Ngaka Ben Mosiane. African Studies. Volume 78, Issue 1, March 2019.
Recent books by Jeremy Seekings & Nicoli Nattrass (2015), James Ferguson (2015), and Deborah James (2014) are key works on the role of the state, kinship, and markets in the distribution of economic resources. Their interventions variously provide theoretical, ethnographic and statistical analyses of the effects of particular South African socioeconomic policies in the last 20 years; the role of the middle class and ordinary poor people in improving their lives as well as the innovative thinking and emergent politics around distributional regimes of state spending in the Global South. Some of the new ideas driving the discussions are distributive markets, the fair share, redistributive livelihoods and ‘situated possibilities’. The latter is a Foucauldian idea that government and politics are about experimentation; working out possibilities in concrete settings.
This review article draws out some of the key lines of conversations among the three books: distributive neoliberalism; the newness or not of Global South regimes of social payments; cash transfers as enablers of livelihoods as well as the mediating role of cash in the contradictions between social solidarities and self-interests. One of those lines of conversations relates to the form of social security systems in the Global South. Seekings & Nattrass (2015) see the historical design of the welfare system remaining unchanged in South Africa. Ferguson (2015) concurs, although he also presents their forms in this country and the Global South as changing because they are increasingly being provided without conditions. Beyond these views about the newness or otherwise of social payments, there is growing evidence that the forms of welfare systems are being reconfigured in many countries in the Global North and South – they are increasingly being based on unqualified eligibility for citizens of the countries involved (this includes new thinking and experiments around various forms of ‘basic income grant’). The contribution by James (2014) is unique in the way it extends the distributional regime of state spending beyond pensions and social grants, to include increased access to credit. Ferguson’s (2015) input is also set apart by his recasting of the social security system as a fair share of a nation’s common estate; a rethinking that for him opens up a number of possibilities: elimination of shame and stigma for recipients; denationalisation of social payments; new political claim-making and mobilisation as well as new ways of thinking about poverty, unemployment, and development. I argue that the opportunities created by access to credit, unconditional eligibility for social payments, and the provision of the latter as a rightful share cannot be seen to always provide options for meaningful social transformation. Instead, they enable ordinary people to make the best of limited opportunities within the interstices of hegemonic cultural, socio-spatial, and economic landscapes
I also highlight in this review article Ferguson’s (2015) and James’ (2014) idea that cash mediates the contradictions between social solidarities and self-interests. Rather than erode social mutualities, money enables people to enter into social relationships. Additionally, savings clubs, rotating-credit-schemes (stockvels), and mashonisas (unregistered, neighbourhood money lending institutions) do not only lessen financial risks of household members, they have also historically constituted local ‘human economies’, that is, the economic practices built on local practices, knowledges, and social networks (James 2014). By the 1990s, however, stringent measures such as different forms of identification and societal sanctions, collateral, and automated teller machine (ATM) cards have come to be used in the workings of the above-mentioned social institutions; in the provision of credit as well as the recovering of loans and other dues. Similarly, the South African credit laws in the post-apartheid era continue the historical practices that favour creditors at the expense of debtors, allowing for the application of garnishee and attachment orders as well as repossession of goods bought through credit. It is on the basis of this grip of creditors and other social institutions on debtors that Ferguson’s (2015) compelling argument about social payments underplays the negative effects of biometrics – the ways in which such technologies can be used to deepen and lock the middle class and ordinary poor people into debt.
