Give A Man A Fish by James Ferguson

give a
man
a fish
Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution

JAMES FERGUSON
GIVE A MAN
A FISH
Reﬂections on the New Politics of Distribution

JAMES FERGUSON Foreword by Thomas Gibson
© 2015 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞
Designed by Natalie F. Smith
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ferguson, James, 1959–
Give a man a fish : reflections on the new politics of distribution / James Ferguson.
pages cm—(The Lewis Henry Morgan lectures)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-8223-5895-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-8223-5886-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-8223-7552-4 (e-book)
1. Economic assistance, Domestic—Africa. 2. Public welfare—Africa.
3. Africa—Economic policy. 4. Africa—Social policy. 5. Neoliberalism—
Africa. 6. Capitalism. 7. Poverty—Africa. i. Title. ii. Series:
Lewis Henry Morgan lectures.
hc800.z9p63 2015
361.96—dc23
2014037998
Cover photo: © Oliver Asselin / Alamy. A man counts money he has

just received from a social cash transfer program in the village of
Julijuah, Bomi County, Liberia, 2012.
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 Lives
of 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
Foreword
The Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures were originally conceived in 1961 by

Bernard Cohn, who was then chair of the Department of Anthropology
and Sociology at the University of Rochester. A founder of modern cul-
tural anthropology, Morgan was one of Rochester’s most famous intellec-
tual figures and a patron of the university; he left a substantial bequest to
the university for the founding of a women’s college. The lectures named
in his honor have now been presented annually for over fift y years and
constitute the longest-running such series in North America.
The first three sets of lectures commemorated Morgan’s contribu-
tions to the study of 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 and
Thursday evenings over a period of two to three weeks and published as
book-length monographs. A public lecture is now delivered on a single
evening, followed by a day-long workshop in which a draft of the planned
monograph is discussed by members of the Department of Anthropol-
ogy and by commentators invited from other institutions. But the public
lecture and the monograph are still intended to present an example of
current anthropological thinking to a general audience.
The present volume is based on the Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture
that Professor James Ferguson delivered at the University of Rochester
in October 2009. The formal discussants who participated in the work-
shop that followed 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 of Morgan’s key in-
terests, including the development and transformation of communal
and individual forms of property, the role that kinship and the state play
alongside the market in the distribution of economic resources, and the
way that non-capitalist societies around the world can serve as “concrete
forms of political inspiration” for the future.
Ferguson’s primary concern is with new forms of distribution that are
emerging across the global South in nations like South Africa, Namibia,
Mexico, Brazil, and India. In view of the fact that the current phase of
global capitalism has rendered a growing proportion of 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 of the social product.
Ferguson notes that many figures 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 of society should be regarded
as shareholders in a collective enterprise, and that everyone thus has a
right to a share of the total social product. Others, such as Marcel Mauss
and Julius Nyerere, developed different arguments about the just distri-
bution of the collective social product without basing it on the labor of
individuals.
One of the most radical proposals circulating in South Africa and Na-
mibia today is that every member of society should receive a basic income
grant without reference to their age, gender, employment, or family con-
figuration. Ferguson notes that such a grant would help undermine the
value system associated with industrial capitalism in which it is socially
demeaning for adult men to be dependent on anyone but themselves
while it is socially acceptable for women, children, and the aged to be
dependent on male kinsmen or on state benefits. This value system per-
petuates both gender inequality and the criminalization of the long-term
unemployed. By contrast, in the kinship-based societies and subcultures
traditionally studied by anthropologists, the cultivation of economic and
moral interdependence within a network of effective kin is one of the
viii foreword
main goals of social life. Proposals like the basic income grant seek to
scale this sort of morality up to the level of the nation-state and beyond.
Just as previous studies by anthropologists of actually existing forms
rather than of ideal models of capitalism and socialism provoked politi-
cal economists to think about the role of markets and planning in a new
way, Ferguson’s study of the actually existing forms of 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-familiar critiques of neoliberal capitalism and open up a new debate
about what a better future might look like for us all. In doing so, it re-
mains true to the radical spirit of anthropology that Lewis Henry Morgan
himself practiced.
Thomas Gibson
Editor, Lewis Henry Morgan Monograph Series
foreword ix
Preface and Acknowledgments
In the course of doing critical studies of “development” over a period of

many years starting in the early 1980s, I was often asked by would-be “de-
velopers” some version of the question “Well, then, what should we do?” I
felt this was in important ways the wrong question (see epilogue to Fergu-
son 1990). But seeing the way money was being poured into project after
project with little positive effect on the lives of the supposed beneficiaries,
I was sometimes tempted to answer the question by suggesting that better
results could be obtained if the project funds, instead of being spent on
Land Cruisers and foreign consultants, were simply handed over directly to
the “target population.” Over the years, several other anthropologists have
confessed to me having had the same impulse. I remember one who even
proposed, half-seriously, that the money spent on development projects be
simply scattered out of helicopters, so that local people could harvest it.
The fact that such thoughts could only take the form of suppressed
impulses or cynical humor reflects the power of a long-standing anxiety
about simply “giving” money directly to poor people. From the time of its
birth, a key imperative for capitalism has been to drive people into labor,
and any plans to directly distribute resources to those who lack them have
been met by powerful worries about undermining what is politely called
“the incentive to work.” Such considerations have long made it self-
evident that development projects should prepare people for such work,
not provide them with sources of livelihood independent of it. Handing
out cash was simply not in the cards, and proposing such a thing could
only be understood as some sort of joke.
It is no longer a joke. I began to notice this as I watched the steady
expansion in recent years of a system of paying cash grants to the poor
in South Africa. As I puzzled over the apparent paradox of a “neoliberal”
regime sending monthly checks to a steadily expanding roster of citizens
that now exceeds 30 percent of the population, I gradually realized that
the new willingness to “just give money to the poor” (as the title of a re-
cent book has it [Hanlon, Barrientos, and Hulme 2010]) was not a South
African peculiarity but an emerging reality across much of the world. As
this book details, recent years have seen the spread of major programs of
direct distribution of cash to the poor (so-called cash transfers) all across
the global South, often with the support of 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 find that they have no access to wage labor—
the form of livelihood that has long been understood both as a historical
telos of economic development and as an anchor of progressive politics.
How are we to understand this new situation? And what is the sig-
nificance of the global trend toward cash transfers to the poor, in south-
ern Africa and beyond? This book is, in the first instance, an attempt to
answer these questions, and to propose at least some preliminary ideas
about how we might think about the emergence of what I call a new poli-
tics of distribution. The argument that unfolds in the following 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
reflection upon certain practical puzzles and impasses of the present po-
litical moment reveals that some of the foundational assumptions that
have guided critical social theory for generations are in significant ways
out of step with our new realities. Moving the question of distribution
from the periphery of our theoretical concerns to the center, I will argue,
both opens up new political possibilities and sheds new light on a host
of analytical issues ranging from labor and livelihoods to markets and
money to dependence and personhood.
I approach these questions through a long engagement with a spe-
cific regional history. While the empirical cases that will be most fully
xii preface and ac know ledg ments

explored here are those of South Africa and Namibia, the account I seek
to provide of distributive processes extends to much of the wider south-
ern African region and has involved pursuing lines of investigation I have
worked on for years while revisiting (and in some cases reinterpreting)
some of my own earlier ethnographic research in Lesotho and Zambia.
But far more important than my own work here has been the work of
countless others. The book is, in no small measure, an attempt to review
and synthesize that work in hopes of bringing the insights of an excep-
tionally important and high-quality regional literature into a wider circle
of discussion. Studies of the southern African region (especially the de-
tailed and richly empirical accounts that feature in the best of its ethno-
graphic research) are, I suggest, of broader significance and import than
has sometimes been recognized. And if, as I will argue, our ability to con-
ceive of real political alternatives in these neoliberal times has suffered
from a certain poverty of the political imagination, this rich ethnographic
archive may contain resources that might be of some use as we seek to
find new ways both of understanding the present and of envisioning pos-
sible futures.
Beyond my intellectual debt to this outstanding body of literature, I
also have personal debts to many of 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 for decades now, and many have been di-
rectly supportive of me and my work. Especially helpful 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 of Social
Anthropology at the University of Cape Town and the Department of So-
ciology and Social Anthropology at the University of Stellenbosch, and
I am grateful for my wonderful colleagues at both institutions.
In the course of this project, I also came to realize how much can be
learned from the people I came to think of as “policy intellectuals”—
sophisticated thinkers engaged with pragmatic issues of social policy in
settings as various as ngos, think tanks, universities, government de-
partments, trade unions, and political parties. I have interviewed many of
these people, formally and informally, over the last decade. For the most
preface and ac know ledg ments xiii

part, they are not named in the text, either because they were promised
anonymity or simply to avoid causing them embarrassment. But I am
grateful to all of them. In South Africa, I am especially grateful to the busy
officials at the Department of Social Development who so generously
took the time to share their perspectives with me, while in Namibia I have
special debts to Dirk and Claudia Haarmann and Uhuru Dempers of the
Basic Income Grant Campaign for their kind assistance and generosity.
The heart of this book was originally presented as the Lewis Henry
Morgan Lectures at the University of Rochester in October of 2009. I am
grateful to the Department of Anthropology at Rochester, and especially
to Tom Gibson and Bob Foster for 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 for the lectures—Douglas Holmes, Dun-
bar Moodie, Mary Moran, Marina Welker, and John Western—who pro-
vided a host of valuable suggestions and questions. In developing this
volume for publication, I have tried to keep the feel of a series of lectures.
As its subtitle suggests, the book is intended less as an authoritative re-
port on research than as a series of “reflections,” whose goal is less to
explain the new distributive programs I describe than to reflect on their
meaning and significance. The chapters are envisaged as an ordered se-
quence of independent essays. While they are meant to fit together into
an integrated whole when read in sequence, my intention is that each
chapter can also be intelligible if read separately. My hope is that the
reader will forgive a certain amount of redundancy that must inevitably
accompany this strategy.
Support for this project was provided by the Stanford Humanities Cen-
ter, where I held the Ellen Andrew Wright Fellowship in 2010–11, as well
as by the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, where I was a fel-
low in the spring of 2011. I am grateful for the intellectual stimulation of
the colleagues with whom I shared fellowship time at both institutions,
and especially to members of the research group with which I worked
at Stellenbosch: Ben Cousins, Henry Bernstein, Bridget O’Laughlin, and
Pauline Peters. I am also grateful to the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam,
where I had the opportunity to serve as international fellow from 2008
to 2010. Of those colleagues who generously hosted me while helping
me to refine my ideas, I would especially like to thank Freek Colombijn,
Marjo de Theije, Birgit Meyer, and Oscar Salemink. I also benefited from
xiv preface and ac know ledg ments

