Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Book Review Symposium

2012; Wiley; Volume: 44; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1467-8330.2011.00970_6.x

1467-8330

Ananya Roy,

Urban and Rural Development Challenges

Ananya Roy , Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development , London : Routledge , 2010 . ISBN 978-0-415-87673-5 (paper), ISBN 978-0-415-87672-8 (cloth) . Mr Jiabao. Sir. When you get here, you'll be told that we Indians invented everything from the Internet to hard-boiled eggs to spaceships before the British stole it all from us. Nonsense. The greatest thing to come out of this country in the ten thousand years of its history is the Rooster Coop. Go to Old Delhi, behind the Jama Masjid, and look at the way they keep chickens there in the market. Hundreds of pale hens and brightly colored roosters, stuffed tightly into wire-mesh cages, packed as tightly as worms in a belly, pecking each other and shitting on each other, jostling just for breathing space; the whole cage giving off a horrible stench—the stench of terrified, feathered flesh. On the wooden desk above this coop sits a grinning young butcher, showing off the flesh and organs of a recently chopped-up chicken, still oleaginous with a coating of dark blood. The roosters in the coop smell the blood from above. They see the organs of their brothers lying around them. They know they're next. Yet they do not rebel. They do not try to get out of the coop. The very same thing is done with human beings in this country … The Great Indian Rooster Coop (Aravind Adiga 2008a:147, White Tiger). In his 2008 novel, White Tiger, Aravind Adiga tells the tale of Balram Halwai, a self-declared “entrepreneur” and “thinking man”. From his desk in Bangalore, the “world's center of technology and outsourcing”, Balram writes each night, for seven nights, to the premier of “the freedom-loving nation of China”, Wen Jiabao, to tell him about life in India. The letters forge a conversation between the two emergent powers of the Asian century. They look ahead to a time when “white men will be finished” and “yellow men and brown men” will “rule the whole world” (Adiga 2008a:262). Sitting at his silver Macintosh laptop, underneath a glittering chandelier, Balram thus boldly declares “I am tomorrow” (Adiga 2008a:4). But there is a twist to this tale of entrepreneurship. Balram's fortune is built on one decisive act, the murder of his employer—by the side of a dark and deserted road in Delhi, the smashing of a skull with an empty bottle of Johnnie Walker Black, the violent stamping out of the last few breaths of a dying, crawling body, a well planned escape with a red bag stuffed with 700,000 rupees. The murder—an execution if you will—of a master by the servant, constitutes the founding act of entrepreneurship. It is the only means by which, in Balram's India, servitude can be converted into entrepreneurship. After all Balram hails from what Aravind Adiga designates as the “Darkness”, a feudal destitution made up of bonded labor, wage slavery, and savage class exploitation. It is a world where teachers in rural schools steal school uniforms and lunches and teach no lessons, their salaries in turn stolen by the state; it is a world where young boys grow old working like “human spiders” in the teashops of provincial towns to pay off inter-generational debt; it is the world's largest democracy where votes are sold and cast at each election, entire villages pledge support for political parties but no villager has stepped inside a voting booth; it is a world of millennial development where the poor die spitting blood in tuberculosis-ridden hospitals but only cures, not diseases, are recorded in the state's archives. Of such a world, Spivak (1989:118) states: “Where everything works by the ruthless and visible calculus of super-exploitation by caste-class domination, the logic of democracy is thoroughly counter-intuitive, its rituals absurd.” Balram does not fear retribution or punishment for his act of crime, since as he notes “it was all worthwhile to know, just for a day, just for an hour, just for a minute, what it means not to be a servant” (Adiga 2008a:276). Writing to the Chinese premier, he argues that India has no need for a dictatorship or for a secret police, for it has servitude—more appropriately what Ray and Qayum (2009) have called a “culture of servitude”. Never before in human history have so few owed so much to so many, Mr. Jiabao. A handful of men in this country have trained the remaining 99.9 percent—as strong, as talented, as intelligent in every way—to exist in perpetual servitude; a servitude so strong that you can put the key of his emancipation in a man's hands and he will throw it back at you with a curse (Adiga 2008a:149). This is the Great Indian Rooster Coop. To break out of it, to become an entrepreneur, Balram must slay his master. We cannot understand such an act as nihilism, for it enacts rather than negates meaning. White Tiger is a story of poverty, entrepreneurialism, and postcolonial development. So is Poverty Capital. In it, I use the case of the global microfinance industry to shed light on the emergence of “bottom billion capitalism”, that which promises to convert the destitution of the world's poorest into entrepreneurial survival and resilience. Microfinance is a particularly