The three books also focus on neoliberalism’s redistributive elements. Despite the predatory tendencies of the markets, these books claim that the neoliberal aspects of efficiency and outsourcing can be used to deliver cash payments and to improve access to municipal services. This conception is premised on the idea that public goods such as water and tax money can resist full privatisation – although the distribution of tax revenue and water may be outsourced to a private contractor, these resources themselves can be retained as public possessions. The market’s speedy and efficient adoption of modern technology, which can be used to remove the institutional barriers to the distribution of public and private goods and services, is another premise on which the redistributive aspect of neoliberalism is based. The redistributive feature of neoliberalism is also premised on the growing private sector-led solutions, which can represent a crucial opportunity for service delivery in the poorest cities, where local governments are newer (due to decentralisation processes starting only recently in the 1990s), where local governments are weaker in terms of infrastructure delivery, personnel, and skills, and where local governments are underfunded (due to national governments’ concerns about political competition) (Robinson 2011). This kind of thinking can be criticised for failing to account for the cost-cutting mechanisms and punitive measures of the neoliberal municipalities, which often result in the provision of inferior services to ordinary people while disproportionately spending more on municipal infrastructure and services for the elite (Adelzadeh 1996; McDonald & Pape 2002; McDonald & Ruiters 2005; McDonald 2008). The conflicting views on the effects of neoliberalism (as an engine of social stratification or a driver of resource distribution) can be explained by attending to the experiences of particular places at specific times.
The final theme covered in this review article is the nature of the South African economy and the extent to which it can support the provisions of social payments and basic services. For Ferguson (2015), the world economy is already overproducing goods and services, which can be shared. In this argument, he overlooks the unequal spaces of such productive processes. The power relations behind those uneven geographies often lead to countries such as South Africa becoming net importers of goods and services, which are often unaffordable to ordinary people. It is for this reason that James (2014) draws attention to an economy that has come to take the dual mainstream and marginal forms as well as the contradictory logics of communality and alienable commodity ownership. Seekings & Nattrass (2015) also point to the capital intensive nature of that differentiated economy, which often favours higher classes of society. Nonetheless, Seekings & Nattrass (2015) regard the South African welfare system and municipal service provision as redistributive because the elites pay a large proportion of the country’s income and value added taxes. Regarding the South African economic policies, Seekings & Nattrass (2015) argue that the Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) macroeconomic policy since the 1990s has been crucial in the realisation of the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), such that not only has the number of recipients of welfare risen, cash transfers themselves have increased. In the same vein, the financial crisis of 2008 was averted due to the GEAR policies. Seekings & Nattrass (2015) conclude that despite social assistance in South Africa not being universal, the existing levels of poverty are much less than they would have been in a non-market based system. The sections that follow elaborate on the themes outlined above.
Global South regimes of social payments: novel or historical continuities?
The nuclear family is a unit through which the state and the markets provide to society. In particular, the safety nets for children, the ‘disabled’, the sick and the elderly were created in the Global North to deal with the problem of sustaining ‘the old social’ – that is, to deal with the income problem of an old imagined world of the nuclear family, with an able-bodied man as a breadwinner (Ferguson 2015). Seekings & Nattrass (2015) see the liberal welfare regime of England continuing to shape that of South Africa – the welfare regime of the latter is still marked by the deserving poor as targets for social assistance; it is still marked by workfare schemes and developmentalism; by market-based insurance/savings schemes as well as means-tests for determining social assistance eligibility. Except for its expanded and deracialised elements, Seekings & Nattrass (2015) state that the essential design of the South African welfare system remains unchanged from its colonial and apartheid forms.
Although Ferguson (2015) is likely to agree with the above description of continuity, he also notes that South Africa and some countries in the Global South have, in the last two decades, been pioneers in the way they attended to issues of poverty and distribution. For him, the distributive unit of the old social (the nuclear family safety nets) is being undermined by the casualisation of and insufficient levels of job markets as well as the intrusive state policing of the family structure when assessing eligibility for social grants. The family-based safety nets are being superseded in the Global South by ‘the new social’ of non-means-tested qualifications for social payments. This new social also relies less on the moralised, nuclear structure of domestic life, but on political and technological recognition, inclusion, and support. It may well be that the cost-effectiveness, efficiency, and relative incorruptibility of the technique of income distribution (the use of unique iris scan technology for a non-familial beneficiary) and associated bio-political care augur well for minimising malfeasant tendencies in the distribution of such payments.
