A post-social question

Debates about 'the trouble with aid' are nothing new. But while these have usually focused on technical, financial or political concerns, the central challenge to the aid industry today is social. If the modern enterprise of aid was a systemic response to 'the social question' (the fallout of capitalist property relations in a class society), it is now faced with 'the post-social question' (the fallout of the social fragmentation brought about by the persistence of these property relations). As the withdrawal of aid from dependent recipients intensifies their hardship, a different politics of human life, grounded in radical needs, is now the necessary basis for a substantive contestation of the social transformations casting today's catastrophic horizon.