How Finance Capital Profiteers from Social Grants
By Erin Torkelson
Predatory Welfare: How Finance Capital Profiteers from Social Grants offers a powerful account of social welfare in South Africa. It examines cash transfers and their role in shaping inequality. Erin Torkelson presents this work in a narrative style. She follows individual lived experiences to ground the analysis.
The book challenges a widely held belief. Many policymakers argue that cash transfers solve poverty. Development agencies support this view. Progressive academics also promote it. However, Torkelson questions this assumption directly.
She shows that cash transfers do not operate as simple solutions. Instead, she positions Predatory Welfare as a complex system shaped by finance capital. This framing introduces Predatory Welfare as a key analytical lens throughout the book.
Rethinking cash transfers and poverty solutions
Torkelson argues that cash transfers do not function as neutral interventions. She directly challenges the idea that money alone can eliminate poverty. She shows that predatory welfare systems often produce unintended consequences. These systems shape inequality rather than reduce it.
The book also critiques mainstream development narratives. It rejects the idea that cash distribution automatically creates dignity or security. Torkelson bases her research on seven years of immersive fieldwork in South Africa. She conducts this research across multiple sites. These include grant payment queues and grocery stores. She also studies Parliament and the Constitutional Court.
Through this fieldwork, she shows how predatory welfare becomes embedded in daily life. She demonstrates how a flagship anti-poverty programme connects to predatory finance systems.
Instead of offering relief, cash transfers often function as financial leverage. Lenders use grants as collateral. This process pushes recipients, especially Black women, into cycles of debt. Survival strategies often appear as personal failures. However, Torkelson links these outcomes to structural inequality. Financial systems label recipients as risky subjects. They also racialise them as poor money managers.
State intervention and structural limits
Civil society campaigns pushed the state to act in 2018. These campaigns forced the government to reclaim control of the payment system from private companies. However, Predatory Welfare conditions did not disappear after this reform. Instead, new challenges emerged. Austerity policies increased pressure on recipients.
Weak infrastructure also limited system effectiveness. Financial stress continued to expose recipients to hardship. These conditions created new forms of vulnerability within the welfare system.
Torkelson blends analysis with storytelling. She uses this approach to rethink welfare systems in South Africa. Her work argues that predatory welfare cannot be viewed as benevolent or neutral. She shows that social grants interact with broader systems of finance and inequality. She concludes that economic justice requires more than cash transfers. Policymakers must address structural inequality directly.
About the author
Erin Torkelson originally comes from Arizona. She works as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Geography at the University of the Western Cape. She also holds a doctorate in geography from the University of California, Berkeley.
Her scholarship spans multiple fields. These include political economy, critical development studies and critical race theory. She also works in feminist kinship studies and science and technology studies.
She has published academic work in World Development, Society and Space, and the Journal of Southern African Studies. Her popular writing appears in Counterpunch, Znet, GroundUp, The Daily Maverick and The Mail & Guardian. She also produced a documentary film for The Cutting Edge on SABC1.
Torkelson collaborates with the Black Sash, Open Secrets and the Institute for Economic Justice. She focuses on South Africa’s social grant system. She has also presented research to the Constitutional Court-appointed Panel of Experts, the National Credit Regulator, the South African Social Security Agency, and the Department of Social Development.
- DISTRIBUTOR | Jacana Media |
- ISBN | 9781431436880 |
- Recommended Retail Price | R340.00 |
- Classification | Current Affairs |