A major point that may be made about Seekings & Nattrass’ (2015) and Ferguson’s (2015) descriptions of social grants above is that some parts of the Global North are also undergoing sea-change in the structures of their social security systems, particularly their emerging ‘universal basic income’ grant. In Finland, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Canada, and the United States of America, trial runs, a referendum, or an actual social payment programme are being launched on municipal or national scales. Historical and contemporary trials on such payments, meant to be unconditional, have shown improvements in the lives of individuals and family recipients, including increases in skills levels, housing security and women’s income independence. The new programmes of guaranteed minimum income are also expected to benefit national economies through expanded consumption levels as well as cuts in the administration costs for such programmes.
What is distinctive about Ferguson’s (2015) input is his reworking of the idea of social security, reconceptualising it away from the language of safety nets to that of social payments. In such a formulation, the state owes people provisioning and care because national resources such as minerals and associated mining proceeds are products of national histories, including slave labour and the migrant labour system. This conception of direct distribution of cash, as common national wealth, implies that feelings of humiliation, shame, stigma and lack of self-worth that are associated with social assistance programmes are likely to be eliminated. The thinking about cash transfers as societal wealth also enables new kinds of political claim-making and new possibilities for political mobilisation that might go beyond the ameliorative effects of social grants (Ferguson 2015). In fact, social payments have already led to the crisis of masculinity, enabling new economic powers and possibilities for women and pensioners. Although this economic empowerment engenders conflict among household members (Mosoetsa 2011), such household relations can also be seen in terms of ‘reluctant mutualities’ as they are marked by self-interest and kinship obligations (Ferguson 2015). For these reasons, Ferguson (2015) suggests that social payments (unlike the programme of nationalisation, often built around patronage networks) are likely to be revolutionary, as they provide access to an actual good rather than an abstract right to it.
There is also a push for this fair share of common inheritance to be denationalised, and thus be made accessible to everyone, wherever they may be (Parnell 2008). In this sense, the new social is seen as concrete and embodied presence that invokes access to obligations implied by that presence. Accordingly, public goods and services (cash transfers, and by extension, basic municipal services) are distributed to everyone, irrespective of their national origin. The South African accounts of this voluntary sharing of national resources with a universal citizen are inconclusive. Even though for Ulrich Becker and Marius Olivier ‘South Africa … is one of those countries where the rights-based approach has been used with great success to ensure access to social security, particularly to non-citizens’ (2008: 10), there is an indication in their book that non-nationals are mostly excluded from social security (2008: 145).
Cash transfers enable livelihoods
The idea of cash transfers, also understood to be decoupled from labour, familial relations and the nationality, enables new ways of thinking about poverty, unemployment and development (Ferguson 2015). As largely redistributive activities, rather than productive, livelihoods are in part made by laboriously capturing pieces of salaries earned by workers. For example, rental accommodation, savings clubs, rotating-credit-schemes, mashonisas, debt administration and debt counselling are some of the strategies used to make livelihoods. James (2014) describes these activities as making money from nothing, while Ferguson (2015) elevates social payments to the level of salaries earned from production processes. The question then is how much of such pieces of salaries and social payments end up in the activities of livelihoods of the poor relative to large businesses? Similarly, to what extent are savings clubs, rotating-credit-schemes and the associated social networks able to connect spaces of livelihood formation (for instance, taverns, street trading, pubs, tuck-shops and local retail stores) to those that are dominant? The answer to these questions will be sector and place dependent. For example, in parts of Rustenburg (North-West Province) there is little indication that home-based retail stores are able to make significant returns from their operations. In the same sites, however, petty landlords do gain substantially from rental markets (business and residential).
