Redistributive politics and the temporalities of crisis: Reconfiguring social protection in a post-pandemic South Africa

Abstract

How does crisis open-up – or foreclose – new possibilities for alternative economic futures? This article explores the possibilities afforded by crisis for reconfiguring redistribution and welfare in contexts where access to income via work is increasingly tenuous. To do so, we turn to South Africa, where we examine the unfolding political possibilities and support for more generous and universal forms of social protection and (re)distribution during and after the Covid pandemic. In particular, we analyse visions of alternative redistributory policies both from above and from below, via original empirical data on the views of low-income inner-city residents in Johannesburg; interviews with government actors and civil society activists; and a close reading of media and policy discourse around social protection between 2020 and 2023. We argue while framing Covid as a crisis forced the state to embrace less workerist approaches to social protection, the very fact that new policies were rooted in an emergency context may have blunted more radical redistributory visions. This argument is underscored by the vacillations and internal contradictions of the South African government’s expansion of its social grant system, as well as by the delimited scope of grassroots demands for more generous or unconditional economic support during and after the pandemic. We make the case that ‘crisis temporalities’ – and the temporality of work and welfare more generally – is critical to understanding the lack of political will and popular demands for more radical forms of redistribution and economic security beyond work.

The commodification of poverty in the Global South: The emergence of a social policy market (São Paulo, Brazil)

“…The co-optation of the poor population whose living conditions benefitted from temporary improvement, the active consensus among social movements, union leaders, and the organized civil society, have been combined with conservative economic policies. This point is also very similar to South Africa (Ansari, 2022; Dawson and Fouksman, 2023). Indeed, the country benefitted from the boom of commodities, in particular during the second term of the first Lula government (President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, 2003-2006 and 2007-2010), increasing the commercial balance by creating comparative advantages for large multinational mining and raw material companies of all types, while the rights of local populations were ignored.…”

Reconfiguring labour and welfare in the Global South: How the social question is framed as market participation

“…The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the magnitude of how a specific crisis ruptured the global systems of production and social reproduction (Gammeltoft-Hansen et al, 2022;Lin et al, 2023;Walby, 2022). Recently emerging schemes of social protection in the Global South hardly shield ordinary people from the risks embedded in precarious work, market insecurities, and ecological instabilities, which could quickly morph into breakdowns and sufferings (Leisering, 2021;Rydstrom, 2022; see also Fouksman and Dawson, 2023), undermining livelihoods and social protection (Plomien et al, 2022). No longer limited to the nation state (Castel, 2003;Kaufmann et al, 2012;Leisering, 2020), these issues are both global in scope (Breman et al, 2019), and transnational, with the crisscrossing of different trajectories of labour mobility (Faist, 2019).…”