Clawing Back by Deborah James

ISBN: 9781776149698

Publisher: Wits University Press, 1 July 2025

Paperback, 204 pages

Clawing Back draws on a rich ethnography of the human relationships at the centre of the redistribution of wealth. It shows how people use wages, welfare, and debt to constitute social relations and market futures, to engage with the state, and to convert between commodified and non-commodified relationships.

The impulse to redistribute wealth is said to be a tool to counter inequalities, applied by the state or society to curb the worst excesses of capitalist exploitation and free trade. In settings where previous political regimes are reformed, or toppled and replaced by new ones, redistribution can also be a policy specifically oriented at redress, one exercised at the formal level of policy. Drawing on a comparative ethnography in South Africa and the United Kingdom, Clawing Back explores how notions of reallocation and payout are intimately connected with those of compensation for a loss. Where financialisaton is accompanied by increased informalisation, redistribution can equally involve the market as well as kinship and social networks. Drawing on a rich ethnography of the human relationships at the centre of redistribution, Deborah James shows how borrowing can provide negotiation opportunities to wage earners and welfare beneficiaries alike: they make use of debt to constitute relations and futures, to engage with the state and to convert between commodified and non-commodified relationships. Rather than suggesting that financialisaton is serving either a totally negative or wholly beneficial purpose, James posits a different way of visualizing the relationship between the finance industry and the world of everyday needs.