In contrast to Ferguson’s (2015) argument that goods and services can be distributed to ordinary people, which for him are already overproduced, it is widely appreciated that such goods and services are not only unevenly produced globally, they are also distributed through unequal power relations. Accordingly, Ferguson (2015) argues that cash transfers create new markets in poor and remote areas, with the possibilities for catalysing livelihood activities of the poor. Indeed, the poor people know how best to use cash payments but such payments end up being captured by large retail stores, especially as they increasingly locate in townships and rural areas. At taverns in townships and some villages in Rustenburg and across South Africa, food, drinks and liquor are sold amidst a jovial music atmosphere. Patrons themselves grill meat on a specially assigned fireplace, outdoors, and are served cooked porridge, gravy and a selection of vegetables. Some taverns and pubs attract younger crowds that are often treated with ‘house music’, while other taverns appeal to older middle-class patrons with a taste for ‘contemporary rhythm and blues’ music. The vibrant neighbourhoods created by these activities represent an organic development of socio-cultural and economic spaces. However, as outlets of large retail companies in Africa (Shoprite stores; the National Sorghum Breweries) and as international monopoly companies (Coca-Cola; South African Breweries-Miller), the spaces created by taverns, pubs, tuck-shops, petty-landlordism, as well as the spaces created through street trading, savings clubs, stockvels, and mashonisas cannot be seen to provide options for meaningful social transformation. Instead, such activities, including local cultural institutions and access to basic municipal services, allow ordinary people to make good use of limited opportunities within the fault lines of dominant socio-cultural and economic landscapes.
Cash mediates social solidarities and self-interests
The role of credit in the emerging political initiatives of cash transfers is another key point that variously runs through the three books. For James (2014), the distributional regime of state spending is constituted not only by social grants and pensions, but also by the post-1994 creation of transmission bank accounts for ordinary poor people; the abolition of interest rate caps as well as the banning of garnishee and attachment orders. Following the official end of apartheid, such liberation of credit (easing of money flow) was meant to ensure higher levels of access to capital by blacks, whose ‘right to credit’ was constrained before then. It was also meant to lay the foundation for an economic role of the black middle class – facilitating their entrepreneurism and enabling their pursuit of aspirations for upward mobility and consumer identities (James 2014). These mechanisms for a credit revolution (loans accessed by blacks) are landing some people deeper in debt. But they also enable others, including those in villages, to start small businesses and to mediate the contradictions between personal concerns and kinship expectations (James 2014).
The ideas that prioritise household income as a key livelihood asset have long been revised in the interest of privileging social networks as crucial resources for livelihood formation (Wratten 1995; Chambers 1995). Ferguson (2015) further critiques the thinking that money has the capacity to erode social mutualities (Simmel 1971), highlighting instead the role of money in fostering social connections – money enables people to enter into relationships such as marriage as well as memberships of collectivities like funeral associations. Equally important, James (2014) notes the role of savings clubs, stockvels and mashonisas in reducing financial risks of household members. Accordingly, stockvels are structured in such a way that they can allow variable payments, depending on affordability – payment in kind, with some members paying more and in turn receiving more cash back than others. Further, the savings clubs of the middle class mimic banks while staying embedded in social networks and remaining outside state regulations. These workings of the moral political economy are indeed marked by tensions, as money enables both social obligations and self-interest in a single set of acts (a situation captured by the idea of ‘reluctant mutualities’) (Ferguson 2015). That said, James (2014) looks beyond these dualities of social commitment and self-interest, highlighting instead the shifting terrains of ambitions and dependencies, where an actor works to balance own-interests with sharing.
Credit shopping is similarly constitutive of the human economy as referred to above. Here debtors through ‘hire purchase buying’, were, by the end of the 1980s, self-responsible, investing in future access to credit by reliably servicing their existing debts. The context then was that no collateral was required to make loans, and interest rates were capped at lower levels (15 per cent), even if repayments were skipped. That form of shopping by credit was built on local norms, practices and local knowledge as well as personal connections (James 2014). Furniture stores sales representatives would make little effort to collect repayments, deliberately choosing not to see debtors at their homes. Debtors would also sell furniture items to sales representatives, who would resell it and keep the change. Debtors would ‘buy’ agents so as to escape the terms of purchase agreement. Upon dismissal by a furniture company, agents would continue selling furniture and collecting money for an item that will never be delivered. The larger point is that although ordinary people operate within the fissures of the dominant cash economy, they do influence its character through a more human economy or extortion (James 2014).