being part of the seminar “Markets and Moralities” at the School for Ad-
vanced Research, Santa Fe, New Mexico, which was held in May 2009.
I am grateful to all of the seminar participants, who pushed my thinking
forward in important ways, and especially to the seminar organizers, Ted
Fischer and Peter Benson. A version of chapter 4 appeared in the volume
that emerged from this seminar, Cash on the Table: Markets, Values, and Moral
Economies, edited by Edward Fischer (Santa Fe: School of Advanced Re-
search Press). A version of 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 of chapter 5 appeared in the Journal of the
Royal Anthropological Institute 19 (2): 223–42.
Tania Li has been a wonderful source of ideas and questions for many
years now, and I have greatly benefited from her comparative thoughts
about distribution and what she once called “worlds without work.” Liisa
Malkki, as always, has been a font of insightful questions, inspired sugges-
tions, and new ideas. I have received very valuable comments from many
other readers of sections of the book, including Keith Breckenridge, Jean
and John Comaroff, Harri Englund, and Hylton White. I also benefited
from 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 benefit from being in the intellectual company of a stel-
lar group of scholars in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford. I am
grateful to them for providing such a supportive and intellectually engag-
ing home base from which to work, and especially to Thomas Blom Han-
sen and Lynn Meskell for their stimulating reflections on the South African
scene. In the wider Bay Area, a group of colleagues was kind enough to
read the entire manuscript at a late stage: Don Donham, Gill Hart, Donald
Moore, Lisa Rofel, Anna Tsing, and Sylvia Yanagisako. I am deeply grate-
ful for their insights and encouragement. As always, Ken Wissoker has
been the best of editors, whose good judgment and unflagging 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 of prior enactments of ma-
terial distribution and social and emotional care. I therefore dedicate it
to all those who have supported and nurtured me through the different
stages of my life, and especially to my parents, Jane and Jim Ferguson.
preface and ac know ledg ments xv

Introduction.
Cash Transfers and
the New Welfare States
From 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 of the global
spread of “free-market” capitalism (decreeing the end of history, or tell-
ing us the world is flat) against critical accounts of that same ascendancy
that tell a formally similar story but with the moral polarity inverted.1 But
both sides of this great debate seem to agree on the story’s fundamental
plotline: unfettered, “free-market” capitalism is regnant, and “neolib-
eral,” market-based systems of economy and governance are everywhere
on the march, while the welfare state is embattled, in retreat, or barely
hanging on. In this context, it has been profoundly surprising to see that
recent years, in a host of different sites across the global South, have in
fact yielded something quite different: the creation and expansion of ex-
tensive social welfare programs targeting the poor anchored in schemes
that directly transfer small amounts of cash to large numbers of low-
income people.
The ideological narratives of 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 for social protection” and that “the poor” therefore must, in
these market-friendly and state-slashing times, receive less attention (not
more) from national states. But they also made it easy to suppose that
whatever interventions or innovations were occurring in the world of de-
velopment and poverty policy must be those that fit the narratives, lead-
ing to a burst of scholarly attention to such paradigmatically “neoliberal”
things as microcredit and microfinance schemes. But now that the smoke
has cleared, it is plain to see that the really big “development” story of
the last twenty years is, in fact, not microcredit but (as a recent policy re-
view put it) “the rise and rise of social protection” (Roelen and Devereux
2013, 1).2 And the central mechanism of the new anti-poverty programs
is not credit, securitization, or any other sort of neoliberal predation but
the startlingly simple device of handing out small amounts of money to
people deemed to need it. As the title of one volume of full-throated ad-
vocacy for such cash transfers recently put it, Just Give Money to the Poor.3
Whatever one may think of this outcome, it is decidedly not where
dominant narratives of marketization and neoliberalism expected us to
end up. And it is a turn of events that implies some quite different sorts
of political possibilities and dangers than those suggested by the usual
neoliberalism story. This book, then, is a sustained reflection on these
new worldwide developments and their political and social significance,
with southern Africa (a region I have studied for more than three de-
cades) as its key point of focus.4 The book’s goal is less to explain these
developments than to reflect on what they might mean and how they may
be transforming the field of 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 influential scholarly stories about neo-

liberalism and concrete developments at the level of social policy is es-
pecially pronounced in southern Africa. Here, narratives about neolib-
eralism have been central to most critical understandings of the massive
political and economic changes of the last few 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
Africa here has led the way, with an extensive national system of social
payments anchored by old age pensions, child care grants, and disability
payments. But others in the region have followed suit, and there are now
2 introduction
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.5
Southern Africa (and especially South Africa) has sometimes been seen
not only as an instance of neoliberalism but even as a paradigmatic case
of it (see, e.g., Klein 2008). And if neoliberalism is, as some accounts have
(rather Eurocentrically) tended to suggest, first and foremost a worldwide
project centered on the erosion, rollback, or downsizing of 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 Africa must be headed: toward the heartless world of
neoliberal capitalism, in which the welfare state withers while the poor
are ever more exposed to the depredations of “the market.” With the is-
sues framed in this way, even the most astute of the region’s many critical
observers have sometimes paid less attention than they should have to a
remarkable set of events in the region, events that have in fact led to sus-
tained expansions (rather than reductions) in programs of social assistance
and indeed to the emergence of what could reasonably be described as a new
kind of welfare state. And while many influential accounts of neoliberal-
ism have seen only ever-growing social exclusion, we here must also take
stock of a new kind of inclusion as millions of poor citizens previously
ignored or worse by the state have become direct beneficiaries of cash
payments.6
The most influential critical accounts of neoliberalism in southern
Africa center on the region’s economic core, South Africa, so it is impor-
tant briefly to review how such accounts understand South Africa’s post-
apartheid transition and the economic changes that came in its wake. As
the story is generally told, the African National Congress (anc) party
that took the reins of government after the 1994 transition, having aban-
doned its old commitments to socialist economic transformation, opted
for what Patrick Bond (2005, 6) has termed a “homegrown” structural ad-
justment program, yielding without much of a fight to the World Bank/
imf orthodoxy of the time that called for the opening up of markets (via
deregulation and privatization), in the hopes of making the new South
Africa an attractive destination for international capital investment. Fol-
lowing a brief and transitional commitment to a “Reconstruction and
cash transfers and the new welfare states 3

Development Plan” (rdp) that articulated a broad if vague social demo-
cratic commitment to a “mixed economy,” 1996 saw an official shift to
a new, more “neoliberal” approach, the “Growth with Employment and
Redistribution” (gear) program. At the heart of the plan was the claim
that a business-friendly, “growth-led” strategy would generate sufficient
economic growth to secure substantial employment growth and in the
end to lift all boats.7 But moves to “open up” the economy to “the market”
yielded only limited economic growth, disappointingly failing to come
close to the optimistic early projections. Even more dramatic was the fail-
ure to generate much employment. Not only was there no burst of new
employment; old standbys like agriculture and mining actually shed huge
numbers of jobs—just the sorts of jobs that had formerly 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 of
a shift that had begun already in the 1970s, from a labor-shortage econ-
omy to one of massive labor surplus (Seekings and Nattrass 2005; Marais
2011). With persistent mass unemployment (official figures stuck near 25
percent and broader measures generally much higher8), many of those at
the bottom of the economic heap seemed to have little to show for their
supposed liberation. New wealth was certainly being generated, some of
it now conspicuously accumulated by black South Africans (often well-
connected anc elites), but inequality rose to levels exceeding even those
seen under apartheid. This led to a society whose superficial prosperity
disguised formidable underlying ills, including inequality, mass unem-
ployment, and lack of full social inclusion.
This critique, in its broad strokes, gets a lot right. Both its account of
economic liberalization and its diagnosis of the social ills that followed
in its wake are broadly correct. But there are two gaps in such accounts
that make them of only limited value in understanding the region’s new
welfare states.9 First, the critiques are inevitably most articulate about
what they are against (“neoliberalism”) and have often struggled to lay out
convincing and realistic alternatives and strategies. Too often, in fact,
critical accounts of neoliberalism have settled into a politics of denuncia-
tion (what I have elsewhere [Ferguson 2010] analyzed as “the politics of
the anti-”) in which political identities are constituted or consolidated
less by concrete programs of government or political mobilization than
by a declaration of opposition to a malevolent and polymorphic “other”
4 introduction
named “neoliberalism.” The result is a strange state of affairs in which
nearly every intellectual and politician in South Africa today condemns
“neoliberalism” but no major political parties have emerged advocating
any very substantially different policy path (at least until very recently).10
The second problem is not unrelated. It is that the now-standard criti-
cal accounts of South Africa’s “neoliberalism” fail to attend to the very
substantial ways in which that country (pioneering a path for many of its
neighbors) has taken a turn that, in some respects at least, seems almost
the opposite of the standard neoliberal model: that is, by elaborating an
enormous system of non-contributory social benefits that today trans-
fers 3.4 percent of the nation’s gdp directly to “the poor” via non-market
cash payments that are now received by more than 30 percent of the entire
population (National Treasury 2013, 84–86).
It seems clear that this development was the product of a quite partic-
ular conjuncture. For it was at just the moment that the post-apartheid
anc regime came to power, with a mandate to transform the economic
conditions of 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 of labor markets for
low-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 failing to yield the rapid economic growth that had been supposed to
“lift all boats,” social protection became a key domain of policy innova-
tion. South Africa and several of its neighbors had long had quite well-
developed social welfare systems for whites, but provisioning for blacks
was rudimentary at best (see chapter 2). As part of the transition to the
new, post-apartheid regime, pension rates were equalized across racial
groups, and social assistance rapidly became of much greater economic
value for the majority populations. At the same time, a decision was made
to implement a substantial new nationwide cash benefit for those caring
for small children. Similar programs were soon taken up by neighboring
countries Namibia and (to a lesser extent) Botswana, and the range of ben-
eficiaries was rapidly expanded (in South Africa, the age limit for a child’s
eligibility was gradually raised from seven in 1998 to the current age limit
of eighteen).11 The rapid growth of such programs responded not only