interesting lens onto bottom billion capitalism, for it carries within it the pledge of financial inclusion, or what has been called the “democratization of capital”. Like White Tiger, Poverty Capital is a tale of “neoliberal populism”, an authorization of the people's economy but on terms established by the calculability of market rule. However, there are no Balram Halwais in Poverty Capital. In the ordered and managed world of microfinance, debt is productive rather than debilitating; the poor rise up, but to chant oaths of loyalty to banks, not commit murder; and villages in the Darkness come to be a part of the global grid of technosocial visibility that is smoothly managed by a proliferation of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), from those run by Hezbollah to those established by USAID. I am taken with Adiga's novel, White Tiger, precisely because all Balram Halwais are written out of the story that is Poverty Capital. Yet, the world of poverty capitalism is haunted by the specter of Balram Halwai, of the servant who smashes his way out of the Great Indian Rooster Coop. This founding act of murder, which converts servitude into entrepreneurship, speaks directly to a question posed by several of the critics of Poverty Capital: what is politics? In her commentary Katharine Rankin asks to know more about the “political openings inherent in the multiplicities of neoliberal populism”. So does Vicky Lawson. Is progressive politics possible in the context of neoliberal populism? If so, what does it look like? Rankin is correct in noting that Poverty Capital“hedges” on such questions. During the several years of research that led to the writing of Poverty Capital, I spent my time in the battlegrounds of millennial development. It was an effort to better understand the global project of poverty management and its entanglement with constantly expanding frontiers of capitalism. It was also an effort to redefine the terrain of poverty ethnography, to shift the ground of research from villages and slums to Wall Street boardrooms and World Bank training seminars, to what I saw to be centers of calculation. In such an endeavor, I came to focus on practices of privilege: the truth-making work of poverty experts who seek to reform development through financial management; the benevolence of eager American volunteers of the millennial generation as they encounter Third World poverty; well trained mediating professionals who receive and manage development aid and expertise and in so doing also articulate their middle-class identities. Frustrated and inspired by the intimate familiarities of such middle-class, truth-making professionalism, I designated some of these subjects as “double agents”, those able to transform complicity into moments of critique and subversion. Michael Watts notes that he is “still not sure what to make of these double agents and how we might conceive of them”. Not convinced that the double agent can be a figure of dissent, he asks: “after all is not the ideology of the double-agent a power narcotic in the operations of hegemony?” But for all those interested in the prospects of transformative praxis, I have little to offer from the world of poverty capitalism other than “double agents”. I can argue, as I do in Poverty Capital, that we ignore double agents at our own peril. If we are to better understand what Stephen Young rightly notes is the polyvalency of neoliberalism, then we must take account of the ethicalized character of millennial capitalism. Entrepreneurship is one lodestone of this ethical conjuncture. But as Vicky Lawson points out, so are “benevolent individualism” and “altruism”. Lest we too easily dismiss the universe of social enterprise and its circuits of “patient capital” (a phrase commonly used by Jacqueline Novogratz of Acumen Fund), it is worth noting that neoliberalism exists in “parasitical co-presence with other social formations” (Peck, Theodore and Brenner 2010:96). The ethicalization of finance capital must be understood at the very least as just such a “hybrid assemblage”. Here ideas of moral virtue deepen market liberalization, as shown by Stephen Young (2010) elsewhere. But here also an unease with the bottom line, bad money, and reckless profit prevails. Double agents are thus both the fuel and friction of millennial capitalism. Steeped in global liberalism, they raise a difficult question. They force us to ask how we mark and identify progressive politics and radical praxis. Surely this world of ethicalized development is quite different than the crude neoliberal ideologies of the 1980s or even the civil society laden rhetoric of the Clinton–Blair Third Way. In seeking to democratize capital, millennial capitalists explore the limits of the market itself. How then do we make sense of the venture capitalist heading to a poverty retreat where the writings of Frantz Fanon are mandatory reading and where seminars are titled “Colloquium for the Common Good”? We ignore such hybrid assemblages at our own peril, for turning away from them diminishes our capacity to understand the scope of the political. Perhaps I am more hopeful than my commentators, for I do not believe that the political has been irreversibly impoverished by the hegemonic machinations of neoliberal populism. I agree with Katharine Rankin's (2009:224–225) argument, presented