The Feminist Critique of Microfinance

Dear V, It was a pleasure presenting with you on Saturday night.

My research experience with microfinance comes mostly from a feminist perspective, in particular, feminist academic work that critically considers how “empowerment” rhetoric shapes global development.

The crux of the argument is that global governance now operates primarily according to “inclusion,” “participation,” and “empowerment.” However, it is not “no strings attached” inclusion, participation, and empowerment, but actually has a tight set of rules, all set up to extend the current global imbalances. For instance, look at how international debt relief under the Millennium Development Goals regime is just another way to expand Structural Adjustment Programs, while allowing nations like the US to look like saints. [AC: "Neoliberal Corn Laws", if you will]

Emotional Politics, or “Solidarity Not Charity: Radical Responses to Poverty”

presented on April 14, 2012, as part of a joint Occupy/Justice Action Ministries panel discussion on poverty entitled “The Poor Can No Longer Afford the Rich.” [for my previous pieces of public scholarship i/r/t Occupy, look to Nightmares and Ghost Stories]

In our modern world, poverty is not natural, but the result of institutions that are set up to benefit a few at the expense of the many. Relief efforts are currently failing because they do not address the root causes of poverty. These causes are not mystical or hard to identify, as the most important ones are global property law, international debt, unfair trade, top-down privatization programs, corporate tax shelters, the those problems are social and political. Furthermore, there is a history to these problems, and poverty will not be addressed until this history is reversed.

Archaic State Pt 4. A Misunderstanding

The fundamental misunderstanding over the Archaic State is in regards to the type of conquest it undertakes. The conquest performed by the Archaic State is never a salt-the-earth war of annihilation but a process of capture.

Archaic State Pt. 3 Mandala Governance

To understand the geography of padi state political influence, Scott proposes imagining the glow of a light bulb (borrowing from Benedict Anderson) (59). In particular, consider two attributes of its light: first, that the light dims and fuzzes as it travels farther from its source; and second, that there are no clear edge to the light but a continuous gradient that fades to black.

Archaic State Pt 2. The Padi State

In a recent work, anarchist academic James C Scott outlines a barebones model of the Archaic State. Setting the scene, Scott focuses on the alluvial plains of Southeast Asia. It is in these fertile valleys, Scott argues, that some of the simplest states formed. Scott’s account emphasizes the political of these simple states because, for him, mass cultivation of rice was the key to their success. To dramatize the centrality of rice for these states, Scott called them “padi states.”

Archaic State Pt 1. They Found A Body

They found the first body tucked away in one of the many coves that dot the shoreline. It had long decomposed, and it first appeared as if all they had to go on was a set of bones whose neat arrangement had been systematically disrupted with the rolling tide. After closer examination, however, they happened across what initially looked like an ornately decorated animal hide. But as the pieces came together, it became undeniable that what they had thought was a hide was in fact the carefully preserved skin of the man they had stumbled at the mouth of the cavern. And rather than decoration, the skin buried next to him was covered in patterns of scars, each grouped around where a vital organ would be located.

Insinuation

Neither the politics of persuasion nor a presentation of facts. (The forms of rhetoric used by republikans and demokrats, respectively.) Rather, we propose insinuation as our form of political communication. Insinuation does not build the party, it spreads like a virus that mutates as it interacts with every new host. It brings about revolutions, yet not a revolution patterned after the swift seizure of the state, but a path that follows the strange drift of aesthetic revolutions — sometimes sudden, and at other times, a slow drift.

By persuasion we mean the art of bringing someone to your side. In our world, the lines in the sand disappeared long ago. There are friends, enemies, allies, and foes inside every one of us. Some paranoiacs try to draw lines for the rest of us to follow, but the result is always the same: infighting descends and people start striking too close to home. Persuaders are Southern Gentlemen still fighting for the Glory of the South, or soldiers forgotten in the Pacific.

Alternately, with the presentation of facts we mean the naive believe that the truth sets you free. We curse the worn motto ‘speak truth to power.’ For, the question is not why truth works but why illusion is so effective. Cynically, we think that truth-speakers desire being right over being effective. Some of us may have been know-it-alls as kids, but now we are more pleased with winning than living in a world of sour grapes.

Next installment: Nuts and bolts of insinuation.
Additional resources? Down the Rabbit-Hole, Alice!