to post-apartheid political expectations but also to another conjunctural
feature of the regional moment: the emergence in the 1990s of a massive
hiv epidemic that was creating huge numbers of orphans even as it left
many elderly caring for the ill.
The result of this complex conjuncture has been the emergence of a
very extensive set of state commitments to provide monthly cash pay-
ments to a wide range of beneficiaries. In South Africa, grants are paid to
more than sixteen million individuals (some 30 percent of the total popu-
lation), in the context of a doubling (in real terms) of overall social spend-
ing between 2002–3 and 2011–12 (National Treasury 2012, 78). Nearly
three million South Africans aged sixty and over receive old age pensions
(each with a 2013 value of r1260 [~US$125] per month), with another
eleven million receiving child support grants (now set at r300 [~US$30]
per child).12 These benefits are non-contributory (i.e., not based on any
payments previously made by recipients) and are paid directly from the
state treasury. They are nominally conditional on an income test, and in
principle school attendance is required for child support grants. But such
strictures have in practice been only loosely applied (if at all), meaning
that for the most part the grants do not have the strong “conditions” that
have often been attached to cash transfers in Latin America and other
regions (indeed, the Ministry of Social Development is currently plan-
ning to phase out even the means test for old age pensions). And it must
be noted that the benefits (while, of course, tiny when compared in ab-
solute terms with those of Northern welfare states) are, in the context of
the lives of low-income people in the region, quite substantial; indeed,
as one recent study has pointed out (Garcia and Moore 2012, 311), the
South African old age pension as of 2010 amounted to 1.75 times the me-
dian per capita income. The grants reach a huge swath of the population,
with some 44 percent of all households nationwide receiving at least one
grant, a figure that rises to nearly 60 percent in the predominantly poor
and rural provinces of Eastern Cape and Limpopo (Statistics South Africa
2013, 19–20).
Namibia has expanded its old age pension scheme along lines very
similar to those of the South African program. It has also introduced the
Child Maintenance Grant, modeled on the South African Child Support
Grant, as well as a number of other, smaller programs. Due to a less flexi-
ble implementation and poor administration, the child care grants are not
6 introduction
as widely distributed (yet) as in South Africa, but here too both expendi-
tures and the number of recipients have expanded rapidly in recent years.
As of 2008, some 12 percent of 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 age
pension system as well as a major program providing cash payments to
those caring for orphaned children—no small thing in a country where
some 15 percent of all children are reckoned to be orphans (Dahl 2009).
Social protection schemes are less developed in other southern African
countries, but the successes of the South African model have inspired
even the poorest states in the region to attempt to emulate it, albeit with
much lower levels of benefits. Swaziland, for instance, now has a univer-
sal old age pension, and even Lesotho (long widely regarded as lacking
the financial means to attempt any sort of social protection) introduced a
modest old age pension in 2004 and is now developing a program of child
care grants (Garcia and Moore 2012, 264).
It is now well documented that these programs, in their own terms,
“work.” For South Africa, where the programs have been studied most
intensively and for the longest time, a robust consensus now exists
that, as one recent evaluation study put it, “South Africa’s social grants
have been extremely successful at reducing poverty” (dsd, sassa, and
unicef 2012, 3; see also the authoritative overview of the evidence in
Neves et al. 2009). According to a recent national survey, the percentage
of households that reported experiencing hunger decreased from 29.3
percent to 12.6 percent between 2002 and 2012 (Statistics South Africa
2012, 4). A recent comprehensive evaluation of 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 from “risky behaviors” in the context of the high hiv prevalence. A
recent survey of living standards (based not on reported income but on
concrete lifestyle markers such as the presence of running water or flush
toilets and ownership of key goods and appliances) found that the pro-
portion of South African adults falling into the lowest of ten categories
for living standards had fallen from 11 percent of the population in 2001
to just 1 percent in 2011.13 Major declines were also found in the other low-
est categories, along with substantial rises in proportions occupying the

middle rungs of the scale. One of the researchers (Georgina Alexander of
the South African Institute of Race Relations) provided this explanation
of the results:
The improvement can be attributed in part to the increase in the num-

ber of people receiving social payments, such as old age pensions and
the child support grant. In particular, the number of recipients of the
child grant increased by 1200% between 2001 and 2010/11. In 2001
some 8% of South Africans were beneficiaries of grants. This propor-
tion increased to 29% in 2010/11 and accounted for 10% of government
expenditure.14
It is not only quantitative surveys that attest to the efficacy and impor-
tance of the expanded programs of cash transfer. Among the scores of ex-
perts and ethnographic researchers whom I have consulted in the course
of this project, many with very long and intimate familiarity with the so-
cial realities of 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 of destitution. When I asked
one such highly knowledgeable researcher what South Africa would be
like without the grants, he paused before 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 of the
programs have been broadly similar to those in South Africa. A recent
overview found that these schemes are making “a substantial and grow-
ing contribution to poverty reduction” and concluded that social cash
transfers have lowered the number of “poor” individuals by 10 percent
and the “very poor” by 22 percent (Levine, Van der Berg, and Yu 2009,
49, 50). The report also finds the programs to be broadly sustainable in
fiscal terms, projecting a gradual reduction in social grant expenditures
(as a percentage of gdp), since gdp growth is expected to outpace the
projected growth in number of recipients (Leving, Van der Berg, and Yu
2009, 42, 45).
Not surprisingly, these programs have been generally popular among
those receiving the cash payments.15 What is perhaps more surprising
is that a broad acceptance of these programs appears to extend across
nearly the whole range of society, with feelings about the legitimacy of
8 introduction
public assistance quite widely shared across both class and race divides.
Jeremy Seekings has shown that, when asked about both specific social
assistance programs and a range of scenarios in which a person in a
certain situation might or might not “deserve” government assistance,
South Africans of different races proved to have surprisingly similar views
(Seekings 2008c). At least in South Africa (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 of the mission of the state to issue monthly cash pay-
ments to a wide range of people deemed to be in need. Indeed, despite
their substantial size and cost, the programs of social grants that I have
described here are not a particularly contentious or embattled feature of
the political landscape in any of the countries I have reviewed here. To my
knowledge, in fact, no major political party has ever proposed eliminat-
ing them, or even reducing their amounts.
How did this come about? In South Africa, especially, it is very clear
that the original ambition of the post-apartheid regime was hardly to
create a welfare state catering to those excluded from the world of wage
labor. Its first political imperative, on the contrary, was to generate jobs
and to improve the condition of workers. The anc, of course, had its in-
tellectual roots on the political Left, and it has governed from the start as
part of a “tripartite alliance” linking it with the powerful trade union fed-
eration cosatu and the South African Communist Party. Partly for this
reason, a high value has long been placed on labor as the central mode of
social incorporation, and on “the workers” as the figuration of those to
whom the government must answer (see Barchiesi 2011). But in the con-
text of new economic realities, as the country went through a wrenching
economic restructuring that shed jobs as much as it created them, more
and more of the population looked to government as a direct provider
and provisioner. “Ser vice delivery” was the new slogan, and increasingly
black South Africans sought their “liberation” in the form of direct state
provision of such goods as housing, electricity, water, sanitation, and
social ser vices. “Ser vice delivery protests,” indeed, became a familiar
feature of everyday life in poor and working-class neighborhoods across
the country. In this context, a patchwork of older programs of social as-
sistance (inherited from the apartheid regime and newly deracialized)
provided the starting point for the development of a vast institutional ap-
paratus that would make it possible for the new state to provide highly

visible and very effective support, in the form of direct cash transfers, to
its electoral base—a way of “delivering” something tangible and valuable,
even in the absence of jobs.
This was a matter of practical politics and pragmatic policymaking.16
But along with the political and institutional innovations I have described
here, it is also possible to trace the emergence of new ways of thinking,
new ways of reasoning about matters of poverty and distribution. As Mi-
chel Foucault once remarked, the work of governing always involves at
least a certain amount of thinking (Foucault 1988, 152–56). I am inter-
ested, then, not only in the new programs of social assistance but also in
the new ways of thinking that are growing up alongside them, new “ra-
tionalities” of poverty and social assistance that, I suggest, may be under-
stood as both harbingers of, and intellectual resources for, an emergent
politics. This is what I term a “politics of distribution,” and it involves
new ways of thinking about a range of things that includes labor, unem-
ployment, the family, and the meaning of “social” payments. We will not
get far, I suggest, by either simply condemning these new ways of think-
ing or simply celebrating them. Instead, I wish to think both about them
and with them, hoping thereby to gain a better understanding of both the
political possibilities and the dangers of the present moment.
An older way of thinking (shared, at some fundamental level, by both
official apartheid planners and their most radical critics) saw the majority
black population first of all as a source of labor. Black populations con-
fined to rural “homelands” or “Bantustans” appeared principally as “labor
reserves,” providing a steady supply of low-wage migrant labor, most of
all to big employers such as the mines. While a permanently settled work-
force would have provoked both political demands and a need for higher
wages (high enough, at least, to cover the costs of the work force’s own
reproduction), state control of black movement and residence attempted
to solve both problems by forcing labor to remain “migrant.” As Marxist
critics pointed out, this was accomplished only by off-loading the costs
of social reproduction (including raising children and caring for the sick
and aged) onto already-impoverished rural communities, thus enabling
a kind of “super-exploitation” that afflicted not only workers themselves
but also their communities and regions of origin.17 For those who would
replace the nakedly exploitative and repressive system of apartheid with
something better, the starting place was therefore the idea that it was not
10 introduction
only those directly employed by capitalists who were exploited by capital-
ism. People from the poor rural peripheries of the southern African po-
litical economy, even if not directly employed, were not at all marginal to
the production system. On the contrary, thanks to the role they played in
the reproduction of labor, they were in fact central to the massive produc-
tion of wealth that was occurring at the industrial centers of this regional
system. This was an analytical claim (i.e., that even the region’s most pe-
ripheral people and locales were in fact vital for capitalism, “reproduc-
ing the labor force”) that contained embedded within it both a functional
imperative (“social reproduction” could only take place via the provision
of 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 of recent years force us to question the logic
that allowed an earlier generation of critics to link the productivity of
the industrial economy to the entire society in such a direct and com-
pelling way. In a labor-scarce political economy, even the most remote
rural reaches of the southern African region could plausibly be under-
stood as providing vitally needed labor reserves for a vast and encom-
passing system of production. Today, however, a restructured capitalism
has ever less need for the ready supply of 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 of so many
today cannot be regarded as “a strategy of global capital” but is instead,
in her terms, “a sign of their very limited relevance to capital at any scale”
(2010, 67). This point was made to me most dramatically in the comment
of a South African social researcher with long experience working with
poor rural communities. “I wish this weren’t true,” he said, “but the fact
is that there are at least ten million people out there who could drop dead
tomorrow and the jse [Johannesburg Stock Exchange] wouldn’t register
so much as a ripple.”18
Under such circumstances, it has become more and more difficult to
argue that the value produced at the region’s industrial centers is gener-
ated by the suffering of those at its periphery; instead, the suffering of the
poor and marginalized appears as functionally isolated from a production
system that simply no longer has any use for them. And if such people in-
creasingly receive social payments, this cannot plausibly be understood as

part of a vital and necessary functional logic of reproducing a workforce,
for there is simply no demand for the kind of labor such payments might
plausibly “reproduce.” On the contrary, insofar as today’s social protec-
tion programs do support a sort of social reproduction, it is the reproduc-
tion of precisely that class of people who have increasingly slim prospects
of ever entering the labor market at all.
At the same time, people whose labor is no longer wanted have acquired
other kinds of power—specifically, political rights within a democratic
regime whose political base is precisely the impoverished and histori-
cally excluded masses of “the poor.”19 And this regime has felt the need
to “deliver” a range of 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 of selective privatization and marketization has been combined
with a far-reaching expansion of programs of direct distribution that are
increasingly decoupled from issues of labor and labor supply.
A Worldwide Shift: The Cash Transfer Revolution and Its Meaning
These developments are not unique to southern Africa. It is true that

