James Ferguson, Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution,

Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. ISBN: 978-0-8223-5895-4 (cloth); ISBN: 978-0-
8223-5886-2 (paper)

“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a
lifetime.” It’s a proverb that has guided the thinking of mainstream Development
institutions for many decades, even if its gender bias has been questioned. Rather than
giving “handouts” to the poor, the priority has been building skills and capabilities that
will allow them to become productive, wage-earning members of society. In this lively
and provocative new book, James Ferguson proposes an alternative way of thinking
about poverty and inequality. What if, instead, we focus on the politics of distribution?
This is not some abstract question plucked out the air. It emerges out of a set of
material changes in southern Africa, where Ferguson has been conducting ethnographic
research for three decades. The first will be familiar to most critical geographers. In the
postwar years, both modernization theorists and structural Marxists anticipated that the
economies of poor countries would undergo a transformation as agricultural labor
migrated to cities to be absorbed by a growing industrial sector. Today, the idea of the
“informal sector” as a temporary stopgap on this journey is no longer tenable. Even in
countries that have experienced high GDP growth rates, the number of new formal sector
jobs created remains pitifully low. Millions of people have been rendered surplus to the
requirements of the global capitalism (see also Jeffrey and Young 2014; Li 2010).
If the problem of mass un/underemployment is now widely recognized, a second
development is perhaps more surprising. Spending on social assistance in much of
southern Africa has actually increased significantly over the last decade. But this is not

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welfare as we knew it. A growing proportion of public expenditure is being funneled into
a variety of non-contributory cash transfer programs that do not have strong
conditionalities. These programs primarily target those who care for children, who have
disabilities, or who qualify for a pension. But this is hardly an insignificant population.
Indeed, 3.4% of South Africa’s GDP is currently being redistributed through cash
payments that are received by more than 16 million individuals, or 30% of the total
population (p.5).
Why has this apparent revolution in social assistance failed to attract much
attention from critical scholars? One argument offered by Ferguson is that the academic
Left tends to know what it is “against” but not what it is “for” (see also Ferguson 2010).
Since the 1980s, innumerable studies have denounced the dismantling of the Keynesian
welfare state and the rise of market-mediated forms of poverty management. When cash
transfer programs emerged in Central and South America in the late-1990s, recipients
were required to first fulfill certain responsibilities, which meant that they were generally
seen as working with the grain of neoliberalism (Peck and Theodore 2010; cf. Ballard
2013). Ferguson, however, follows scholars such as Stephen Collier (2011) in arguing
that the presence of elements of neoliberalism should not be grounds for wholesale
dismissal. If we just subscribe to a “politics of the anti-” (p.4), we risk missing the
progressive potential of cash transfer schemes. He points out that Foucault himself
argued that in order to challenge neoliberalism, the Left would have to develop its own
“arts of government” (p.27). If we are interested in such a project, Ferguson suggests that
cash transfers offer a rich site for experimentation and innovative thinking, not just more
critique.

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 Rather than tracing a global policy network, the book is attentive to the specific
regional history that has given rise to cash transfers in southern Africa. Whereas the mid
20th century saw the expansion of welfare programs in the West, such interventions were
restricted to a privileged minority of formal sector workers in much of colonial Africa.
For the rest of the population, social security was premised on the idea of a “traditional”,
rural extended family supported by a male wage laborer living in the city (p.69). This
model began to falter in the 1970s due to deindustrialization and the casualization of
labor. However, the end of apartheid also meant that access to pensions and grants was
dramatically expanded in the 1990s. It was from this conjunctural moment–wherein
millions of black South Africans found themselves included politically but excluded
economically–that cash transfers began to expand across the continent.
Ferguson goes on to examine the livelihoods of people in cities across southern
Africa, noting that those who make a living in the informal sector are usually involved in
various forms of “survivalist improvisation”. Crucially, he argues that these improvised
livelihoods are not usually aimed at producing goods and services; rather, they are
oriented toward capturing a piece of the wages earned by those who do receive a salary.
The window washer, the panhandler, the pickpocket, and the rural mother visiting her
family in the city are all examples of what Ferguson calls “distributive labor” (p.101). If
we recognize the full significance of this labor in the regional economy, it becomes clear
that livelihoods based on practices of distribution rather than production are already an
established reality for the majority of southern Africans (p.116).
Could cash payments be a Trojan horse that will allow money and market logics
to dominate the lives of the poor, destroying altruistic social bonds in the process?
Ferguson argues that this critique stems from a romanticized reading of non-capitalist