However, by the end of the 1980s, leaders and members of institutions such as burial societies have increasingly become unscrupulous, and for this reason sanctions came to be instituted in such relations. Accordingly, assets of various kinds, including those of a neighbour, came to be used as collateral to secure mashonisa loans. By the end of the 1990s, ATM cards and a form of identification were required to make these loans. Similarly, the post-1994 credit laws continue to favour credit providers in general – even though the Housing Act (107 of 1997) was meant to ring-fence ordinary people’s housing rights and to protect them against destitution and indigence, their properties continue to be attached and repossessed. Likewise, although the National Credit Act (34 of 2005) was meant to safeguard ordinary people against garnishee and attachment orders, creditors continue to issue garnishee orders and mashonisas use debtors’ ATM cards to recover loans. It is for these reasons that in his compelling discussion of ‘the new social’, Ferguson (2015) underplays the negative effects of biometrics, which for James (2014) enable creditors to pursue debtors with merciless efficiency. The contradictory effects of biometrics in the provision of social payments, and generally the use of prepaid technology to deliver basic municipal services (see below), mean that the support for activities of livelihood formation and access to credit for small businesses can increase, while stockvels and savings clubs can lessen financial risks for the middle class and poor households. That said, informal credit lenders such as mashonisas often use similar technological applications, which tend to land the poor and middle class deeper in debt.
Distributive neoliberalism
The three books also point to the ways in which market elements of efficiency, audits and outsourcing can be put to the service of cash payments for ordinary people. In that sense, the market, as a social institution, can be a mechanism for redistribution, despite its predatory tendencies. The state can use aspects of neoliberalism to facilitate access to credit for ordinary people (James 2014). For Ferguson (2015), elements of such an economic practice can be recombined in different ways to achieve particular social and political ends (expansion of direct distribution). The payment services may be outsourced to a private contractor through tendering procedures, but the payment itself (as a common property – tax money) remains a public good that is resistant to full privatisation. Broadly, it was noted earlier that private sector-led solutions may represent a crucial opportunity for service delivery in newer, weaker, and/or underfunded municipalities (Robinson 2011). Similarly, it will be argued below that the South African welfare and municipal services systems are redistributive in that the elites pay a large proportion of South Africa’s income and value added taxes; it will be argued that GEAR is in fact supportive, rather than a replacement, of the RDP; that it is because of GEAR that cash transfers and their recipients increased; and that the GEAR policies assisted the state to avert the 2008 global financial crisis. For these reasons, the specificity of the idea of distributive neoliberalism lies in the claim that the existing levels of poverty are much less than they would have been in a non-market based system. It also lies in the emergent possibilities of a market feature of cost-effectiveness as well as the speedy and effective adoption of modern technology to create institutional conditions necessary for facilitating universal citizenship.
In that sense, market elements can support a redistributional regime. An efficient use of modern technology to distribute social payments and to provide basic services such as cross-subsidised water can be used to remove institutional barriers to redistribution: to address the administrative problem of identifying an account holder; to address the problems of meter reading, account generation, and billing as well as the delivery of account by mobile phone as well as the challenge of improving the payment system and cash point convenience (Parnell 2008). Indeed, addressing such institutional barriers to receiving a service can create problems for recipients – linking the billing and pre-payment system can be used to effect blocking and surcharging mechanisms. These technological solutions can generally render ordinary people ‘visible’ to the state and also to predatory lenders. Governments have been criticised for their tendency to use modernist mechanisms of formalisation to suppress ordinary people’s practices and resources – practical knowledge, informal processes, improvisation – that are indispensable in the face of unpredictability (Scott 1998). Surely, modernity has been crucial in the human capacity to overcome social and natural challenges (Peet & Hartwick 2009). But given that public provision in many cases remains wanting, the state has more and more come to rely on neoliberal forms of governance to implement pro-poor policies. That is, hybrid forms of governance that retain public ownership while commercialising the provision of a service are increasingly seen to be plausible options (Ferguson 2015; James 2014; Robinson 2011; Bakker 2007).