southern African programs, especially those providing old age pensions,
have their own, quite specific, historical roots (reviewed in chapter 2).
But as I suggested at the start, their recent rapid expansion is clearly part
of a much larger, worldwide trend.
In fact, the last two decades have seen the rise of new kinds of welfare
regimes all over the world. The programmatic element that has been at
the heart of this transformation has been “cash transfers,” most with at
least nominal “conditions” (typically school attendance for children and
clinic visits for improved health) attached to them (thus “conditional
cash transfers” or ccts). These programs, in their modern form, can be
traced to Latin American roots, in particular the Opportunidades pro-
gram in Mexico (Molyneux 2007a, 2007b; World Bank 2009), followed by
the Bolsa Familia program in Brazil, both focused principally on fami-
lies with children. The latter, in particular, has served as something of a
global model and inspiration, delivering benefits as it does to more than
eleven million families, with what has been claimed to be both a strong
anti-poverty impact and the familiar Keynesian benefit of enabling con-
12 introduction
sumption and thereby stimulating the economy (Soares et al. 2010; cf.
Lo Vuolo 2013). But what was once largely a Latin American phenom-
enon has gone global. A 2009 World Bank report traced the growth of
cash transfer programs across scores of countries worldwide, noting that
“countries have been adopting or considering adopting cct programs at
a prodigious rate” (2009, 1). Hanlon, Barrientos, and Hulme (2010) have
characterized this shift as a “development revolution from the global
South” and pointed to “a wave of new thinking” rooted in the conviction
that “it is better to give money to poor people directly so that they can
find effective ways to escape from poverty” (2010, 1). A recent literature
review done by the United Kingdom’s official development aid agency
identified the spread of cash transfers as a “quiet revolution” and noted
that such programs are now estimated to reach between 0.75 and 1 billion
people (dfid 2011, i).
Southern Africa, as I have noted, arrived at such programs via its own
route, and due to a unique history. But beyond southern Africa, social
protection schemes elsewhere on the continent were until recently ru-
dimentary or nonexistent. In fact, only a few years ago, social assistance
hardly seemed to be in the cards for a continent renowned for “weak
states” characterized by feeble fiscal capacity, bureaucratic dysfunction,
and widespread corruption. Yet in the wake of the much-touted success of
cash transfer programs elsewhere (and especially the examples in nearby
southern Africa), today there is an explosion of new programs for trans-
ferring cash to “the poor” across a number of African states (albeit at sig-
nificantly lower levels of benefits than those seen in southern Africa). A
recent World Bank review identified no fewer than 123 cash transfer pro-
grams in operation across the continent and provided detailed reviews
of programs in 28 countries (Garcia and Moore 2012; see also Ellis, De-
vereux, and White 2009; World Bank 2009).
Most of the discussion about these programs has been in the public
policy field—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 for southern Africa) strongly
indicates that these programs do in fact yield powerful improvements to
a range of measurable “development” goods (for reviews of similar evi-
dence worldwide, see Hanlon, Barrientos, and Hulme 2010; dfid 2011).
There is a strong case, that is, that these programs have amounted to

good public policy. But I wish to argue that there is even more at stake
here than pragmatic gains in ameliorating the worst forms of poverty.
Instead, I want to suggest that these new modalities of distribution are
associated with both new kinds of political claim-making and new pos-
sibilities for political mobilization, even as they are also bound up with
new ways of thinking and new rationalities of poverty. These new devel-
opments point both to the exhaustion of older forms of politics and to
vital possibilities for new ones. In this respect, both the new official will-
ingness to “just give money to the poor” (Hanlon, Barrientos, and Hulme
2010) and the new kinds of distributive politics associated with it are of
deep interest and, from the point of view of progressive politics,20 simul-
taneously exciting and deserving of critical scrutiny. My aim, then, is to
describe a certain sort of new thinking in the domains of social policy
and distributive politics while at the same time attempting to think both
about it, and along with it.
Perhaps the first question that must be answered is whether, for all the
talk of a “development revolution,” the programs and perspectives I have
here pointed to are in fact as novel as they pretend. There is, after all,
nothing new about welfare states giving money to the disadvantaged—
indeed, “the dole” is perhaps the most widely known and discussed of
the many “social” programs associated with the classic welfare states of
the global North. And the idea that it might be beneficial, both for eco-
nomic growth and for the well-being of the underconsuming “poor,” to
put money into the hands of those most likely to spend it is not some
sort of new discovery but a standard element of the Keynesian common
sense that supported the creation and growth of the classical Northern
welfare states of the twentieth century. Is the “revolution,” then, really
just a matter of the South catching up, belatedly achieving the sorts of
social assistance that were pioneered elsewhere more than a century ago?
The answer to this question is no. As a number of authors have pointed
out, the new regimes of social assistance in the South have a number of
distinctive features that distinguish them from their older and better-
studied Northern cousins.21
First of all, there is real novelty in the very idea that “less developed”
countries could even consider having extensive nationwide welfare insti-
tutions. As detailed in chapter 2, the architects of the European welfare
states assumed that such programs presupposed both a “developed” in-
14 introduction
dustrial economy and something approaching full employment, at least for
male “heads of household.” Where “welfare” institutions were developed
in the colonial world (as in South Africa and a few other places in Africa),
they were chiefly for whites and a few privileged others. In colonial settings
in which huge proportions of the population were both impoverished
and outside the wage economy, “informal” social security such as “the
African extended family” was the only solution that could be imagined.
Then, too, the conditions under which payments are received in the
new welfare states of the South look quite different from earlier Northern
models. In the North, the central conception was typically of a “safety net”
that could provide social support for a “breadwinner” (often presumed to
be a male “head of household”) and his “dependents” in conditions either
of 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 for ensuring such payments was a
kind of insurance system, based on payments made into a “system” by
those who might one day need to be caught by the “net.”22 But the south-
ern African schemes I have reviewed here are non-contributory, meaning
that they are paid out of general treasury funds and make no reference
to prior “contributions” by beneficiaries.23 Such payments are made with
no reference to employment histories and are allocated instead based on
such labor-independent criteria as absolute age (for pensions) or num-
ber of children being cared for (for child care grants). What is more, the
large share of the population that has come to rely on such grants strains
any notion of a “safety net” as an extraordinary measure for dealing with
abnormal contingencies. In South Africa today, for instance, 44 percent
of all households receive one or another sort of grant (Statistics South
Africa 2013, 19–20), meaning that, across many of the country’s regions
and neighborhoods, being at least partially supported by social transfers
is more the norm than it is the exception. In the poorest communities, in
fact, the ability to access an income often 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 transfer. Anxieties that poor women might decide to
have children simply for the income do not appear to be well founded
(birth rates have in fact 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

things as contracting hiv tend to rest more on second-hand anecdotes
than on convincing data. But while such worries may be ill-founded, they
are a response to a very real, and rather startling, new fact, which is that
conditions associated (in the “safety net” model) with losing a steady in-
come (illness, old age, disability, needing to care for small children) are
now, for many, more likely to appear as the only plausible way of obtain-
ing one in the first place.
Yet the incomes thus obtained are, by design, not comparable to the
sorts of incomes associated with full-time wage labor. While the tradi-
tional “dole” in the North was meant to replace the normal paycheck for
an injured or temporarily unemployed worker, the much smaller cash
transfers that are at the heart of the South’s new welfare states are explic-
itly not intended to be a substitute for other economic activities but rather
a catalyst—enabling, supporters claim, both “informal” livelihoods such
as small businesses and sometimes even access to wage employment it-
self. A recent comprehensive literature review found very little evidence
that cash transfers produce any negative effects on labor market partici-
pation, and noted, on the contrary, that many studies have found positive
effects, as cash transfers cover costs associated with job seeking or create
new employment opportunities by creating new markets in poor and re-
mote areas (dfid 2011; cf. 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 of people who (due to poverty, poor health,
lack of transportation, and so on) have had their range of economic activ-
ity acutely restricted (cf. Ferguson 2007).
Also important is the way that new cash transfer programs (at least in
southern Africa) have broken with the ambition (long central to North-
ern welfare states) to govern or police the structure of domestic life.24
Since 1998, for instance, South Africa’s huge program of child support
grants has had no requirement that the recipients of the grants be in any
prescribed familial relation, either conjugal or filial. The marital status
of the recipient is not considered, nor is the question of whether or not
they reside with a partner (of either gender). Indeed, the “primary care-
giver” who receives the grant is not required to be a parent, or even a
relative, of the supported child. Unlike traditional Northern systems that
became notorious for seeking to apply moralizing familial norms via in-
trusive social workers, there is here no attempt to identify “real parents,”
16 introduction
to impose responsibilities on fathers, or to impose “proper” behavior or
family forms.25
Most radically, some new thinking on social policy is beginning to
break from the central conception of the classic welfare states—the con-
ception that social payments are fundamentally a way of dealing with the
interruption of a “normal” situation in which adult heads-of-households
(most of all men) earn wages that support their dependents. Until now,
social protection programs in the region have effectively ignored the fact
of mass unemployment, supposing that “social” support is needed only
for “dependent” categories such as the elderly, those caring for children,
and the disabled. Working-age “able-bodied” men, in contrast, are all
counterfactually presumed to be able to support themselves through
their labor. Directly challenging such conceptions, a campaign in South
Africa and Namibia has in recent years proposed a “basic income grant”
(big) that would provide a small monthly cash payment to each and every
individual citizen. The amount of the payment was initially set at R100
(N$100) per person (an amount that was, at the time of the initial pro-
posal, worth about US$16). (The proposal is discussed at greater length
in later chapters, especially chapter 6; see also dsd 2002; Standing and
Samson 2003; Meth 2008; Haarmann et al. 2009.) In such a program,
there would be no means testing of 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 of a social
payment would make no reference to gender, age, employment status, or
family configuration, and even “able-bodied” working-age men would be
eligible. In this, the most innovative of the new social payment schemes
recently envisaged or implemented in the region, cash transfers to citi-
zens are completely divorced from calculations about wage labor and
family structure alike.
As discussed in the next chapter, powerful criticisms can be leveled
against most currently existing cash transfer programs precisely on the
grounds that they do not go far enough toward the radical rethinking of
the meaning of 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 of the
old European “social” state, as if that old imagined world of breadwinners
and their dependents could be meaningfully mapped onto social settings

