A key inquiry of Susanne Soederberg’s penetrating and original book Debtfare States and the Poverty Industry: Money, Discipline and the Surplus Population is what is ‘the financial’ in which the poor are so kindly asked to join.
Refuting the mainstream position that financial inclusion is a natural, inevitable and mutually beneficial arrangement, Soederberg convincingly argues that the structural violence inherent to neoliberalism and credit-led accumulation have created and normalized a reality in which the working poor can no longer afford to live without expensive credit.Credit is an instrument of capital accumulation, class regulation, and symbolic subjugation. The book transcends economic treatments of credit and debt by revealing how the poverty industry is extricably linked to the social power of money, the paradoxes in credit-led accumulation, and ‘debtfarism’. The latter refers to rhetorical and regulatory forms of governance that mediate and facilitate the expansion of the poverty industry and the reliance of the poor on credit to augment/replace their wages.…
Economic Sociology and Political Economy
Credit makes you free! Neoliberalism, politics of debt and the subjugation of the working poorOleg Komlik