In contrast to the logic of distributive neoliberalism referred to above, an established body of work in South Africa has for some time been critical of the role of markets in the distribution of resources (Adelzadeh 1996; McDonald & Pape 2002; McDonald & Ruiters 2005). This work holds that the shift from RDP to GEAR in the mid-1990s did not benefit ordinary people because the neoliberal post-apartheid state interventions – huge public sector spending, investments and government-sponsored loans for infrastructure in municipal utility services and capital infrastructure – disproportionately favoured private capital and the transnational elites (McDonald 2008). Although billions of South African rands have been spent on housing, water, and electricity infrastructure and services for low-income people, such expenditure is disproportionately lower relative to that spent on the needs of capital and elites (McDonald 2008). This scholarship also makes a number of related arguments: that the household-based lifeline provision of services such as water and electricity are insufficient, serving to reinforce ordinary people’s powerlessness (McDonald & Ruiters 2005; McDonald & Pape 2002). Additionally, the practices of efficiency, audits and outsourcing referred to earlier tend to divert funds away from the needs of the poor through the ring-fencing of functions; through performance management systems and associated performance bonuses (McDonald 2008). The neoliberal technologies of metered electricity and water, David McDonald (2008) argues, often come with punitive measures such as service surcharges, service blocking and self-imposed cut-offs or self-imposed consumption limits. The effects of these cost-cutting mechanisms – cost-recovery, reduced budget allocations and outsourcing of functions – tend to result in the provision of inferior level of services to ordinary people and, conversely, end up in generous subsidies for the wealthy (McDonald & Pape 2002). Overall, the contention for this body of work is that investments in cheaper municipal services, telecommunications, housing, roads, railways, ports, harbours, entertainment and convention facilities as well as the tax cuts for the wealthy have been part of the new accumulation strategy in South Africa since about 1996.
The opposing arguments on the effects of neoliberalism above (distributing resources or stratifying society) can be demonstrated by attending to the experiences of particular places and at particular times. For example, in Rustenburg in the 2005/6 financial year, consumers of electricity paid a basic fee of R49.30/kWh, with indigent and lower income consumers receiving (through means-tests) free 50kWh of basic electricity. However, there is a six-fold jump from the first tariff block (R34.92) to R251 in the second block. This cost is significant, constituting about 30 per cent of the monthly expenditure of low-income households across the country (Maharaj et al 2011). In contrast, higher income households using 601 kWh, spend only R547.38; a charge that is not only lower in terms of elite income share, but it also plateaus from the third graduated block onwards. As a result, room for cross-subsidisation is severely limited. In this case, therefore, McDonald (2008) has a point that free basic electricity is consistent with the neoliberal approach of full-cost recovery, an element of a tariff structure that disproportionally protects the rich. Indeed, in Rustenburg the electricity infrastructure capital budget spent in the previously disadvantaged areas was a mere third of R48-million in 2005/6. In 2012/13, only about 30 per cent of R75-million was spent in previously disadvantaged areas.
However, the situation is more redistributive in the case of the water infrastructure capital budget. For the consumption of 12kl of water, R61.80 cents was paid in 2005/6, with indigent consumers not paying for using that amount of water. As regards the 2013/14 financial year, the second block of the tariff structure rises to R251.82. As opposed to electricity, the water tariff structure rises steeply throughout the tariff blocks, resulting in higher costs for higher income groups. In this way, progressive cross-subsidisation from higher blocks is possible. Although for McDonald & Ruiters (2005) the poor people merely get a ‘lifeline’ supply, which only serves to reinforce powerlessness, for the period between 2005 and 2013 in Rustenburg, more than 80 per cent of the budget on water infrastructure went to the previously disadvantaged areas. The larger point here is that whether neoliberalism is resource distributive or stratifying society is a function of a sector, place and time; meaning that neoliberalism may be distributive.
Presences and absences
The one issue that Ferguson (2015) does not address is the ability and/or willingness of a state to keep resilient the very economy that he reckons can be shared. Indeed, he does acknowledge the decline in employment in South Africa since the 1970s as a result of slowing growth in manufacturing as well as stagnant mining and agricultural industries. Nonetheless, one of his major contentions is that the global economy is experiencing overproduction of goods and services, which are distributable. In this argument, he overlooks the uneven geographies of such productive processes. Those spatial inequalities mean that countries such as South Africa end up being net importers of goods and services with higher prices that ordinary people do not afford.
