Debt will make you free?

                Within the topic of neoliberalism, Shuster, Graeber, and the Comaroffs all touched on issues associated with the trend in development toward microfinance.  What resonated with me was the critique that challenges citizens to consider “the enchantments”[1], the package deal of democracy, nationalism, and freedom which springs from capitalism as an ideology.  Microfinance can be seen as emplacing personal debt in the third world, modeling the Grameen Bank value that “credit is a human right.”[2]  The poor of the world are already financing the debts of the nation-states they live in (a direct result of political neoliberalism) by bearing the burden of infinite production in a finite world. Encouraging debit/credit to support market solutions to poverty, is proposing an enterprise solution to a problem grounded in neoliberal capitalism itself.

                The story of the Indian farmer suicides in the video and article (link below) is an example of how these policies can culturally isolate individuals and result in tragedy--this is a form of microfinance based on a system that cultivates an  individual as a “tiny corporation” in a singular calculated paradigm organized “around the same relationship of investor and executive.”[3]

http://www.democracynow.org/2011/5/11/every_30_minutes_crushed_by_debt            .

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[1] Comaroff and Comaroff, p318

[2] Graeber, p380

[3] Graeber p377