The South Atlantic Quarterly 113:2, Spring 2014
doi 10.1215/00382876-2643585  © 2014 Duke University Press
Silvia Federici
From Commoning to Debt:
Financialization, Microcredit, and the
Changing Architecture of Capital Accumulation
On the Rise of the “Debt Economy”
​Debt, as David Graeber has so powerfully
reminded us, has a central place in the history of
humanity and the class struggle. Debtors’ revolts
were frequent in ancient Athens as early as the
sixth century BC, forcing debt cancellations and
prohibitions against debt enslavement (Graeber
2011a: 230–31, 427nn 24–25). In Rome, in 63 BC,
the head of the populares (the section of the senate
that addressed the problems of the urban plebans),
Catiline, led an army of debtors against the patricians
(see Caffentzis 2012: 3). In modern times,
public debt has become “one of the most powerful
levers of primitive accumulation,” as Karl Marx
(1976: 919) points out in his chapter “The Genesis
of the Industrial Capitalist.”1
 Shays’ rebellion
of 1786, in western Massachusetts, three years
after the end of the War of Independence, targeted
debt collectors (see Zinn 1999: 92–93). A hundred
years later, the Populist Party expressed the farmers’
rage at seeing bankers take away their farms
because they could not pay their debts (Zinn 1999:
284). Also the “penny auctions” that spread from
Wisconsin through much of the Midwest during
the Great Depression were responses to the threat
232  The South Atlantic Quarterly • Spring 2014
posed by debt and foreclosures. In sum, as a means of exploitation and
enslavement, debt has been an instrument of class rule through the ages. It
would be a mistake, however, to conceive of it as a sort of “political universal.”
Like the class societies in which it has thrived, debt itself has undergone
significant transformations.
This is especially true of the contemporary situation, as a new “debt
economy” has come into existence, with the neoliberal turn in capitalist
development, that is altering not only the architecture of capitalist accumulation
but the form of the class relation and debt itself.2
Debt has become ubiquitous,
affecting millions of people worldwide who for the first time are
indebted to banks, and it is now used by governments and financiers not
only to accumulate wealth but also to undermine social solidarity and the
efforts that movements are making globally to create social commons and
alternatives to capitalism.
It was through the “debt crisis,” triggered in 1979 by the Federal
Reserve’s rise of interest rates on the dollar, that the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund (IMF), as representatives of international cap-
ital, “structurally adjusted” and de facto recolonized much of the former
colonial world, plunging entire regions into a debt that over the years has
continued to grow rather than becoming extinguished.3
In many countries,
due to the debt crisis, the gains obtained by the anticolonial struggle were
nullified and a new economic order was forced into existence that has condemned
entire populations to a poverty never before experienced. On its
basis, a restructuring of the world political economy has been founded that
has systematically channeled the resources of Africa, Latin America, and
every country in the grip of the “debt crisis” toward Europe, the United
States, and, more recently, China.
So successful has the debt crisis been in recolonizing much of the
“Third World” that its mechanisms have since been extended to disciplining
North American and (more recently) European workers, as demonstrated by
the drastic austerity measures imposed on the populations of Greece, Spain,
Italy, and the United Kingdom, among others, and the fact that public debt is
now plaguing even the smallest municipalities and “through [it] entire societies
have become indebted” (Lazzarato 2012: 8).4
But the clearest expression
of the logic motivating the new debt economy is found in the new forms of
individual debt that have proliferated with the neoliberal turn—student loan
debt, mortgage debt, credit card debt, and above all microfinance debt now
affecting millions across the planet.
Federici • From Commoning to Debt  233
What is specific about the new use of debt, considering that debt is the
oldest means of exploitation? In what follows I investigate this question and
argue that individual and group debt not only amplify the economic effects of
state debt but also change the relation between capital and labor and among
workers themselves, making exploitation more self-managed and turning
the communities that people are building in search of mutual support into
means of mutual enslavement. This is why the new debt regime is so pernicious,
and why it is so crucial for us to understand the mechanisms through
which it is imposed.
