have at least some share can in fac

have at least some share can in fact be meaningfully shared. Proponents
of Malema-�style nationalization have never managed to supply an adequate
answer to that, and neither (it must be said) have socialist theorists
of either the Marxian or the anarchist stripe.40 But the intersection of a
demand for rightful shares with a bureaucratic apparatus for direct payments
opens up concrete new possibilities that are only now beginning
to be explored. New kinds of welfare states, that is, may open up the possibility
of imagining new kinds of politics—Â�perhaps even new kinds of
socialism.
Distributive claims, after all, may rest on the most compelling ethical
and po�liti�cal rationales, but they can lead to actual distributive outcomes
only to the extent that there exists an effective and universal apparatus
of distribution. Without that, even the most assertive gestures of common
own�ership (such as nationalization) are unlikely to have genuinely
distributive outcomes, as we have learned only too well. The new welfare
states in places like Namibia and South Africa are in fact creating such apparatuses
of distribution and thereby putting into place (unintentionally,
I think) a precondition for a different kind of resource politics—Â�one that
could be socialist in a very different sense than traditional nationalization.
That is hardly an assured outcome, and perhaps not even a likely
one. But it is an intriguing possibility, and perhaps a hopeful point of
aspiration on which to focus a new form of progressive po�liti�cal practice.