more often characterized by mass structural unemployment, “informal”
livelihoods, and highly fluid domestic groups. It is also noteworthy that
existing programs, based as they are on national citizenship, have yet
to find satisfactory solutions to the issues of migration and xenopho-
bia that bedevil all welfare states, issues that reveal the conventionally
nationalistic particularities that still lie beneath the surface of even the
most ostensibly universal programs (this set of issues is discussed in the
book’s concluding chapter). But if one looks closely, it is possible to see
that there is also some profound 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 of this or that concrete
policy, that makes southern Africa such an interesting site for thinking
about distribution today. Perhaps because of the region’s dramatic po-
litical history as well as the extremity of 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 of the world have had to deal with the
consequences of the decline of certain forms of low-wage labor, here the
change has been so abrupt and wrenching as to open up space for thoughts
that might elsewhere be unthinkable, or only furtively and hesitantly pon-
dered in the safety of private musings or low-level policy conclaves. Here,
the unthinkable is in fact being thought, quite publicly, and often with a
very high level of intellectual rigor and critical self-consciousness. Thus,
one might open up a leading South African business daily and read the
following remarkable argument (by the well-known political and cultural
analyst Jonny Steinberg):26
“If we create enough jobs to keep the youth off the streets, we will be
saved. If we cannot, South Africa 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. If we are honest with ourselves, we have long

ago given up trying to employ everyone, or even to halve unemploy-
ment. . . . South Africa started bleeding jobs in the mid-1970s, along
with much of the rest of the world. We have been bleeding jobs ever
since. . . . It hasn’t mattered who has been in power or whether our
18 introduction
political system has been a racial dictatorship or a democracy, or
whether our labour law has been rigid or flexible—we cannot employ
everybody. We can’t even come close. To think that we can is to indulge
in millenarian thinking, as if Jesus will come and remake the world, as
if 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
found. Others say that it is creating a culture of idleness from which
there will be no return.
But if we are honest, it is what we do now and what we will keep doing
forever. It is a substitute for work and it holds the country together; it
has saved many millions from starvation and misery.
If we accept that welfare is permanent, we must go the whole hog; we

must start giving grants to the one category of poor people entirely
excluded from them—young men.
A whole series of taboos that govern thought and discourse around em-
ployment all across the world are here summarily discarded as so much
superstition. While leaders in every nation promise jobs for all, Steinberg
simply states it as a fact that, for a huge swath of the population, wage
labor–based livelihoods are simply not going to return, and new forms of
distribution are a permanent and necessary feature of the new world. Won’t
the expansion of 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 plentiful. There isn’t sufficient demand to
employ this country’s young men. We will either give them grants or they
will get nothing. They are our fellow citizens, after all. To put some money
in their pockets to spend as they wish is to confer upon them some dignity”
and to bring “life, not idleness” to the lives of the poor.27 Indeed, he sug-
gested in a companion column a few weeks later that in a context in which
millions have inherited structural unemployment from their parents,
where the promise of decent jobs is “not even a living memory,” arguing
that welfare will make people lazy “borders on madness.”28
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

of 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 of possibilities for new thinking (over
and above any specific program or policy), that makes the story of south-
ern Africa’s new welfare states such an interesting one. And we do not yet
know how it ends.
Toward a Distributive Politics
Beyond the specifics of the new programs of social assistance, this book is
also about a broader set of questions that they have provoked—questions
about the general processes of distribution as they unfold in contempo-
rary societies, and about the sorts of binding claims and counterclaims
that can be made about these processes. It is this that I refer to as the
politics of distribution, and this volume has the ambition of linking the
recent rise of new sorts of welfare states in the global South to the possi-
bilities and dangers of emergent forms of distributive politics that are un-
folding in contexts where ever more “working-age” people are supported
by means other than wage labor.
It is useful to start by considering the issue of distribution in its most
general form. How are the goods we produce distributed? Which of them
may I have access to? Differently organized societies, economic anthro-
pologists have long pointed out, have provided a wide range of different
institutional answers to that question, ranging from the obligatory rules
for meat-sharing among hunter-gatherers to such famously elaborate cer-
emonial gifting 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-
self or receive others as gifts, the normal way that people access most of
the goods and ser vices they consume is via “the market.” Which, then,
of the vast quantity of 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 of funds to buy goods? The usual answer
to this question is that I work for it. I exchange my labor (or its products)
for money, and then can use the money to buy the quantity of goods
that “the market” allows. Whether one reads neoclassical economists
or their Marxist critics, it would be easy to arrive at the conclusion that
20 introduction
distribution in capitalist societies is organized by “the market,” that the
exchange of labor is the source of most people’s purchasing power, and
that purchasing power in the market is both the fundamental mechanism
of distribution and the underlying source of consumption.
Even some of the most articulate and insightful recent critics of the
hegemony of 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 of food, clothing, and shelter” (emphasis
added). But plainly that is simply not the case in much of Africa, where
only small minorities participate in waged work and where a range of
other activities and mechanism allow “most people” to obtain their live-
lihoods. And lest we write this off too quickly as a symptom of Africa’s
“underdeveloped” condition, let us linger for a moment on the suppos-
edly “advanced capitalist” United States, generally taken as a country in
which the wage labor form is especially dominant. Here, too, I want to
suggest, paid labor may be less central to processes of distribution than
is often imagined. Indeed, in the United States, as in the rest of the world,
the question of how people actually gain access to the things they need
turns out to be far more complicated than simply exchanging their labor.
We are used to tracking a very narrowly defined official “unemploy-
ment rate” (the percentage of the workforce that is, at any moment, ac-
tively seeking but failing to find employment). The fact that this rate is
generally in the single digits (currently around 7 percent) might lead one
to believe that the rest of the population (the ninety-odd percent who
are not “unemployed”) is in fact employed. But in fact, official labor force
statistics for 2012 show that only 58.6 percent of the adult population of the
United States is actually in employment.29 In a total national population of 314
million, just 142 million were (as of 2012) employed.30 Of the rest, only
12 million were officially “unemployed,” while nearly 90 million adults31
were reported as neither employed nor unemployed but simply “not in the
labor force” (i.e., “those who have no job and are not looking for one”).32
These adults of 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 of the classic “breadwinner” group (men
aged 25 to 54), nearly one out of five were neither employed nor seeking
employment but “managing to get by some other way.”33

Such observations have led conservative ideologues to characterize the
distributive economy of the contemporary United States in terms of a huge
underclass of “takers” living on the productive virtue of their economic
betters. Leonhardt’s concern was directed specifically at the expanding rolls
of the federal disability program, but he might just as well have pointed to
the huge numbers of working-age adults living in households that receive
nutritional support from the federal snap program (some forty-eight mil-
lion Americans, or 15 percent of the population, currently receive so-called
food stamps)34 or, indeed, the astonishing number of working-age men
incarcerated as prisoners (at any given time, one out of every forty-eight
working-age men is in prison [Schmitt, Warner, and Gupta 2010, 1]).
But the importance of receiving a livelihood via direct distribution
rather than as a market exchange for labor is not only something one
finds in the lower reaches of the socioeconomic order. As Kimberly
Morgan has recently pointed out, nearly all Americans are recipients of
benefits from one or another government program (96 percent, accord-
ing to her sources) and the receipt of such benefits in fact flows dispro-
portionately to those in the middle and at the top of the income ladder
(Morgan 2013). And let us remember that, for all the popular fantasies
about welfare cheats and loafers on unemployment benefits, if one really
wants to find idle non-workers nonetheless receiving generous cash in-
comes, the better-off end of the spectrum is surely the place to start. It is
difficult to calculate the percentage who live on invested capital, but there
is no doubt it numbers many millions—the super-rich, of course, but also
many upper-middle-class people retired on private pension plans (in-
cluding many who retire early in life), and young adults supported partly
or wholly by trust funds. And, of course, there are uncounted young
people who have reached adulthood but are still supported by parents or
other kin as well as the millions of students (university, graduate, and
professional) who are supported by some combination of parental lar-
gesse and institutional grants and scholarships. In fact, while a certain
common sense tells us that “everybody” has to work for a living, the plain
fact is that massive numbers of Americans (indeed, most of them, if one
includes children) do not (at least not the sort of “work” that is counted
by the U.S. Labor Bureau). Instead, they are supported not by exchanging
their labor for its market value but by being granted distributive alloca-
tions from other individuals, institutions, or both.35
22 introduction
This is, of course, even more true in southern Africa, where massive
unemployment is the norm and a myriad of distributive practices (from
“informal” remittances and kinship-based sharing to state programs of
grants and pensions) have long furnished livelihoods to a huge chunk of
the populations (see chapter 3). Yet the distributive mechanisms through
which so many Americans and Africans alike make their way in the world
are widely disparaged. As discussed at some length in chapter 1, a kind of
productivist common sense has too often rendered distribution subsid-
iary, invisible, or even contemptible.
This neglect and denigration of distributive modes of livelihood has
continued, even as such livelihoods have become increasingly important
across much of the world. As Mike Davis (2006) has pointed out, vast
masses of poor people across the global South have left rural livelihoods
for city living in recent decades. Yet instead of 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
often been recruited into informal slums where they eke out a living via
a complex range of livelihood strategies to which agriculture and formal-
sector wage labor alike are often marginal (see chapter 3). The exclusion
from wage labor of those exiting small-scale agriculture (whether they
come to the city or remain in the countryside) is certainly not happening
everywhere (as witnessed by the massive recruitment of rural peasants
as industrial workers in some regions of very rapid economic growth,
notably in China), and one should beware of the temptation to extrapo-
late current tendencies toward some inevitable global future of universal
mass redundancy. But it is unmistakably the case that (for the present
and for the foreseeable near future, and across much of the world) people
lacking access both to land and to waged employment form an increas-
ingly prominent part of our social and political reality. Equally important,
those occupying such precarious and ill-defined social locations are both
pioneering new modes of livelihood and making new kinds of political
demands. It is in this context that distributive practices and distributive
politics are acquiring a new centrality.
Distributive issues in the southern African region are probably most
readily identifiable in the tense debates around land reform and the na-
tionalization of mineral resources. Yet such explosive issues have some-
times taken the spotlight away from another distributive discussion—the

