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  • Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution by James Ferguson
  • Christopher Webb
James Ferguson, Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution (Durham: Duke University Press 2015)

In August 2015 South Africa’s National Union of Mineworkers warned of a “bloodbath” in the mining sector as companies prepared to lay off upwards of 20,000 workers. Job losses have not been confined to mining; the manufacturing and agricultural sectors have all shed jobs over the past decade. South Africa is increasingly a surplus labour economy, characterized by vast pools of low-skilled workers who are simply not necessary to the functioning of today’s capitalism.

It is in this context of widespread unemployment and poverty, that South Africa has witnessed the expansion of a social welfare system in which the state provides direct cash transfers to the elderly, those with children, and the disabled. These transfers now reach 44 per cent of households in the country. This expansion of welfarism is at odds with narratives that describe South Africa as model of neoliberal development. In Give a Man a Fish James Ferguson, a leading anthropologist of Southern Africa, suggests that these welfare payments contain the seeds of a new, potentially transformative, politics.

Underpinning this work is Ferguson’s antipathy to leftist critiques of neoliberalism, which, he claims, suffer from a [End Page 331] myopic obsession with identifying instances of neoliberalism rather than proposing alternatives to it. If the left is to reconstitute itself, it must look beyond these critiques to the multiple social and economic formations that can provide some alternative. There is an urgent need, and here I must agree, for a politics that embraces experimentation, discovery, and invention. Lest he be mistaken for a technicist policymaker, Ferguson stresses that these new forms of social welfare are neither perfect nor are they extensive enough. Rather, they are important because they provide an opening for political claim making and new possibilities for mobilization.

The introduction and first chapter provide the reader with a grounding in the “politics of distribution,” which Ferguson considers central to these new forms of social welfare. Waged work is not the only way that people make an income and this is particularly the case in Southern Africa, home to myriad forms of income redistribution and informal sector survivalist activity. In an era of surplus labour, he asks, how is it that people survive and households reproduce themselves?

An understanding of “distributive politics” requires a thorough grounding in the history of social protection in Africa, provided in Chapter 2. The types of social welfare policies developed in Europe in the post-war period were introduced to Africa in uneven ways. While colonial states established rural development projects, social welfare was largely confined to white settler populations. The purpose of historicizing social welfare in Africa is to move away from nostalgic readings and to propose new forms of social protection. South Africa’s welfare system, for example, remains heavily influenced by European models based on male wage labour where absence of employment was a temporary phenomenon. In an environment such a South Africa universal wage labour is hardly the norm.

Ferguson’s distributive politics is informed by the myriad ways in which households in Southern Africa have long been reliant on circuits of redistribution. In Chapter 3 he shows that new forms of social welfare have been inserted into a world in which distribution – between households, between urban and rural areas, and among the poor – is already pervasive. For example, remittances from urban to rural areas provide a crucial resource for the pursuit of livelihoods in rural informal economies. The work of “distributive labour” occurs along a multiple lines, including kinship sharing across poor households, financial support from partners and lovers, and the vast economies of funeral provision.

New forms of social welfare have drawn criticism primarily from the left. In Chapter 4, Ferguson responds by suggesting that left critics do not fully grasp the sociality of money. Direct cash payments, he argues, do not erode sociality or commoditize social relations thereby drawing people deeper into capitalist relations. Here he provides case studies of how...

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