The End of the Welfare State and the Crisis of the Wage-Common
Brought to public attention by the subprime crisis of 2008, individual and
household debt are already the object of a large body of literature investigating
its causes and social effects, its relation to the increasing financialization
of everyday life (Martin 2002) and reproduction (Marazzi 2010), its determination
of new forms of subjectivity (Lazzarato 2012), and above all the forms
of mobilization most effective against it (Caffentzis 2007, 2010a, 2010b).
There is a broad consensus that the institution of a debt-based economy
is an essential part of a neoliberal political strategy responding to the cycle of
struggles that in the 1960s and 1970s put capitalist accumulation in crisis
and that it was triggered by the dismantling of the social contract that had
existed between capital and labor since the Fordist period. Plausibly, the
struggles of women, students, and blue-collar workers showed to the capitalist
class that investing in the reproduction of the working class “does not
pay,” neither in terms of a higher productivity of labor nor in terms of a more
disciplined workforce. This is why we have witnessed not only the dismantling
of the “welfare state” but also the “financialization of reproduction,” in
the sense that an increasing number of people (students, welfare recipients,
pensioners) have been forced to borrow from the banks to purchase services
(education, health care, pensions) that the state formerly subsidized, so that
many reproductive activities have now become immediate sites of capital
accumulation.
These developments are well understood. It is agreed that debt serves
to impose social austerity, that it serves to privatize the means of reproduction
and intensifies the mechanism of domination (see Lazzarato 2012). It
is also agreed that the financialization of reproduction by which much
individual and household debt is produced is not something superimposed
234  The South Atlantic Quarterly • Spring 2014
on the real economy but is the “real economy,” insofar as it is the direct organizer
of people’s labor. But what the new literature on debt has not sufficiently
highlighted is the role that the new forms of debt play in the destruction
of communal solidarity, an element that differentiates them from
previous forms of proletarian debt. We must remember, in fact, that debt has
always been one of the most common aspects of proletarian life. From the
nineteenth century until the post–World War II period, working-class communities
lived for a good part of the year on credit, paying shopkeepers on
payday and borrowing from each other to make ends meet. In this context,
debt has often functioned as a sort of mutual aid, a means by which communities
circulated their scarce resources to those most in need. Even in company
towns, debt did not isolate those burdened with it, as the common
bondage unified them in their resentment against the exploiters. Debt began
to change its connotation, first with the creation of purchase by installment
that became a habitual practice already in the 1920s (see Cross 1993: 148) and
later in the post–World War II period, with the extension of mortgages especially
to white male workers, with wages, guaranteed by the state and the
unions, functioning as the collateral. Debt for mortgages and consumer
spending was both a victory and a defeat for workers. On the one hand, the
extension of credit to workers reversed the ontological capitalist principle:
work first and then get paid; that is, proletarians must work on credit. On the
other hand, to the extent that it was tied to the availability of wages, to performance,
and in many cases to racial privilege, it contributed to diminishing
communal cohesion.5
By the 1980s, workers’ debt had become a sure measure of their loss of
social power. The 1980s was the time of the “great transformation” (see
Polanyi 1957) that built the infrastructure for the new debt economy. By this
time, the extension of bank credit to workers through expanded access to
credit cards, coupled with the precarization of work, the removal of antiusury
laws in most states, and the increasing commercialization of education and
health care, changed the nature of debt as a social relation. As credit grew
in the face of both diminishing wages and of increasing incentives to turn
to the market to acquire the necessities of life, the material bases of solidarity
were further undermined. It is quite ironic that, while employment has
become more insecure and access to it more difficult to obtain, indebtedness
was immensely facilitated. As we know, much fraud was employed to bring
multitudes under the control of the banks. But what matters, for my point at
least, is not the manipulations of the financial world but the fact that a debt
economy was consolidated that has disarticulated the social fabric, not least with
Federici • From Commoning to Debt  235
the illusion that the financial means the international banking system has manufactured
could be used by workers as well, and not only to purchase the necessities
of life but to come out ahead of the system.