It is mainly James (2014) and Seekings & Nattrass (2015) who attend to the dual character of the South African economy (mainstream and marginal) and the extent to which it may sustain the distribution of social payments and basic services. Additionally, they also attend to this country’s classed, gendered, and racialised economy, which is also based on contradictory logics of alienability (commodity ownership form) and inalienability (customary form of resource ownership). In particular, James (2014) highlights the problem of banks treating houses in the black middle-class suburbs as risky investments. Such red-lining actions by banks limit the extent to which the middle-income blacks can participate in the economy through property markets. The impediment to full commodification of black people’s property is further expressed in township houses, which tend to be embedded in familial relations. Moreover, in rural areas, the permission-to-occupy certificate of the customary land tenure keeps this type of land ownership off the market (James 2014). Thus, as commodities, residential properties in the black suburbs, townships, and traditional villages would not only improve the living conditions of women and black men, it would also break South Africa’s dual economy (James 2014). Through these claims, James (2014) provides a liberal rights critique of a widely held conception that:
African forms of land tenure – which have produced both flexibility and tensions – have shown themselves quite capable of fostering agricultural development. If one followed the logic of taking institutions that have seemed conducive to economic growth in Europe as models for what Africans should do, one might be tempted to say that Africans need to make land into an alienable commodity and create an open market in land, including the possibility of selling land, in whatever size chunks … (Cooper 2014: 35)
In contrast to this egalitarian rights discourse as articulated by Frederick Cooper (2014), James’ (2014) contention is that family embeddedness and thus non-partibility of township houses and communal land tend to create hurdles for their marketisation and associated potential for development. Additionally, marital break-ups, limited educational skills, the absence of material capital assets for businesses as well as the lack of family assets that could be inherited, all present challenges to ordinary people’s social and economic aspirations (James 2014). Moreover, James (2014) notes that the legal geographies and operations of credit agencies are unjust, and state regulations regarding financial services are biased against debtors’ needs. By all means, debtors themselves do ‘play the system’, using debt counselling as a tactic to delay credit repayments. Nonetheless, a key point is that the flow of money (as mediated by credit and property markets) is uneven, and can be stopped, retarded and interrupted through cultural relations as well as spatial and institutional biases against ordinary people (James 2014).
Seekings & Nattrass (2015) address the labour market dimension of that interruptible money flow. For them, South Africa’s labour and fiscal policies since 1994 have failed to shape a labour-intensive economic growth path. For example, the Accelerated Shared Growth Initiative of South Africa (ASGISA) and its successor, the New Growth Path (NGP) delivered an economic growth path that is characterised by high productivity, huge profits and soaring wages for the upper classes. Such fiscal and labour policies broadly led to persisting inequalities seen also in the declining earnings for the unskilled workforce of the labour market that has undergone informalisation.
Moreover, Seekings & Nattrass (2015) are concerned with higher rates of unemployment and the lack of a basic income grant for the unemployed, especially for the ’18- to 59-year-olds’. The key issue for these two authors is that the South African welfare system has not had a serious impact on poverty levels because of the country’s structural constraints: import dependence, low worker retirement and pension savings that result in the elderly depending on the state; public works programmes that are never fully implemented not only because they are not budgeted for, but also because they are not linked to specific infrastructure projects, and they pay higher salaries, thus covering a smaller number of workers (Seekings & Nattrass 2015).