elsewhere, that this sphere of the political is made up of subversions and that such subversions, unlike overt, collective forms of resistance, are not necessarily progressive. Rankin notes that subversions denote ambiguous forms of political agency that reveal fissures in the dominant apparatus but that may also strengthen existing hierarchies. I am not convinced that instruments like microfinance will democratize capital or that double agency will enact a radical transformation of a global system of obscene inequality. But if it is resistance that we want, then we have to return to Balram Halwai. We have to return to the politics of life and death, or what Mbembe (2003) has called “necropolitics”. The Great Indian Rooster Coop, Halwai speculates, is “ruled from within”. Microfinance, and indeed poverty capitalism itself, is perhaps one such rooster coop, a debt trap ruled from within. In various interviews, Adiga has noted that his book is inspired by Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, which he designates as a “book of a lifetime”: “Balram is my invisible man, made visible. This white tiger will break out of his cage” (Adiga 2008b; Jeffries 2008). Adiga (2008b) describes the streets of Indian cities as lined with “invisible men”—“thousands of day laborers, rickshaw pullers and beggars, the sleeping poor”; “their skin is the colour of my skin”. He imagines a day when the “Invisible Man speaks to us with his fists.” Neither the Darkness of invisible men bound in servitude, nor the shedding of lifeblood by murderous fists seeking redemption, makes its presence known in the world of bottom billion capitalism. Balram Halwai then is the “other” to poverty capital. The democratization of capital through microfinance loans, or even the electoral rituals of the world's largest democracy, are irrelevant to him. Only violence can mark his conversion to the role of “entrepreneur” and “thinking man”. He is, as Katharine Rankin would argue, a poverty expert, a poor man producing his own poverty truths. But he is no double agent. He is instead a white tiger, a rare and fictional specimen. Can such fictions be the cause for hope? In a speculative essay on “Hope and democracy”, Appadurai (2007:33) identifies hope as “a collectively mobilized resource”, one that involves a “whole new range of practices that allow poor people to exercise their imaginations for participation” that makes possible the “capacity to aspire”. “The patience required to engage the daunting scale and effects of mass poverty”, Appadurai argues, “is the key to the special relation between hope and democratic politics at the beginning of the twenty-first century”. While Appadurai places his hope in the politics of participation, others (for example Gibson-Graham) chart what Lawson (2005) has termed “hopeful geographies”, searching for alternative and diverse “postdevelopment” economies. In an early reading of Poverty Capital, one of my graduate students had perceptively noted that I place my hope in a set of postcolonial experiments, especially in the pro-poor service delivery organizations of Bangladesh. “Your genealogical analysis of millennial development breaks down at this location”, he noted, “as you begin to search for hope”. I had been seduced, he suggested, by the glimpse of hope. Was he inspired or disappointed? The postcolonial experiments with development that are an integral part of Poverty Capital cannot be interpreted as forms of radical praxis. They are not alternative economies of postdevelopment. Instead, they are steeped in ideologies of developmentalism and modernization; their everyday practice is that of patriarchal discipline and the art of NGO government. If Michael Watts identifies “modularization” and “miniaturization” as “central to the neoliberal vision of development”, then these systems of pro-poor service provision fit this bill. Primary education, tuberculosis medication, financial services, rural livelihoods are all provided in modularized and miniaturized fashion, governed by manuals of bureaucratic efficiency. Can Appadurai's collective mobilization take place under such conditions? We do not know the answer just yet in the countryside of Bangladesh. But I remain hopeful. In the broadest sense I share hope with James Ferguson who has, in the pages of this journal, recently called for complex readings of governmental power and social assistance: “Pro-poor” and neoliberal—it is the strangeness of this conjunction that is of interest here. For the sorts of new progressive initiatives I have in mind seem to involve not just opposing “the neoliberal project”, but appropriating key elements of neoliberal reasoning for different ends. We can't think about this (or even acknowledge its possibility) if we continue to treat “neoliberal” simply as a synonym for “evil”. Instead, I suggest (and this is a deliberate provocation) that some innovative (and possibly effective) forms of new politics in these times may be showing us how fundamentally polyvalent the neoliberal arts of government can be (Ferguson 2010:174). Ferguson (2010: 174) concludes that this conjuncture of development “is much more complicated … and perhaps also more hopeful”. Building on Ferguson's work, Stephen Young thus argues that “we need to think about … the progressive possibilities that might open up when schemes that are in some senses ‘neoliberal’ can also be made to co-exist with other more welfare state-like interventions”. It for this reason that I place hope in postcolonial experiments of development that trouble and disrupt the global order of millennial capitalism. Let me return to the world of microfinance for a brief explanation. In Poverty Capital, I present the global microfinance industry as engaged in the making of subprime markets. Through the elaborate management of risk and the self-responsibilization of risk, the high-profit microfinance sector empowers credit-worthy subjects and banishes those that are seen to be high risk, assigning the latter to what Katharyne Mitchell (2010:243) has rightly termed a fate of “sovereign dispossession”. Today, it is not just American home loans that are “woven through Wall Street securitization into global networks of debt and investment” by “entrepreneurial brokers and lenders” for “yield-hungry investors” (Wyly et al 2009:323, 351). So too are the modularized and miniaturized debt parcels of microfinance. Like home mortgages, the microloans of the world's bottom billion are, to borrow a phrase from Newman (2009), a “post-industrial widget”. This is the productivity of subprime debt; such is the reinvention of finance capital in a time of crisis. In its crudest form, the global microfinance industry is an instance of what Sparke and Lawson (2003:381) have termed “geoeconomics”, a territorial logic that “operates on an arrogantly global scale” and that seeks to create a flat world of mobile and networked capital. And as Sparke (2003:374) has noted elsewhere, we must take into account the ways in which “American hegemony is structured into global interdependency”. As evident in Poverty Capital, a war on poverty, waged through the global instrument of microfinance, is simultaneously an American war on terror. The subprime frontiers of capitalism coincide—uneasily—with imperial frontiers. This too is necropolitics. The Bangladesh experiments with development, including those with microfinance, interrupt this geoeconomic project. They are programs of social protection governed by liberal calculations of entrepreneurialism and efficiency; they are strategic cooptations of revolutionary praxis through schemes of rural livelihood; they are efforts at the collective mobilization of the poor by organizations fraught with bourgeois anxiety; they are bold declarations of postcolonial autonomy at times funded, and often lauded, by foreign donors. Full of contradictions, they mark the polyvalency of both neoliberalism and postcolonialism. But they also mark the limits of self-help, that much-vaunted ideology of millennial capitalism. They insist upon state or state-like institutions of service provision. And they therefore signal what Vicky Lawson calls an “economy of care”. Lawson rightly notes that “global transcripts of millennial development and microfinance actively relegate need and dependency to the domestic sphere”. Indeed, the self-help entrepreneurialism so highly valorized in neoliberal populism operates through this “domestication of care”. Elsewhere Lawson (2007:3, 1) calls for a “feminist ethic of care” that does not give into the “relentless extension of market relations” and that “begins with a social ontology of connection”. But the ethicalization of millennial capitalism cannot accommodate such an ontology and its relations of care. Even the Bangladesh experiments with development, which may be read as an economy of care, actively and aggressively operate through what Lawson has termed “gendered relations of responsibility”. The Bangladesh case is not an anomaly. Today, development programs that serve as regimes of distribution may eschew microfinance's global transcript of entrepreneurialism but they are also for the most part regimes of patriarchal discipline. It is this simultaneity of care and discipline, of distributive ethics and patriarchal surveillance, that interests me. From the social safety nets of BRAC in Bangladesh to the conditional cash transfers of Bolsa Familia in Brazil, such practices of discipline rely on the domestication of poor women and their giving of care. The great irony of millennial development is that such regimes of government are scripted as women's empowerment. Can self-help entrepreneurialism be reconciled with the ethics of care? In White Tiger, Balram Halwai converts his servitude into entrepreneurship through the founding act of the murder of his master. He thereby converts a feudal relation of dependence into the disembedded freedom of a market economy, a life of entrepreneurial profit in a global Bangalore. But such a conversion is also accompanied by a brutal severance of the economy of care. In the feudal webs of the Darkness, Balram's urban master is also the landlord of his rural family. Shortly after his master's murder and his subsequent escape, Balram reads in the newspapers of a family of 17 slaughtered in his village. He does not try to find out if this is his family, for such is the price of entrepreneurship. In one of his nightly letters to the Chinese premier he writes: Only a man who is prepared to see his family destroyed—hunted, beaten, and burned alive by the masters—can break out of the coop. That would take no normal human being but a freak, a pervert of nature. It would, in fact, take a White Tiger. You are listening to