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economies. In reality, as Mauss’ (1967) work demonstrated, forms of “gifting” are never
free from conflict or expectations of reciprocity (see also Graeber 2011). Likewise, the
presence of money in social relations does not prevent them from also being sites of
caring, cooperation, and sharing (p.127). Mark Hunter’s (2010) superb ethnography of
AIDS and intimacy in contemporary South Africa shows how ideas of love are intricately
interwoven with economic concerns. Read through this lens, Ferguson argues that cash
transfers may actually “enable less malevolent sorts of dependence to take root and a
circuit of reciprocities to unfold within which one-sided relations of dependence can
become more egalitarian forms of interdependence” (p.138).
Ferguson also engages with liberal arguments that valorize individual agency and
view cash transfers as creating new forms of dependency. He argues that economic
restructuring has effectively “freed” many southern Africans from the wage labor system
but this has hardly been an emancipatory experience. Indeed, to the discomfort of
liberals, many of the poor actually seek out dependent, hierarchical relations with those
who are better off. This is hardly surprising considering the alternative, and Ferguson
argues that we could learn much from studying how poor people seek to negotiate social
inequalities that, however reprehensible, are a reality of life. Cash transfers might not
eliminate inequalities, he concedes, but they could promote more “asocial” forms of
interdependency premised on a guaranteed income rather than the patronage of those who
have money and power (p.156).
To be sure, Ferguson is aware that there are many existing and potential problems
with cash transfer schemes. What makes this book so refreshing is his refusal to simply
throw in the towel in the face of these limitations. The politics of cash transfers, he
insists, are emergent and still up for grabs. Why should mineral wealth be seen as a

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resource to be shared but not the wealth generated by financial transactions? Why frame
programs in national terms rather than thinking of regional or global transfers of wealth?
Why exclude working-age men on the outdated assumption that they can access waged
labor while women care for the family? In Namibia, the campaign for a Basic Income
Grant (BIG) is already raising many of these questions. Rather than seeing cash transfers
as a substitute for wages, a reward for good behavior, or as charity, the BIG campaign
understands them as a means of giving citizens–or returning to them (p.195)–their
“rightful share” of the collective wealth. This is the kind of political movement that
Ferguson believes can drive cash transfers in a more radical direction.
This is an extremely important book and one that will no doubt find a wide
readership. It challenges conceptions of Africa that see the continent as either falling
behind or catching up to the West. It pushes critical scholars to question their
productionist bias and take seriously questions of distribution. Perhaps most importantly,
it is for something, even if Ferguson’s optimism is tentative and provisional. Read
alongside work on the living wage campaign in London (Wills 2011) and workers’
cooperatives in Buenos Aires (Chatterton 2005), it demonstrates that there are spaces
where different economic relations are being imagined and enacted. Some might see
these efforts as localized and, no doubt, compromised. However, as genealogies of
economic globalization have shown, neoliberalism did not emerge as a set of cohesive,
ideologically-pure policy prescriptions, but through a series of disparate experiments in
market governance (Brenner et al. 2010). Could these new experiments in redistribution
also coalesce into a wider, more radical movement for social justice? This book does not
have all the answers but I think it certainly pushes the debate in the right direction.

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References

Ballard R (2013) Geographies of development II: Cash transfers and the reinvention of
development for the poor. Progress in Human Geography 37(6):811-821
Brenner N, Peck J and Theodore N (2010) Variegated neoliberalization: Geographies,
modalities, pathways. Global Networks 10:182–222
Chatterton P (2005) Making autonomous geographies: Argentina’s popular uprising and
the Movimiento de Trabajadores Desoocupados (“Unemployed Workers
Movement”). Geoforum 36(5):545-561
Collier S (2011) Post-Soviet Social: Neoliberalism, Social Modernity, Biopolitics.
Princeton: Princeton University Press
Ferguson J (2010) The uses of neoliberalism. Antipode 41(s1):166-184
Graeber D (2011) Debt: The First 5000 Years. New York: Melville House
Hunter M (2010) Love in the Time of AIDS: Inequality, Gender, and Rights in South
Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press
Jeffrey C and Young S (2014) Jugād: Youth and enterprise in India. Annals of the
Association of American Geographers 104(1):182-195
Li T (2010) To make live or let die? Rural dispossession and the protection of surplus
populations. Antipode 41(s1):66-93
Peck J and Theodore N (2010) Recombinant workfare, across the Americas:
Transnationalizing “fast” social policy. Geoforum 41(2):195-208
Mauss M (1967) The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (trans I
Cunnison). New York: Norton
Wills J (2009) The living wage. Soundings 42:33-46

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 Stephen Young
Department of Geography
University of Wisconsin-Madison
[email protected]

December 2015