From Commoning to Debt: Financialization, Microcredit, and the Changing Architecture of Capital Accumulation

Abstract

The article examines the development of the new “debt economy,” especially the expansion of individual debt, in its relation to the main props of the neoliberal agenda: the precarization of work, the dismantling of the “welfare state,” and the increasing financialization of reproduction. The debt-based economy and the production of mass indebtedness, which must be viewed as a response to the accumulation crisis caused by the social struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, represents an important transformation in class relations. “Debt” hides class antagonism, individualizes workers, and weakens resistance to exploitation. In particular, “debt” undermines social solidarity, as in the case of microfinance where failure to repay loans results in much physical and psychological violence against the mostly female borrowers. The article traces the rise of antidebt movements, especially in Latin America and the United States, underlining their importance in the regeneration of the social fabric and the collectivization of resistance to banks, nongovernmental organizations, and debt collectors.

Valorised but not valued? Affective remuneration, social reproduction and feminist politics beyond the crisis

“…Three core aspects can be identified of what has been termed a financialisation of social reproduction (Dowling and Harvie, 2014;Federici, 2014;Roberts, 2015).…”

“…First, the financialisation of explicitly gendered activities involves the financialisation of allegedly female characteristics and of women's bodies and labour, e.g. in the ways in which women are explicitly targeted in micro-credit schemes (Federici, 2014) or other financial and consumer products (Allon, 2014). In other words, the ways in which an under-utilisation of women's productive capacities becomes the ideological basis for what Roberts (2015) has called 'Transnational Business Feminism'.…”

“…Second, the financialisation of the household pertains to the increase of personal debt, household utility payments and risk management in the form of insurance and other financial products, such that a portion of (future) household income and the activities undertaken in the home are tethered to financial markets (cf. Bryan, Martin and Rafferty, 2009;Allon, 2014;Federici, 2014). Third, the financialisation of welfare and social and community activities focuses on forms of social provisioning or social reproduction outside of the household: volunteering.…”

Women, girls and world poverty: empowerment, equality or essentialism?

“…Over and above these concerns, the limitations of microfinance in offering a meaningful pathway out of gendered poverty, let alone any assurance of 'female empowerment', are compounded by a lack of specialist guidance in enterprise growth, weak local or wider economies, and grassroots needs to divert loans to solving repeated crises of domestic consumption (Bibars, 2010;Casier, 2010;Federici, 2014;Geleta, 2013;Herselman, 2014;Mohamed, 2010;Sweetman, 2010). As summarised by Sholkamy (2010: 257):…”

“…Part of the blame for these prejudicial consequences has to be the way in which microfinance schemes trade on gender-stereotyped essentialisms such as women's purportedly greater responsibility for their families, and likelihood of complying with loan repayments, and perhaps more covertly, their susceptibility to intimidation (Federici, 2014:236; see also Elyacher, 2002;Geleta, 2013;Herselman, 2014;Wilson, 2011b). Indeed, even where women are not subjected to direct harassment by official personnel, the group structure of many microfinance programmes effects new community-based 'internalised'…”