It is not my intention to examine the complex class dynamics that
have enabled this process. Suffice it to say that mass indebtedness and the
neoliberal assault on wages and “social rights” would not have been possible
without the acceptance by some workers of the neoliberal ideology of
prosperity through the market. From this viewpoint, the escalation of
indebtedness to the banks can be placed on a continuum with some workers’
acceptance of company stocks in the place of wages and benefits and
their attempt to improve their declining economic condition through equity
raised on their homes, in part explaining the lack of mass resistance in
front of the refusal by the state to use its accumulated resources to guarantee
workers’ reproduction.
As the 2008 Wall Street crash has so dramatically demonstrated, however,
the hope that “financialization” might provide a solution or an alternative
to the vanishing jobs and wages has proved to be an illusion. The decision
to bail out banks but not working-class debtors has made it clear that
debt is designed to be a standard condition of working-class existence, no less
than in the early phase of industrialization, though with more devastating
consequences from the viewpoint of class solidarity. For the creditor is no longer
the local shopkeeper or the neighbor but the banker, and due to the high
interest rates, debt, like a cancer, with time continues to grow. Moreover,
since the 1980s, a whole ideological campaign has been orchestrated that represents
borrowing from banks to provide for one’s reproduction as a form of
entrepreneurship, thus mystifying the class relation and the exploitation
involved. According to this campaign, instead of the capital-labor struggle
mediated through the debt, we have millions of micro-entrepreneurs, “investing”
in their reproduction, even if in possession of only a few hundred dollars, presumably
“free” to prosper or fail as their laboriosity and sagacity allows.
Not only is “reproduction” presented as a “self-investment.” As the
lending debt machine becomes the main means of reproduction, a new class
relation is produced where the exploiters are more hidden, more removed,
and the mechanisms of exploitation are far more individualized and guilt
producing. Instead of work, exploitation, and above all “bosses,” so prominent
in the world of smokestacks, debtors now confront not an employer but
a bank and confront it alone, not as part of a collective body and collective
relation, as was the case with wage workers. In this way, workers’ resistance
is diffused, economic disasters acquire a moralistic dimension, and the
236  The South Atlantic Quarterly • Spring 2014
function of debt as an instrument of labor extraction is masked, as we have
seen, under the illusion of self-investment.
Microfinance and Macrodebt
So far I have described in broad outlines how working-class debt creation
has functioned in the United States. However, the workings of the lending/
debt machine are best seen in the politics of microcredit or microfinance, the
much publicized program launched in the late 1970s by the Bangladeshi
economist Muhammad Yunus with the foundation of the Grameen Bank
and since then extended to every region of the planet. Promoted as a means
to “alleviate poverty” in the world, microfinance has actually proved to be a
debt-creating engine, involving a vast network of national and local governments,
nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and banks, starting with
the World Bank, serving mostly to capture the work, energies, and inventiveness
of the “poor,” women above all.6
As Maria Galindo of Mujeres Creando
has written with reference to Bolivia, microfinance, as a financial and political
program, has aimed to recuperate and destroy the survival strategies that
poor women had created in response to the crisis of male employment produced
by structural adjustment in the 1980s.7
Assuring women that even a
small loan could solve their economic problems, it has subsumed their informal
activities, made of exchanges with poor unemployed women like themselves,
to the formal economy, forcing them to pay a weekly amount as part
of their loan repayment (see Galindo 2010: 8). Galindo’s observation that
microfinance is a mechanism to place women under the control of the formal
economy can be generalized to other countries and so can her argument
that loans are traps from which few women can profit or free themselves.
