in recent decades. Yet instead o being swept up in an in-

dustrial revolution that would turn them into proletarians (as both mod-

ernization theory and Marxism might have predicted), they have more

ofen been recruited into inormal slums where they eke out a living via

a complex range o livelihood strategies to which agriculture and ormal-

sector wage labor alike are ofen marginal (see chapter 3). The exclusion

rom wage labor o those exiting small-scale agriculture (whether theycome to the city or remain in the countryside) is certainly not happening

everywhere (as witnessed by the massive recruitment o rural peasants

as industrial workers in some regions o very rapid economic growth,

notably in China), and one should beware o the temptation to extrapo-

late current tendencies toward some inevitable global uture o universal

mass redundancy. But it is unmistakably the case that (or the present

and or the oreseeable near uture, and across much o the world) people

lacking access both to land and to waged employment orm an increas-ingly prominent part o our social and political reality. Equally important,

those occupying such precarious and ill-dened social locations are both

pioneering new modes o livelihood and making new kinds o political

demands. It is in this context that distributive practices and distributive

politics are acquiring a new centrality.

Distributive issues in the southern Arican region are probably most

readily identiable in the tense debates around land reorm and the na-

tionalization o mineral resources. Yet such explosive issues have some-

times taken the spotlight away rom another distributive discussion—the


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discussion about the social payments that have come to orm such an

important part o the economic and social structure in the region. It has

ofen been observed that the relative decline o wage labor as a basis o

livelihood has produced a kind o crisis o masculinity, in which young

men whose social power long rested on their ability to earn wages haveound their position undercut and rendered more precarious. But at the

same time, it is clear that new powers and possibilities have ofen opened

up or those occupying other social positions (notably women and pen-

sioners) who previously had ar less social and economic power. This is

partly due to the relative expansion o work in ser vice industries that are

more open to women than the old “blue- collar” industrial jobs o the

past. But a rich literature also makes it clear that such transormations

are also, at least in substantial part, a product o the expanded availability

o social grants.

Indeed, in a context o scarce and diminishing employment oppor-

tunities, distributive outcomes or those at the bottom o the economic

heap are increasingly determined within the domain o social policy.

Social protection has thus emerged as a key arena within which unda-

mental questions are addressed concerning how resources should be

distributed, who is entitled to receive them, and why. The possibility to which this book is devoted is that the new regimes o social payments

may be not just ameliorative, but that they may also open new possibili-

ties or moving more undamental issues o distribution to the center o

our analytics and our politics.

The essays that compose this book thereore seek to document an

emergent politics, and to offer a critical assessment o its dangers and pos-

sibilities. Chapter 1 reviews the ubiquity o anti-distributionist sentiment

in the domains both o scholarship and o practical policymaking and ex-plores the masculinist and misogynistic bases o such hostility toward dis-

tribution. It then notes certain reasons to believe that this state o affairs

may be changing, introducing some o the book’s key assertions about

the growing role o distributive politics and the importance o distributive

claims grounded in ideas not o need or charity but o a “rightul share.”

Chapter 2 provides historical contextualization or this story. It shows that

earlier, mid-twentieth-century versions o “the social” never had much

purchase in most o Arica, allowing or a common but mistaken view that

“welare states” simply bypassed the continent. But the welare state had


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its own distinctive history in Arica, especially in the settler-colonial soci-

eties o southern Arica, and it is only out o that peculiar and highly racial-

ized history that a new kind o social protection has emerged.

Chapter 3 reviews the way that new state programs o distribution

intersect with long-established vernacular processes and practices o dis-tribution. There is a vast and rich regional literature on the multiple

livelihood practices that are utilized by low-income people across the region

and on the social relationships that sustain and enable such practices. This

chapter attempts to distill the key insights o this literature and to draw

some lessons rom it about how to understand the place o what I term

“distributive labor” in the regional po litical economy. The act that dis-

tribution and production are here (like the social and the economic) so

intimately entangled requires us to bring together domains that are ofen

kept separate. Chapter 4 ollows up on this point by tracing the concep-

tual dualism that continues to plague thinking about market and society

and the perni

give a man a fish by james ferguson

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