From anti-debt movements in Mexico, Spain, Poland, Croatia, and Chile to the Occupy movements in the United States, Israel and Canada, organizations repudiating both debt and the centrality of financial markets have proliferated worldwide. In this article, I draw on Polanyi’s work in order to frame the financialization of society and different forms of debt repudiation as a double movement, characterized as a second wave of the commodification of money and the attempts by society to protect itself from the advancement of finance. Relying on a secondary literature and my own ethnographic research on debtors’ movements, I explore the commonalities and differences between diverse forms of repudiating debt through collective action at both national and international level.
Un gran número de investigaciones estudia la relación entre el uso de las plataformas de redes sociales y distintas formas de participación política. Sin embargo, la evidencia respecto del rol en la participación electoral es reducida, sobre todo para el contexto de América Latina. Esta investigación busca analizar la relación entre el consumo de información política en Facebook y Twitter y la concurrencia a votar en las elecciones en Chile. Para ello, se utilizan datos provenientes de encuestas de opinión pública que miden la participación en los comicios de 2013 y de 2017 (n=7736). Se aplica la técnica de Full Matching (FM) para reducir el sesgo de (auto)selección presente en estudios observacionales y realizar comparaciones válidas. Se contrastan las estimaciones antes y después de la aplicación del FM, encontrando diferencias relevantes. Los resultados con FM señalan que el consumo de información política en las plataformas de redes sociales no se asocia con la participación electoral en el periodo de estudio. Esto abre una discusión respecto de los diversos tipos de uso de las plataformas y la participación electoral.
The quest for social status is usually considered one of the main drivers of the demand for consumer credit. This article provides a nuanced take on consumer credit by exploring the interaction between consumption, borrowing, and class identity. To do so I pursue a cultural class analysis inspired by the work of Pierre Bourdieu. Drawing from 26 semi-structured interviews, the article has two main findings. First, it shows that people engage in borrowing not only to gain prestige, but also to assert their belongingness to symbolic groups, which embody the values of imagined communities. Second, against the idea that borrowing is undertaken mainly for conspicuous consumption, the article’s findings show that middle- income families in Chile borrow to consume ‘ordinary’ goods. Through the consumption of these goods, the Chilean middle classes seek to stabilize their class identities through their life trajectories, thereby achieving a sense of place in a changing environment. These findings lead me to focus on the normalization of credit and the process through which borrowing practices turn consumer goods from wants into needs, ratcheting up the demand for credit. The article argues that this is an overlooked way in which competitive dynamics drive the demand for credit, which is a missing link in the explanation for the rise of household debt.
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