It is significant that loans, usually involving very small sums of money,
are given mostly to women and in particular to women’s groups, although in
many cases it is the husbands or other men in the families who use them.8
Financial planners prefer working with women, whom they recognize as
more responsible in their economic transactions, since they are far more
dependent on steady economic resources for the reproduction of their families
and more vulnerable to intimidation. They have also studied women’s
communities and “appropriated their system of social relations for their
objectives” (Galindo 2010: 10), treating it like a social capital, so that when
groups are not available women are encouraged to form them.
Microloans are given to groups because in this way each member
becomes responsible for her repayment, and should anyone default each
Federici • From Commoning to Debt  237
member can be expected to intervene. Joint responsibility, moreover, as
Lamia Karim (2011: 73–74) argues, leads to a proliferation of disciplining
technologies with women constantly monitoring and surveilling each other,
notifying managers of potential problems. “Through this system,” as
Galindo (2010: 10) as well points out, “the social fabric that supports women
in their everyday life is used to support the payment of the debt.” This mechanism
has proved to be very effective, since microloans are given in societies
in which rural codes—tied to ancient survival tactics—make repayment a
matter of honor, and women’s honor in particular is essential to a family’s
standing in the community. Indeed, as Karim (2011: 198) writes, women’s
honor operates as a sort of collateral. Thus the paradox is that although the
borrowers are the world’s poorest, the rates of repayment are the highest.
Collective self-policing is only partially responsible for this “success.”
Equally important have been the strategies used when borrowers default.
Banks, international agencies, and NGOs have been engaging in a true ethnography
of shame, studying the mechanisms by which different communities
culturally enforce their ethical mores, which they apply accompanied by
threats and physical intimidation. Home visits and a variety of vilifying
methods are used to terrify debtors into payment. In some countries, like
Niger, photographs of women who have not repaid their debts are posted on
the banks’ doors (Alidou 2012). In Bolivia, some microfinance institutions
have marked defaulters’ houses and put up posters in their neighborhoods
(Toro Ibañez 2010: 135). In Bangladesh, a standard method to punish defaulters
is housebreaking, the practice by which NGO officers enter a house and
rip out the doors, floor planks, and roofs to resell them as payment for the
defaulted loan (Karim 2011: 85, 117). However, “public punishments and
sanctions also include . . . flogging, pouring pitch over bodies, tonsuring
women’s hair, . . . publicly spitting on a person every time she or he walks
by” (Karim 2011: 85). NGOs have also turned to the police, the courts, and
the local elites. As a result, those in danger of default live in a state of terror
that intensifies resentments and hostilities among the women themselves,
who at times cooperate in the housebreaking. This explains why repayment
rates are so high even though few can claim to have had much success with
the capital acquired.
“Empowerment” through microcredits is not an easy feat, at least for
the majority of recipients. The reality is that poverty and misery are caused
not by lack of capital but by the unjust distribution of wealth, and a few hundred
dollars cannot resolve or mitigate this problem. A few hundred dollars
or even more in the hands of families who live daily at the edge of disaster
238  The South Atlantic Quarterly • Spring 2014
quickly vanish and rarely are invested to make more money. The husband
gets sick, the goat dies, or the children have no shoes to go to school: within a
short time, loan recipients find themselves unable to meet their repayments
and have to borrow from moneylenders to repay their loans. Far from lifting
themselves out of poverty by some “virtuous” investment, they plunge more
deeply into it, going from a small debt to a bigger one in a sequence that often
ends in a suicide. Even when they do not die physically, many borrowers die
socially. Some, full of shame for being unable to repay their debts, leave their
villages. In Bangladesh, defaulting women have been abandoned by their
husbands after being publicly shamed. That many default is guaranteed not
only by their perennial state of crisis but also by the high interest rates
imposed on the loans, usually 20 percent or more (see Toro Ibañez 2010:
146–52). The justification given for these high rates is that lending to the poor
is a laborious process presumably requiring a substantial social/work
machine to ensure that they do not escape the hold of their creditors, and if
they cannot repay with money, they will repay with their last drop of blood, be
it in the form of a small piece of land, a small shack, a goat, a pot, or a pan. In
Bangladesh, as punishment defaulting women are deprived of the large pot
they use to cook rice to feed their families, the ultimate shame a woman can
endure, an insufferable loss of face with respect to the community that can
lead to abandonment by the husband and at times suicide (Karim 2011: 91).
