Post-apartheid freedom of choice reduces to what one can afford and buy into

Evidence

The land of apartheid supposedly has become that of deracialized choice. On this account, one can live, school, work, consume, recreate, and even die anywhere and with those more or less of one’s choosing – so long as they’ll have you, of course. Less the choice of freedom than the freedom of choice, this latter liberty is all about affordability. One can be almost anywhere so long as one can buy one’s way in. A society on the make is a society above all on the take. Even a city street parking space requires coining the palm of an otherwise unemployed and all too helpful parking “supervisor” (“consultant” might be a better, if ironic, characterization). Failure to pay will leave one at least with a guilty conscience, if not a gutted car. A small example of the neoliberal economy at work, where the failure of support by a state crimped by global financial institutions such as the IMF insistent on diminished tax revenues is displaced onto a private sphere of informal employment fueled by a pay-as-you-go revenue stream diffused across the economy. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1597

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the social-capital and extralegal-contracting literature already in the library — informal pay-as-you-go economies (parking ‘supervisors’) as bottom-up institutions substituting for state capacity. — connects to: Post-apartheid sovereignty governs the quality of living but not who lives — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1628
• SEED: Angle: the informal ‘parking consultant’ economy as a microcosm of how the IMF-driven retrenchment of the state gets privatized into street-level extortion-charity hybrids.