Debtfare States and the Poverty Industry ─ Money, Discipline and the Surplus Population

Instead of celebrating the highly popular concept and strategy of financial inclusion, the book seeks to understand relations of power, inequality and exploitation that underpin the exponential rise of expensive forms of consumer credit to people, who can ill afford the interest and fees attached to it, nor afford to live without it. It also addresses the role of states and, by extension, international organizations, in facilitating, mediating, and the expansion of consumer credit to the poor.

Using a historical materialist approach to understanding the credit/debt system it reveals both the dimensions of class-based power and the social power of money and the credit system. The analysis is concerned with explaining why and to what ends the consumer credit for the poor has become an indispensible feature of financial-led capitalism and its social reproduction under neoliberal forms of governance. The author examines the exploitative nature of the securitized credit system and its effects on the everyday lives with case studies on pension securitization and different types of consumer debt ranging from payday and student loans in the United States to residential housing finance in Mexico.

Providing a much-needed theorization of the politics of debt and credit with regard to the poor and the global implications of the securitization of development, as it relates to financial inclusion of the poor in the developing world, this book will be very strong interest to students and scholars of Global Political Economy, Finance, Global Development Studies, Economic Geography and Economic Sociology.

Susanne Soederberg is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Global Political Economy at the Department of Global Development Studies, cross appointed with the Department of Political Studies, Queen’s University, Canada.