Yet this is precisely what many women have been subjected to, having their
house broken into and they themselves at times being physically assaulted.
Given this situation, why then are microloans still proliferating?
What induces people to take them, and what is achieved by this generalized
extension of debt? The answer is that today worldwide few people
can live purely on subsistence means, even in predominantly agricultural
areas. Land expropriations, currency devaluations, cuts in jobs and social
services, combined with the extension of market relations, are forcing even
populations primarily engaged in agriculture to seek some form of monetary
income. NGOs have also learned to combine lending with marketing
schemes, offering together with loans a variety of goods like medicines or
foods that the borrowers will be tempted to buy.9
Some borrowers do succeed
in improving their situation, although they are a minority and often
do so by collaborating with NGOs in policing other borrowers and in debt
collecting.10
The situation of female borrowers in Bolivia or Bangladesh is
parallel to that of students in the United States who are often ready to face
very high rates of indebtedness convinced that the degree thus purchased
will fetch them higher wages, although in reality many, upon graduating,
Federici • From Commoning to Debt  239
will have a hard time finding employment or finding it at the expected
wage rates or at rates enabling them to repay their debts.
Why investors insist in promoting this program—despite the growing
criticism and evidence of its failure to end poverty—varies.11
The good
returns on the money invested is only one factor. Equally important are the
changes in class relations and relations within the proletariat itself that debt
is producing. Microfinance enables international capital to directly control
and exploit the world proletariat, bypassing the mediation of the national
states and thus ensuring that any profit made accrues directly to the banks
and is not appropriated by local governments. It also enables it to bypass the
world of male relatives as mediators in the exploitation of women’s labor and
to tap the energies of a population of women who in the wake of “structural
adjustment” have been able to create new forms of subsistence outside or at
the margins of the money economy, which microcredit attempts to bring
under the control of monetary relations and the banks. Last but not least, like
other debt-generating policies, microfinance is a means of experimentation
with different social relations where the tasks of surveillance and policing
are “internalized” by the community, the group, and the family and where
exploitation appears to be self-managed, failure is experienced as an individual
problem and disgrace is more burning.
Here as well a continuity can be seen between the experience of
indebted women in Egypt, Niger, Bangladesh, or Bolivia and that of indebted
students or victims of the subprime crisis in the United States. In both cases,
the state and the employers disappear as the immediate beneficiary of the
labor extracted and therefore as targets of demands and conflict. There is
also the ideology of micro-entrepreneurship that hides the work and exploitation
involved. One sees in both individualized reasons of success and failure,
the individually suffered shame, the politics of guilt leading to hiding,
self-imposed silence, and avoidance of disclosure.
This strategy so far has been very successful, but it is clearly unsustainable
in the long run and not only for the poor alone. In fact, it is already beginning
to show its limits. As increased poverty due to microfinance is becoming
ever more severe, and the ability to squeeze the poor further is reduced,
microlending networks are redirecting their attentions to more affluent
populations and increasingly moving to the global North. Significantly, the
Grameen Bank—literally the Village Bank—has opened branches in ten US
cities, starting with New York.12
In the long term, the debt strategy puts capitalism
in a bind, as in no part of the world can the absolute impoverishment
of so many people be sustained if world production is not to stagnate and
240  The South Atlantic Quarterly • Spring 2014
retrench further. Most important, capitalism is arguably reaching the point at
which the advantage derived from the pauperization and expropriation of the
world’s multitudes is offset by its inability to contain the resistance it is
generating.