discussion about the social payments that have come to form such an
important part of the economic and social structure in the region. It has
often been observed that the relative decline of wage labor as a basis of
livelihood has produced a kind of crisis of masculinity, in which young
men whose social power long rested on their ability to earn wages have
found their position undercut and rendered more precarious. But at the
same time, it is clear that new powers and possibilities have often opened
up for those occupying other social positions (notably women and pen-
sioners) who previously had far less social and economic power. This is
partly due to the relative expansion of work in ser vice industries that are
more open to women than the old “blue-collar” industrial jobs of the
past. But a rich literature also makes it clear that such transformations
are also, at least in substantial part, a product of the expanded availability
of social grants.36
Indeed, in a context of scarce and diminishing employment oppor-
tunities, distributive outcomes for those at the bottom of the economic
heap are increasingly determined within the domain of social policy.
Social protection has thus emerged as a key arena within which funda-
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 of social payments
may be not just ameliorative, but that they may also open new possibili-
ties for moving more fundamental issues of distribution to the center of
our analytics and our politics.
The essays that compose this book therefore seek to document an
emergent politics, and to offer a critical assessment of its dangers and pos-
sibilities. Chapter 1 reviews the ubiquity of anti-distributionist sentiment
in the domains both of scholarship and of practical policymaking and ex-
plores the masculinist and misogynistic bases of such hostility toward dis-
tribution. It then notes certain reasons to believe that this state of affairs
may be changing, introducing some of the book’s key assertions about
the growing role of distributive politics and the importance of distributive
claims grounded in ideas not of need or charity but of a “rightful share.”
Chapter 2 provides historical contextualization for this story. It shows that
earlier, mid-twentieth-century versions of “the social” never had much
purchase in most of Africa, allowing for a common but mistaken view that
“welfare states” simply bypassed the continent. But the welfare state had
24 introduction
its own distinctive history in Africa, especially in the settler-colonial soci-
eties of southern Africa, and it is only out of that peculiar and highly racial-
ized history that a new kind of social protection has emerged.
Chapter 3 reviews the way that new state programs of distribution
intersect with long-established vernacular processes and practices of 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 of this literature and to draw
some lessons from it about how to understand the place of what I term
“distributive labor” in the regional political economy. The fact that dis-
tribution and production are here (like the social and the economic) so
intimately entangled requires us to bring together domains that are often
kept separate. Chapter 4 follows up on this point by tracing the concep-
tual dualism that continues to plague thinking about market and society
and the pernicious effect of such dualism on understanding distributive
processes and distributive politics. It traces a persistent conceptual error
found on the political Left (confusing money and markets with capital-
ism) and explores an alternative framework for understanding “cash pay-
ment” and the socialities with which it is associated. Here certain new
thinking emerging in the domain of social policy provides both an object
of analysis and a sophisticated inspiration.
The “mutualities of poverty” that bind poor southern Africans to both
markets and each other are, of course, riddled with inequalities. In liveli-
hoods that depend on distributive relations (whether with other persons
or with institutions), distributive practices are typically bound up with
relations of dependence that are unequal, hierarchical, and oft en ex-
ploitative or abusive. Chapter 5 explores the ironic fact that, in societies
we like to think of as “liberated” and “postcolonial,” many actively seek
precisely such hierarchical and dependent relationships with well-placed
others. Tracing a regional history in which social orders based on the
scarcity and value of people were abruptly overturned by ones in which
people came to be regarded as in surplus, it seeks to historicize both the
contemporary hunger of many of “the poor” for social dependence and
the evident eagerness of the propertied classes to evade such entangle-
ments. Understood against this long history, the chapter argues, the de-
sire for dependent relations with powerful others is not some archaic and

reactionary remnant of the paternalistic past but a very up-to-date (and
in at least some measure effective) response to current economic con-
ditions. This has implications for contemporary debates around social
policy in general and for discussions of “dependency” in particular.
Finally, the book concludes with a survey of the possibilities the cur-
rent conjuncture raises for progressive politics. It suggests that emergent
new forms of distributive politics, involving both cash transfers in specific
and the broader ground of “ser vice delivery” in general, are demonstrat-
ing the potency of new kinds of mobilization and claim-making. The so-
cial question today therefore is not simply a technical matter of whether
certain sorts of social assistance can ameliorate certain sorts of poverty.
More fundamentally, it involves the emergence of new understandings
of what cash payments are, or could be, and of why and how distributive
payments ought to be received by citizens. While thinking on questions
of distribution has long been trapped within the conceptual opposition
of gift (social assistance seen as a kind of generosity) and market (wages
understood as a market exchange for labor), chapter 6 traces the emer-
gence of other ways of understanding the meaning of social transfers,
including the idea of cash payments as rightful shares that are due to
owners. Distributive claims here are rooted in a conviction that citizens
(and particularly poor and black citizens) are the rightful owners of a vast
national wealth (including mineral wealth) of which they have been un-
justly deprived through a historic process of racialized dispossession—a
conception that provides a very different, and much more politicized,
justification for cash payments than is available in the usual framework of
“social assistance” as generous help for the needy. The concluding chap-
ter provides a speculative look forward, noting a range of sites where new
thinking is emerging around new kinds of distributive politics and seek-
ing to assess the significance and promise of such thinking.
“Increase the Experiments Wherever Possible”
As I noted at the start, I have been drawn to this project by an impatience

with the increasingly empty (as it seems to me) politics of “opposing neo-
liberalism.” Critiques of neoliberalism have had an important and neces-
sary place, but one reaches a point of diminishing returns when the same
critiques are simply repeated over and over (as they today seem to be) in
26 introduction
what I have elsewhere called a “politics of the anti-” (Ferguson 2010). In
place of such denunciations, the more pressing issue seems to me to be
the challenge of positive government, the need to develop real strategies
and tactics that would enable one to mobilize around specific programs
or initiatives that one might be for, not against.
In his 1979 lectures on neoliberalism (2008), Michel Foucault famously
spoke of the “absence of a socialist art of government,” and the historic fail-
ure of the Left to develop an “autonomous governmentality” comparable to
liberalism. And he concluded his discussion of socialist governmentality
by insisting that the answers to the Left’s governmental problems require
not yet another search through our sacred texts but a process of concep-
tual and institutional innovation. “If there is a really socialist governmen-
tality, then it is not hidden within socialism and its texts. It cannot be
deduced from them. It must be invented” (2008, 94).
Such invention will probably happen (if it does) not in the lectures of
philosophers or anthropologists but in the push and shove of actual gov-
erning and actual politics. And my suggestion is that important elements
of such invention may be emerging as we speak, in the working out of
new forms of “social” governance and new modalities of distribution in
the new welfare states of the global South.
That is not, of course, to say that the sorts of programs I analyze here
are in any simple way socialist, or necessarily subversive of dominant cap-
italist forms of economic organization. On the contrary, the programs I
analyze in the book are creatures of their time. In certain ways, they un-
doubtedly do partake of the neoliberal spirit of the age. As I have noted
elsewhere (2007), even the proposals for the basic income grant (big)
(which I have suggested is the most conceptually ambitious and interest-
ing of the new cash transfer schemes on offer in the region) have relied on
a number of characteristically neoliberal arguments.
One example of this is the common use of ideas of “investment” and
“human capital” as justification for social grants, including the standard
neoliberal move to treat the poor individual as a kind of micro-enterprise.
The big would (as the big Coalition website once claimed) “enable work-
ing families to invest more of their incomes in nutrition, education and
health care—with corresponding productivity gains” (Tilton 2005). Ar-
guments for social transfers today in fact normally rely on language that
recasts social spending as investing in a kind of capital (see Fine 2000

for a useful critique of “social capital” theory). Similarly, arguments for
social payments sometimes draw on neoliberal valorizations of “infor-
mal” enterprise, seeing grants as catalysts for improvised livelihoods that
might energize the inactive unemployed into entrepreneurial “activity”
(Ferguson 2007).
Such compatibility with certain elements of neoliberalism has been cen-
tral to many Left critiques of the new cash transfer programs. Patrick Bond,
for instance, has recently characterized the South African social policy
regime as a merely “tokenistic” complement to neoliberalism as usual, pro-
viding “talk left” ideological cover for the real “walk right” policies of the
anc regime (Bond 2014). Franco Barchiesi (2011), while recognizing that
programs of direct distribution may hold out more radical possibilities,
notes that existing programs are only too compatible with the expansion of
“precarious” forms of casualized labor that has been characteristic of neo-
liberal restructuring. But as I have noted, these programs (and certainly the
most progressive among them such as the basic income grant campaign)
also include elements that seem to move in the opposite direction. Rather
than turning everything over to “the market” (as we are told neoliberalism
is determined to do), they grant unconditional claims to income rooted
in national citizenship. Rather than transferring resources upward to the
“1 percent,” they rely on progressive taxation to impose real, if modest,
income redistribution. Organizations like the International Labour Of-
fice (ilo), as I discuss in the conclusion, even see such social protection
programs as the first stage in the development of international norms that
would guarantee a right to a minimum income in the same way that we now
expect states to provide basic education. As shown in chapter 6, contempo-
rary demands for cash transfers may also involve claims to social payments
as a “rightful share,” received not as “aid” but as the share properly due to
owners. This, as I will argue, raises the possibility that the new programs
of direct distribution may become the terrain of a far more radical politics
than is usually associated with social “assistance.”
Is it, then, the case that substantively “pro poor” effects may be ob-
tained even in the face of the presence of countervailing neoliberal
elements? In fact, the situation is more interesting than this. For it is
not only that such effects are obtained in spite of “neoliberal” program
elements and modes of reasoning; it is also that formally “neoliberal”
elements may themselves be put in ser vice of those effects. For instance,
28 introduction
while the standard neoliberal objection to social assistance points to the
danger of “dependency” on the state, contemporary advocates for new
social transfer programs use neoliberal reasoning to neatly reverse the
argument. It is the existing “safety net,” say promoters of a basic income
grant, that breeds dependency, since any economically productive poor
person, under the current system, is surrounded by dependents who must
be supported. This dependency constitutes a “tax” on the productivity of
the poor, which both creates a disincentive to work and degrades human
capital. The “dependency” of absolute poverty is a drag on productiv-
ity, and it makes workers unable to be economically active, to search for
better jobs, and so on. What is more, insecurity breeds passivity and in-
hibits entrepreneurship and risk-taking. A poor South African thinking
of starting a small business under present circumstances, for instance,
must consider the terrible risk of falling into destitution and hunger in
the event of failure. The same person with a monthly big payment would
be empowered to be much bolder. Providing basic income security for all,
it is claimed, will enable the poor to behave as proper neoliberal subjects
(i.e., as entrepreneurs and risk-takers); the status quo prevents it, and
promotes “dependency” (see, e.g., dsd 2002, 61). In this conception, the
big would provide not a “safety net” (the circus image of old-style welfare
as protection against hazard) but a “springboard”—a facilitator of risky
(but presumably empowering) neoliberal flight (Ferguson 2007).
A similarly ironic reversal can be observed around another character-
istically neoliberal element: the valorization of transparency, evaluation,
and measurable quantifiable outputs that is at the heart of what has been
termed “audit culture” (Strathern 2000). These neoliberal elements have
often been associated with Foucauldian ideas of “governmentality” and
with objectionable forms of control and surveillance. But in the push for
cash transfers, both in southern Africa and around the world, the “neolib-
eral” demand for transparent indicators and measurable results has often
been used to argue precisely for “no-strings” cash grants—for the simple
reason that such programs are relatively easily implemented, can be ef-
fectively evaluated, and generally produce (as most development projects
do not) immediate and quantifiable gains in a range of “development”
indicators of health, nutrition, education, and so on (World Bank 2009).
The relative simplicity and “transparency” of cash transfers is another
point on which neoliberal reasoning is deployed toward a political end not

