exemplified by the work of the Grameen Bank, seems to have proven a tool with the potential to empower the poor. However, the growing industry as a whole seems to reinforce inequalities by failing to address the power structures into which their borrowers will take loan money. Given the profound shortcomings of both interventions as agents of empowerment, the ever-growing enthusiasm for them among dominant development practitioners suggests that their actual appeal arises from their “supreme serviceability to the neoliberal/globalization agenda.” (Bateman and Chang, forthcoming). Arguably, coercive manipulation of ownership has always been the means by which the poor have been made to formally participate in capitalist economies—even where participation proved the most rewarding. Marxist theory suggests that capitalism is
driven inexorably toward the accumulation of assets in the hands of capitalists, perpetually vacillating between crises of accumulation and crises of legitimation (Harvey, 2009; Habermas, 1980). The former results when the surplus capitalists hold cannot find an outlet, because they have left insufficient buying power outside of their control to purchase their product, because of conflicts with labor that halt production, or any number of other “blockages.” (Harvey, 2009) The latter arises when capitalists seek new terrain from which to extract the resources they will invest and encounter resistance from those who challenge their rights to do so (Habermas, 1980). Modern neoliberalism, Harvey (2009) asserts, is feeding capitalism’s ever-expansive appetite for extraction by “opening up new fields for capital accumulation in domains hitherto regarded off-limits to the calculus of profitability.” And if
the institution of capitalism itself is the problem, then it would make sense that even attempts at transformational participation changes like Muhammad Yunus’ microfinance reforms would fail. Capitalism conquers not by simple dominance, but by reorganizing the world to feed it surplus value. Giving the poor access to capitalism also gives capitalism access to the poor. Some people do opt out of capitalism. So far those who have successfully escaped capitalist assimilation have done so through “everyday forms of peasant resistance” or by occupying frightfully inhospitable geographies. The modern conditions of rapid urbanization, slum dwelling, and massive informal economies may mark the arrival of an “other” system to the world’s cities, however what form these societies will take remains to be seen.
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