Transferred Justice: Historic Debt and Future Repair

Who owes what to whom? Can the debts of racial capitalism be repaid or repaired through redistribution? What role might basic income payments play in this process? In this speculative last chapter of Predatory Welfare, I consider the ways cash transfer recipients problematize social grant payments in South Africa. Far from the optimism around basic income, those who survive on grants often express concerns about how such payments are converted into new forms of debt. Such debts are not, of course, simple economic relationships between themselves and financial firms, but also between themselves, their households, the government and wider South African society. Some cash transfer recipients question the ways in which their cash transfers are easily converted into debts, and wonder whether cash alone can alter a highly unequal distributional regime. Instead, some of their demands stretch far beyond cash transfers, even universal ones, and are far more akin to reparations.