Formalities of Poverty: Thinking about Social Assistance in Neoliberal South Africa

Abstract

Abstract:In Marginal Gains (2004), Jane Guyer traces the logic of African socioeconomic practices that have long confounded attempts by modern states to impose what she terms “formalization.” Nowhere is the tension between pragmatically “informal” economic life and putatively “formal” state structures more evident than in the domain of poverty interventions, which typically aim to bring state institutional power to bear precisely on those who are most excluded from the “formal sector.” This article offers a preliminary analysis of some new rationalities of poverty alleviation observable in recent South African political and policy discourse. I will argue that new sorts of programmatic thinking about poverty represent a new development within (and not simply against) neoliberalism, and that they seek, by abandoning the regulatory and normalizing functions usually associated with social assistance, to bring the formal and the informal into a new sort of relation.

A Brief History of the Social Wage: Welfare Before and After Racial Fordism

“…But as David McDonald (2008: 75) has argued, the extension of the South African state's participation, its "strength," is in fact entirely consistent with neoliberalism: on the one hand the focus is "cost recovery and other forms of social and economic discipline," which "remain the primary objectives" of the state. On the other hand, welfare-including housing provision, antiretroviral rollout, and the massive system of social grants (Ferguson 2007(Ferguson , 2013)-while marking an increased presence by the state, should be understood in historical perspective. "The most obvious difference," McDonald argues, "is that the welfarism of apartheid was highly skewed along racial (and to some extent ethnic) lines, complicating the moments of neoliberal destruction and creation" (75).…”

The financial impact of strikes: A worker’s perspective

“…The main contributing factor was that the 'Growth with Employment and Redistribution' (GEAR) policy led to massive job shedding, especially low-skilled, low-tech jobs most often held by the poor. Ferguson (2007) reported that unemployment in South Africa had doubled from 2,2 million in 1994-1996 to 4,5 million in 2003. The official estimate of unemployment was conservatively approximated at 26,7% of the economically active population.…”

Neoliberalism in Retrospect? It’s Financialisation, Stupid

“…One major reason for the scepticism over neoliberalism concerns its diversity and complexity across time, place and issue, with a corresponding lack of distinctiveness as far as the neo-liberal component is concerned in the local application -Bush is surely neo-liberal but he nationalises banks and insurance companies! This problem has been explicitly addressed by Ferguson (2007) in the context of social policy, for he appropriately charts the extent to which the rationale for a Basic Income Grant (BIG) in South Africa has often been provided by progressives in deploying arguments that are borrowed from the neo-liberal portfolio. He reasonably asks, p. 83/4: When activists, trade unionists, and others opt to seek concrete economic improvements for the poor by adapting to the reality of neoliberalism and speaking its language, are they simply falling into a trap by allowing issues of power and policy to be framed within a grotesque liberal vision of society that reduces all human activity to the pursuit of capital by (more and less impoverished) "entrepreneurs"?…”