usually associated with neoliberalism (i.e., expanding social protection).
Neoliberal discourses on welfare have traditionally disparaged social assis-
tance as a form of paternalism (as in the old Thatcherite complaint about
the “nanny state” that tries to run everybody’s life in the name of the needs
of “society”). Yet advocates for new forms of social payments such as the
big use these arguments not to argue against welfare but to argue for a
new and expanded form of it. They point out that simple, universal, and
unconditional cash transfers neither make moralizing judgments about
“the deserving poor” nor require the surveillance, normalization, and so
on that are normally associated with “social assistance.” The big that they
propose would be paid to everyone; citizens would access their funds (in
the ideal scheme) by simply swiping their national identity cards in an
atm. They would use the funds in the way they saw best, knowing their
own problems and their resources for addressing them better than any
state agency could. There would be no policing of conduct, no stigmatiz-
ing labels, no social workers coming into homes—and no costly bureau-
cracy to sort out who does or doesn’t qualify. While means-tested condi-
tional cash transfer programs (and still more so public works schemes)
inevitably require elaborate bureaucratic and informational apparatuses
and spend much of their budgets on administrative costs, the relative
simplicity of the unconditional cash transfer allows more of the money
allocated to end up in the hands of the intended beneficiaries. Through
the bold step of eliminating means testing (and, in some versions, replac-
ing documents with biometric technology [see chapter 2]), it is proposed
that even an extremely far-reaching transfer scheme need not require an
overbearing or oppressive state presence. The state is here imagined as
neoliberally “slim” (in the sense of eschewing costly and intrusive govern-
ment programs for engineering the conduct of those under its care) while
at the same time carrying out a very substantial economic intervention
(both redistributing resources and acting as a kind of direct provider for
each and every citizen).
Ideological lines often become blurred around programs of cash
transfer, today as in the past. Critics on the Left, for instance, sometimes
seek to discredit programs of direct distribution by pointing out that the
arch-neoliberal Milton Friedman supported a “negative income tax” that
had certain similarities to contemporary cash transfer programs. But
they often fail to note that at the same time Martin Luther King Jr. (1967)
30 introduction
was advocating for a guaranteed income in terms very similar to those
of today’s advocates of basic income. At the same moment in history
that Richard Nixon was proposing a “Family Assistance Plan” that would
have provided a minimum income for all households with children, his
ideological opponent on the Left wing of the U.S. mainstream, George
McGovern, was campaigning on a platform that called for giving every
U.S. citizen a redistributive cash payment of $1,000 per year. Such strange
bedfellows are misunderstood if they are thought to reveal the sinister
“neoliberal” essence lying beneath an only-apparently progressive policy
proposal. What they reveal is only the radical political indeterminacy
that always attends any specific governmental technique. As I have ar-
gued elsewhere (Ferguson 2010), specific institutional and intellectual
mechanisms can be combined in a great variety of ways to accomplish
quite different social and political ends. With social technologies as with
any other sort, it is not the machines or the mechanisms that decide what
they will be used to do.
Stephen Collier (2012, 188) has recently pointed out that those who see
“neoliberal” elements as marking the necessary and nefarious presence
of a sinister “big Leviathan” known as “neoliberalism” or “the neoliberal
project” are ironically reproducing the reasoning of the original neolib-
eral, Friedrich von Hayek, who erroneously believed that there could be
no such thing as a “mixed economy” since the presence of “socialist” ele-
ments of planning and redistribution could only lead to “serfdom” (i.e.,
totalitarian dictatorship). Just as Hayek could not imagine that (as Collier
[2012, 188] puts it) “elements of the Marxist programme could function
in systems that bear no resemblance to a dictatorship of the proletariat”
so do contemporary “anti-neoliberalism” critics seem to struggle to
imagine how ideas and techniques with “neoliberal” origins or affinities
might contribute to quite different sorts of political and social systems
than those imagined by the likes of Hayek and Friedman. Yet if history
has shown us anything, it is that it has no respect for original intentions,
promiscuously throwing together diverse institutional and conceptual el-
ements with little regard for ideological purity. Just as socialist elements
ended up mingled with liberal capitalism to yield what we today know as
social democracy or the welfare state, so might apparently “neoliberal”
elements today be in the process of becoming something else (cf. Fergu-
son 2010).

If we are willing to consider this possibility, then we will need to culti-
vate in our thinking certain virtues, first among which are an open mind
and a willingness to be surprised. Our politics must become less deduc-
tive and more inductive, less judgmental and more experimental. Are
cash transfers, for instance, bound to remain trapped within the limits
of national citizenship and the chauvinistic xenophobia with which they
are often associated (a question addressed in this book’s conclusion)?
Might they simply expand the domain of precarity (a danger of which Bar-
chiesi [2011] has warned)? Or actually increase certain sorts of insecurity
(as Dubbeld [2013] has recently suggested)? Are such payments really a
device for demobilizing the poor (as some traditional Marxists claim)—
effectively buying the political quiescence of those who have the most to
gain from radical social change for a paltry token sum? Or do they, as
many proponents of a politics grounded in demands for direct distribu-
tions such as basic income argue, help to open up a new space of mobi-
lization and political demand by decoupling labor and consumption and
opening a new domain of distributive politics? These are not the sorts of
questions to be answered theoretically or ideologically; the only answer
that really convinces is the empirical and experimental one: let’s find out!
Such a stance, I suggest, allows us to begin to meet the challenge that
Foucault posed to the Left, the challenge of inventing arts of government
adequate to the times. For Foucault, government and politics alike were
always more about experimentation than denunciation, puzzling out pos-
sible ways forward in concrete settings rather than deducing the correct
path from a general political theory (cf. Koopman and Matza 2013). In an
interview on social security, Foucault insisted that what was required for
a progressive rethinking of social policy was not a theoretically derived
“line” but, as he put it, “a certain empiricism,” an approach that would be
devoted less to critique than to experimentation. The whole field of social
policy, he suggested, should be treated as “a vast experimental field, in
such a way as to decide which taps need turning, which bolts need to be
loosened here or there, to get the desired change.” The goal, in his ac-
count, was less to arrive at a desired and known end state than, as he put
it, “to increase the experiments wherever possible” (1988, 165).
What this implies is a form of politics that has less to do with critique
and denunciation than with experimentation and assessment. If we are
indeed to arrive at viable Left “arts of government,” we will need to be
32 introduction
open to the unexpected, ready to “increase the experiments wherever
possible,” and attentive to the ways that new conditions may be opening
up new possibilities for politics and policy alike.
Where does such a politics lead? This book’s conclusion briefly re-
views a range of interesting and politically promising current “experi-
ments” (institutional and intellectual), but this is nothing more than a
beginning of what must be a long process of analysis, assessment, and
reimagination involving a range of interested actors. In fact, there can
be no deductive answer to the question of where distributive politics is
going. Instead, this book is animated by Foucault’s experimental and em-
pirical sensibility, and by the conviction that a politics adequate to the
times must be more than a set of normative certainties that one brings to
bear on an issue. It must be a process of discovery and invention.

Notes
Introduction. Cash Transfers and the New Welfare States
1. The “end of history” and “world is flat” arguments are associated with best-
selling books by Francis Fukuyama and Thomas Friedman, respectively. The most in-
fluential critical accounts operating at the same “meta” level are perhaps David Harvey
2007, Mike Davis 2006, and (in a more popular vein) Naomi Klein 2008.
2. Even in Bangladesh (home of Muhammed Yunus’s Grameen Bank and long the
poster child for microcredit as anti-poverty remedy), Ananya Roy’s revealing study
(2010) has concluded that microcredit/microfinance programs there, successful as
they have often been, have in fact been less about investment and interest than about
public subsidies to the poor. “Despite the rhetoric of credit and entrepreneurship,”
she observes, “the Bangladesh institutions seem to be engaged in forms of social
protection,” following a “logic of development” that “fits much more comfortably in
the ‘social protection’ family of programs and policies than in the ‘micro-enterprises’
family” (2010, 116, 117).
3. Hanlon, Barrientos, and Hulme 2010.
4. “Southern Africa” is both a conventional unit of scholarly specialization and a re-
gion that is meaningfully integrated both economically (insofar as it is oriented around
the powerful industrial “core” economy of South Africa) and politically (via the South-
ern African Development Community, a regional grouping that began as an associa-
tion of anti-apartheid “front line” states but today includes all the states in the region,
including South Africa). Note that I will give special attention throughout to two states
within the region, South Africa and Namibia, that have especially extensive and (from
my point of view) interesting systems of social assistance, but I will also refer where
appropriate to neighboring states where similar (if less extensive) programs have been
introduced or contemplated (including the two countries for which I have the most
sustained direct research experience, Lesotho and Zambia).
5. Garcia and Moore 2012; for Zimbabwe, see unicef 2012.
6. On the theme of exclusion, see, for example, Wacquant 2009; Sassen 2010.
More recently, scholars have paid more attention to the ways that new forms of
inclusion-via-social-policy may also be part of the “neoliberal” story (see Collier 2011;
Muehlebach 2012).
7. See Bond 2000 and Marais 2001 for accounts of this “neoliberal” turn.
8. The most recent official unemployment rate was reported as 25.2 percent, with an
“expanded” definition (including all those desiring employment regardless of whether
they are actively seeking it) at 35.1 percent. Youth unemployment was reported at 66 per-
cent. “Employment Down for First Quarter of 2014,” Mail and Guardian, May 5, 2014.
9. While not directly concerned with questions of social assistance, Hart (2008) has
provided a related assessment of the limits of dominant neoliberalism narratives, insist-
ing that understanding the specific political dynamics of concrete points of local politi-
cal struggle in South Africa will require a more complex political and analytic strategy
than simply “exposing neoliberal class power.” See also Parnell and Robinson 2012.
10. The newly founded eff (Economic Freedom Fighters) led by Julius Malema
(treated in chapter 6) may prove an exception to this, for better or worse. It is also
worth noting the recent emergence of two small alternative Left parties, the Demo-
cratic Left Front (dlf) and the Workers and Socialist Party (wasp), though clearly
neither can at this point be termed major political parties.
11. For an overview of the development of social pensions in the region, see De-
vereux 2007; on the South African Child Support Grant program, see Lund 2008 and
dsd, sassa, and unicef 2012.
12. See National Treasury 2012 (85). Other grants include the War Veterans Grant,
the Disability Grant, the Foster Care Grant, and the Care Dependency Grant.
13. Bond (2014) has disputed the reliability of these figures, claiming that many of
the toilets, taps, and other new facilities tallied in the survey are in fact functioning
imperfectly or not at all. This is likely true, but the same must have been true of the
counts from earlier years (i.e., not all the counted infrastructural assets would have
been functional). It is hard to see how considerations of this kind can stand in the way
of acknowledging such a marked improvement over only a few years—a trend that is
consistent with other difficult-to-dismiss data, such as the self-reported hunger fig-
ures cited above, as well as the extensive field studies reviewed in the authoritative
report of Neves et al. 2009.
14. “Impressive Shift in Living Standards Trends,” press release, South African
Institute of Race Relations, August 28, 2012.
15. Dubbeld (2013) has recently reported that some rural recipients (in South Afri-
ca’s KwaZulu-Natal province) condemn the proliferation of grants as corrosive of “tra-
dition” and contrast the current world of grants unfavorably with a remembered past
where men could earn more adequate incomes via wage labor. A yearning for wage
labor and the social structure that it supported, however, should not be mistaken for a
218 notes to introduction