the story of a social entrepreneur, sir (Adiga 2008a:150). The dream of microfinance is that of an age of millennial capitalism teeming with self-help entrepreneurs. Such a dream remains silent on the crucial question of how, amidst the Darkness, servitude can be converted into entrepreneurship. This is, as the commentaries on Poverty Capital have shown, a political question. In this reflection, I have suggested that this may even be a question of necropolitics, a politics of life and death. At a recent book reading at the Berkeley chapter of Rotary International, a member of the audience angrily insisted to me afterwards that the most important contribution to human development in modern history has been America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “We are sacrificing lives to build economies and democracy—as we did in Korea, and academics like you discount these sacrifices.” He was wrong on that last count. I do not discount it. The tale of microfinance in Afghanistan makes evident the twinned project of millennial capitalism and millennial empire, of financialization and militarization. Poverty Capital is a call to better understand how financialization is a central feature of millennial capitalism. Not surprisingly I had first titled the book “debtscapes”. These geographies of debt are all around us. As I pursued the writing of Poverty Capital, so I had to keep track of the brutal restructuring of public education in California. The structurally adjusted public university is also a debtscape. At one of the many protests that have recently erupted on the University of California campus at Berkeley, students occupied a building under construction and unfurled a sign that read “College of Debtors”. Facing sharply rising fees, these students were protesting the use of their tuition to securitize the university's construction bonds; more broadly they were protesting a future of bonded indebtedness, where education can only be earned at the cost of crushing debt. On Youtube I watch scenes of that night of protest and occupation at Berkeley. I watch a student in my Global Poverty class stand face to face with riot police. They are fully armed. Wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, she is angry, screaming, often hysterical. But she is also trying to explain to the police why she is protesting, what public education means to her, and why they should set down their batons and tear gas and join her. I want to reach through the screen, pull her back from the barricades, and explain that no such conversation is possible with a cop in riot gear. Poverty Capital is written from within the College of Debtors. As our struggles in California have shown, there is no clear path of progressive politics and radical praxis, not even in the fight to defend public education. We remain folded together (complicit) with the very system that we seek to transform—our faculty salaries dependent on rising student fees, the job security of unionized workers dependent on the layoffs of non-unionized workers, the future of our departments dependent on “academic entrepreneurs”, the future of our university dependent on the vitality of the financial investments made by our financial trustees and brokers. As academic workers, we too are “yield-hungry investors”, an integral part of the circuits of finance capital. What then does our politics look like? But Poverty Capital is also a call to look beyond the world of financialization. I remain intrigued, even seduced by, regimes of distribution. The sheer scale of Bangladesh's pro-poor service delivery provision remind me of what Jan Pieterse (2001) has noted is the “promise” of development. This promise is not just that of financial inclusion, but rather of old-fashioned development—infrastructure, education, savings, livelihoods. This development, or at least the promise thereof, is being delivered by postcolonial institutions with considerable global ambition and tremendous local power. A far cry from social movements and grassroots mobilizations, they deliver services and even social justice through the vertical hierarchies of centralized bureaucracies. Seeking to remake development on their own terms, these institutions remain entangled with donor capital, Wall Street securitizations, and neoliberal discourses of efficiency. They too are double agents, emblems of postcolonial development, instructive of the deep contradictions of millennial capitalism. My previous research has been concerned with the Darkness and its contours of bonded labor and domesticated hope. Poverty Capital, dedicated to the millennials who make their way through my Berkeley classroom, remains open to the possibility that even at centers of calculation, subversion and dissent are possible; that even at the margins, the project of development can be transformed. Ethicalized millennial capitalism may turn out to be a poor cause for hope, but it is for sure a terrain of the political. I am not willing to just yet cede this territory and its battle of ideas. I am grateful to Matt Sparke for his organization of these commentaries and of an “author meets critics” session at the 2010 AAG conference where these comments were first presented. I am honored to have this opportunity to respond to commentaries by Lawson, Rankin, Watts, and Young, since the work of each inspires me greatly.