That said, the GEAR macroeconomic policy in the 1990s, which was for some time seen by scholars such as Asghar Adelzadeh (1996) to have been a departure from the RDP, Seekings & Nattrass (2015) now claim that it has been an essential and feasible way to realise the RDP. The GEAR fiscal policy paid off, they argue, because by the early 2000s, the budget deficit and debt burden were reduced and government was thus able to reflate the economy during the 2008 financial crisis, something that could not have been possible in the 1990s. Additionally, it could be because of GEAR policies that recipients of cash payment programmes rose from 2.4-million people in 1994 to 16-million people by 2014 (Seekings & Nattrass 2015). As a percentage of GDP, expenditure on such programmes rose from 2 per cent in 1994 to 3,5 per cent in 2014. Furthermore, the South African welfare system and municipal services remain redistributive (with the top income quintile alone contributing not only 97 per cent of personal income tax, but also 77 per cent of value added tax). Thus, despite social assistance not being universal, poverty and inequality are much less than they would have been in a non-market based system (Seekings & Nattrass 2015). Moving forward, while ‘job creation is not the solution to all problems’ (Ferguson 2015: 60), ‘job creation should not simply be forgotten in a clamour for higher wages (and subsidised services)’ (Seekings & Nattrass 2015: 132).
Conclusion
The three books analyse variously the ways in which economic resources are distributed through kinship networks, the state and markets. Kinship relationships have not only characterised savings clubs, burial societies, and stockvels, they have also historically embedded economic practices through local networks, practices, and accumulated knowledge. Such relationships also continue to be crucial in mitigating household financial risks and in practices of distributive livelihoods generally. This moral political economy has been thrown into disarray by the neoliberalising economy, resulting in severe controls – forms of identification, collateral, ATM cards, and various forms of societal sanctions – being used in both kinship and market institutions to recover monthly monetary contributions and loans. Nonetheless, money continues to enable ordinary poor people and the middle class to enter into various kinds of relationships, although such associations are marked by tensions and self-interest. At times, social relationships exceed the market imperatives of the local political economy, ultimately coming to reside in the realm of the affective (sets of solidarities, commitments and mutual support for collective improvements). Thus, the relationship between the affective and the cash economy is dialectically mediated through shifting terrains of ambitions and dependencies, where actors work to balance their own-interests with sharing (James 2014).
As regards the distributive role of markets, this review article reflected on the existing idea that the state ambitions of tax revenue generation, job creation, and basic services delivery are tied to the capitalist forms of economic activities (Robinson 2011). Given that capitalism is unevenly developed, and thus its histories and dynamics vary across space, the impact of neoliberalism on welfare and redistributional regimes may be negative in the Global North, but such negative effects may be limited in the Global South, where welfare interventions have been minimal from the outset (Robinson 2011). In fact, elements of neoliberalism can be put to the service of cash payments and the delivery of basic municipal services. Even the proponents of a basic income grant work within the logics of the markets, seeing neoliberalism as a springboard for development more than mainly delivering safety nets that in the process depoliticise the social (Ferguson 2015). This confidence in the markets apply to other areas of social life, including the commodification of township houses, where, were it not of their embeddedness in inalienable familial relationships, they would lead to wealth generation for ordinary and middle-class blacks (James 2014).
Unlike the other authors reviewed here, Ferguson (2015) paid little attention to the state of national economies in the Global South – the extent to which they may sustain the distribution of social payments and basic services. Although he acknowledges that social payments may not be feasible in some countries, that for him does not mean that such redistributive regimes cannot be realised by other states, particularly those of middle income countries. Accordingly, he highlights a number of instruments as possible sources for financing social payments in lower and middle-income countries: revenue from national resources attached to mining operations; a ‘global resource dividend’; humanitarian and philanthropic giving; Tobin Tax; carbon tax; a Global Basic Income meant to deliver international distributive justice as well as the ‘Social Protection Floor’ as suggested by the International Labour Office. The limited attention that Ferguson (2015) pays to a national economy’s ability to sustainably support social payments is based on his main concern for ‘the possibilities’ to institute a denationalised system of social payments for a universal citizen. For this, he concludes by quoting Lewis Henry Morgan: ‘Although the subject has been inadequately treated, its importance at least has been shown’ (Ferguson 2015: 216).
Taken together, the three books provide critical analyses of recent state interventions in improving the lives of ordinary people and point to a set of areas of possible social transformation in that process. The books can be inspirational to scholars and policy-makers interested in socioeconomic issues, although as this review article has shown, not all of the books are fully resolved.