desire to reduce or eliminate grants, which Dubbeld’s informants estimated to be the
primary source of income for 70 percent of the population of the village under study.
16. For an excellent account of exactly how such policymaking emerged in one spe-
cific case, see Francie Lund’s exposition (2008) of the process that led to the creation
of the South African Child Support Grant program.
17. The classic statement of this position is Wolpe 1972.
18. None of the several social policy experts to whom I have told this anecdote has
disagreed—indeed, several registered their grim suspicion that the jse would actually
rise substantially on the news. One suggested that the experiment had in some sense
already been performed, since the hiv/aids epidemic had in fact eliminated millions
from the supposed “reserve army of the unemployed” with (she claimed) little impact
on either industry or the national gdp.
19. On the emergence of “the poor” as local category of considerable political sig-
nificance, see Ashwin Desai 2002.
20. Here and elsewhere, I use the term progressive not as a synonym for what we
have come to know as the Left but in a broader sense (one closer to the word’s literal
meaning) that references simply a political commitment to altering or reforming the
social and political status quo in such a way as to improve it. Some interesting forms
of progressive politics today, I will suggest, may be more distorted than clarified by
placing them within a traditional Left-Right grid.
21. Seekings (2008c), for instance, has argued that Esping-Andersen’s (1990) ty-
pology of welfare states (which has become a kind of standard reference for cross-
national comparative work) is based on analytical categories not appropriate for the
new welfare states of the South. See also Sandbrook et al. 2007; Gough et al. 2008; and
Haggard and Kaufman 2008.
22. This is, of course, a highly simplified account. Extensive scholarship has ana-
lyzed the significant differences among “first-world” welfare states, with perhaps
the most influential account being Esping-Andersen’s (1990) contrast between what
he termed “liberal,” “corporatist,” and “social democratic” types of system. Since
systems of the “social democratic” type (such as the well-known Swedish case) rely
more on “universalistic” benefits (which benefit all or most of the population and not
only the poor or the unfortunate who “fall”), they may appear closer to some of the
southern African schemes discussed here than the “safety net” model that is more
characteristic of Esping-Andersen’s “liberal” model. But even the benefits offered by
the most universalistic “social democratic” systems are (unlike the southern African
social grants) normally graduated according to accustomed income, and they remain
premised on a “normal” state of universal wage labor. Indeed, Esping-Andersen
claims that of the three basic types of welfare state, it is the “social democratic” type
that is most dependent on universal wage employment, “at once genuinely committed
to a full-employment guarantee, and entirely dependent on its attainment” (1990, 28).
23. South Africa also has contributory systems for formal-sector workers. These
work more like typical social insurance systems and are not part of the system of
grants that is treated here.
notes to introduction 219

24. A critical literature on this is reviewed in chapters 1 and 2.
25. These issues are discussed at greater length in chapter 2. See also Lund 2008
(80) on how and why it was decided to move away from older models of assistance that
presumed “the nuclear family.”
26. “Idea of Jobs for All Blinds Us to Need for Welfare,” Business Day, July 26, 2013.
I am grateful to Jess Auerbach for first bringing this column to my attention.
27. “Idea of Jobs for All Blinds Us to Need for Welfare,” Business Day.
28. “Grants Encourage Liberation, Not Dependence,” Business Day, August 23, 2013.
29. United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Labor Force Statistics from the Cur-
rent Population Survey: 35. Persons not in the labor force by desire and availability for
work, age, and sex,” accessed December 4, 2013, http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat35.htm.
rent Population Survey: 1. Employment status of the civilian noninstitutional popula-
tion, 1942 to date,” accessed December 4, 2013, http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat01.htm.
rent Population Survey: 35. Persons not in the labor force by desire and availability for
work, age, and sex.”
rent Population Survey: Frequently Asked Questions,” accessed June 26, 2013, http://
www.bls.gov/cps/faq.htm. Note that this does not include the self-employed, who are
here reckoned as both “in the labor force” and “employed.”
33. David Leonhardt, “Men, Unemployment, and Disability,” New York Times, April
8, 2011, accessed December 4, 2013, http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/08
/men-unemployment-and-disability/?_r=0.
34. United States Food and Drug Administration, Food Nutrition Ser vice, “Supple-
mental Nutrition Assistance Program (snap),” accessed June 26, 2013, http://www
.fns.usda.gov/pd/34SNAPmonthly.htm.
35. It is also perhaps worth remarking that even for those who are in wage employ-
ment, the distributive stream of wages is often supplemented with other (often extrale-
gal) transfers of resources within the workplace (informal “perks” or privileges, “toler-
ated theft,” etc.). As Lisa Dodson has recently pointed out for the United States (2011)
prevailing ideas of “fairness” often allow such transfers to be justified within the
workplace as “bending the rules” rather than theft, a phenomenon that is often noted
to be a feature of southern African workplaces as well. Notable, too, is the extent of
popular support in the United States for more formal sorts of direct redistribution,
which is considerably greater than mainstream political discourse might suggest. A
recent Gallup survey found that 52 percent of Americans (including 34 percent of self-
described “conservatives”) agreed that “our government should redistribute wealth
by heavy taxes on the rich” and noted “a broad trend over time” suggesting that Ameri-
cans have become “more rather than less in favor of active government involvement in
redistributing wealth” (“Majority in U.S. Want Wealth More Evenly Distributed,” ac-
cessed February 8, 2014, http://www.gallup.com/poll/161927/majority-wealth-evenly
-distributed.aspx).
220 notes to introduction

36. White 2001; Ngwane 2004; Niehaus 2010; White 2010; Barchiesi 2011; and Dub-
beld 2013.
1. Give a Man a Fish
1. For a thoughtful reflection on the problematic use of “teach a man to fish” rea-
soning in the contemporary development fad for “sustainability,” see Swidler and
Watkins 2009.
2. “anc Has Tough Job Rallying West Coast’s Frustrated Fishermen,” Business Day,
February 24, 2006. A comprehensive study exploring the difficulties the post-apartheid
South African fishing industry has faced in seeking to expand access to historically ex-
cluded groups concluded by pointing to the global industry trends referenced above,
noting that “small-scale bona fide fishers are up against heavy odds, all over the
world” (Hersoug 2002, 223).
3. “Mpulungu Job Hunt Kills 9,” Zambia Daily Mail, May 29, 2012, accessed June 4,
2012, http://www.daily-mail.co.zm/?p=4484.
4. See discussion later in this chapter as well as chapter 6; cf. Ferguson 2013.
5. This history has recently been insightfully reviewed by Weeks (2011).
6. As Brian Turner has usefully pointed out in a discussion of T. H. Marshall’s En-
glish context, citizenship has historically been associated with (typically male) par-
ticipation in the formal labor market, sometimes supplemented with (again male)
military ser vice (thus the “worker-citizen” and the “soldier-citizen”). Women have
historically been granted social rights not as individuals but as parts of “families,”
within which they have enjoyed certain entitlements “as fertile adults who are replen-
ishing the nation” (Turner 2010, 70).
7. On the related association of the domestic domain with humanitarian practice,
see Malkki 2015.
8. “Alan Simpson Calls Social Security ‘Cow with 310 Million Tits,’ Causes Uproar,”
Talking Points Memo, August 25, 2010, accessed September 27, 2013, http://talkingpoints
memo.com/dc/alan-simspon-calls-social-security-cow-with-310-million-tits-causes
-uproar.
9. In the Communist Manifesto, they famously described the lumpenproletariat as
“the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the layers of the old soci-
ety” ([1848] 1998, 48); as late as 1870 Engels described it as “this scum of depraved ele-
ments from all classes . . . the worst of all possible allies” (Engels [1870] 1968, 229).
Elsewhere, Marx suggested such a class acted as an “industrial reserve army” whose
function under capitalism was keeping wages low. For a critical account of the limita-
tions of such Marxian functionalism in the context of massive labor surplus, see Li
2010 and cf. this book’s conclusion. On Marx’s concept of the lumpenproletariat, see
also Stallybrass 1990 and the discussion in chapter 3.
10. “Any distribution whatever of the means of consumption,” he later wrote, “is
only a consequence of the distribution of the conditions of production themselves,”
and for a given arrangement of the elements of production, the distribution of the
notes to chapter 1 221

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give a

Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution

Reﬂections on the New Politics of Distribution

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

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

Foreword by Thomas Gibson vii

1. Give a Man a Fish

2. What Comes after the Social?

4. The Social Life of Cash Payments

The Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures were originally conceived in 1961 by

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

xii preface and ac know ledg ments

preface and ac know ledg ments xiii

xiv preface and ac know ledg ments

preface and ac know ledg ments xv

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

Neoliberal Welfare States? The Surprising Outcome of Political

The disjuncture between certain influential scholarly stories about neo-

cash transfers and the new welfare states 3

cash transfers and the new welfare states 5

cash transfers and the new welfare states 7

The improvement can be attributed in part to the increase in the num-

cash transfers and the new welfare states 9

cash transfers and the new welfare states 11

A Worldwide Shift: The Cash Transfer Revolution and Its Meaning

These developments are not unique to southern Africa. It is true that

cash transfers and the new welfare states 13

cash transfers and the new welfare states 15

cash transfers and the new welfare states 17

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

If we accept that welfare is permanent, we must go the whole hog; we

cash transfers and the new welfare states 19

Toward a Distributive Politics

cash transfers and the new welfare states 21

cash transfers and the new welfare states 23

cash transfers and the new welfare states 25

“Increase the Experiments Wherever Possible”

As I noted at the start, I have been drawn to this project by an impatience

cash transfers and the new welfare states 27

cash transfers and the new welfare states 29

cash transfers and the new welfare states 31

cash transfers and the new welfare states 33

Introduction. Cash Transfers and the New Welfare States

218 notes to introduction

notes to introduction 219

220 notes to introduction

1. Give a Man a Fish

notes to chapter 1 221

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