Clawing Back

Redistribution in Precarious Times

By: Deborah James

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Paperback | 29 September 2025

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Paperback
277 Pages

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15.1 x 22.9 x 1.7

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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 financialization is accompanied by increased informalization, redistribution can equally involve the market as well as kinship and social networks. Drawing on a rich ethnography of the human relationships at the center 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, to convert between commodified and non-commodified relationships. Rather than suggesting that financialization 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.

Industry Reviews

"James reveals how work, welfare, and debt are not merely survival mechanisms but are woven into a larger tapestry of moral, familial, and financial interdependence. With a keen eye, James deftly challenges totalizing accounts of financialization and evocatively illuminates how financial and familial relationships interlock, people tack back and forth between calculative and relational forms of reason, and borrowing can be seen not as a beggar's supplication but a strategist's gambit, which while not always unequivocally successful nevertheless affirms agency in a world where we so frequently feel we have been stripped of it." -Bill Maurer, University of California, Irvine "In Clawing Back, discover how people creatively piece together wages, welfare, and debt to claim what they are owed. This provocative exploration urges us to radically rethink redistribution, highlighting the informal and everyday strategies people use to secure a fairer share in an increasingly and dramatically unequal world. An essential read for anyone interested in poverty, inequality, and justice." -Isabelle Guerin, French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development

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