Antidebt Movements
The most powerful antidebt movement in the 1990s, in Mexico, was El Barzon
(the Yoke), which within a few years extended nationwide with the slogan
“I owe, I don’t deny it. But I pay what is right” (Samperio 1996; Chávez
1998). A debtors’ mobilization also took place in Bolivia, where in May 2001
thousands of people, mostly women, came from different parts of the country
to lay siege to the banks in the streets of La Paz for ninety-five days (see
Toro Ibañez 2010: 137–44). Meanwhile, the Grameen Bank has become a
hated name in Bangladesh, its founders and administrators viewed as nothing
more than moneylenders enriching themselves at the expense of the
poor (Karim 2011: 192–93). In the United States, an antidebt movement is
growing, as demonstrated by the formation of Strike Debt in an increasing
number of US cities and the successful launch of the Rolling Jubilee in New
York in November 2012.13
While the outcome of these forms of resistance
remains to be seen, the formation of a liberation-from-debt movement is by
itself a major victory, as the power of the debt economy derives in good part
from the fact that its consequences are suffered in isolation; for as The Debt
Resistors’ Operations Manual (Strike Debt and Occupy Wall Street 2012: iv)
states, “There is so much shame, frustration and fear surrounding our debt,
we seldom talk about it openly with others.”
Indeed, the curtain of fear and guilt that debt has generated worldwide
must be broken, as it was in Mexico with El Barzon in the 1990s and
in Bolivia in 2001 when indebted women rallied in the streets of La Paz
and besieged the banks. Students, especially in the United States, have a
special role in this process, as many of the cultural tools that NGOs and
banking systems use to convince women to contract a debt and to shame
borrowers into repayment even at the cost of their lives are forged in universities.
Anthropologists in particular “have played the midwife role,”
bringing to the world’s attention the ability of the poor to survive “in the
face of alienation, deprivation, and marginalization” (Elyachar 2002: 499).
As Julia Elyachar points out, it was anthropologists who alerted economic
planners to the extraordinary ways that the poor manage to survive against
all odds and the importance of networks of relationships to people’s sur-
Federici • From Commoning to Debt  241
vival. She adds that some of the effects of microfinance may not have been
what the researchers had intended. Nevertheless, it was a short step from
the recognition of culture and social relations as economic resources to the
definition of a “program of action” (Elyachar 2002: 508).
Elyachar’s comments demonstrate the importance of universities in
the production of the new models of disciplining and labor extraction.14
Thus from the viewpoint of an anti–student debt movement, the task is
twofold. On the one side, the movement must refuse the student loan debt
as illegitimate, for education should not be a commodity to be bought and
sold. On the other side, it should refuse to collaborate in the production of
knowledge creating the debt, as well as knowledge usable as an instrument
of debt repayment and an instrument of psychological torture for those
who fail.
The struggle against microcredit is also intensifying. A “No pago” (“I
won’t pay”) movement has developed in Nicaragua. Protests against microcredit
have also spread to India (Bajaj 2011). In Bangladesh, the birthplace of
microfinance, even the prime minister has accused it of “sucking the blood
of the poor” (Bajaj 2011). In Bolivia, Mujeres Creando has made the cancellation
of the debt one of its key tasks, accusing banks and NGOs of stealing
women’s work, women’s time, and women’s hope for the future and urging
women to recuperate their traditional forms of borrowing in which “money
passes from woman to woman on the basis of friendship and reciprocity
relations” (Galindo 2012: 131). More broadly, new movements like Strike Debt
in the United States are forming that view debt as a potential terrain of class
recomposition, where those struggling against mortgages and foreclosures
can meet indebted students, microloan defaulters, or credit card debtors. But
as Galindo powerfully intuited, the success of these movements will very
much depend on the degree to which they not only protest the debt but recreate
and reinvent the commons the debt has destroyed.
Notes
Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine.
	 1	 “The only part of the so-called national wealth that actually enters into the collective
possession of a modern nation is—the national debt” (Marx 1976: 919).
	 2	 I take the concept of a “debt economy” from Lazzarato 2012.
	 3	 The literature on the debt crisis is now immense. For references, I refer to Altvater et al.
1991. See also Caffentzis 1995, Cleaver 1990, and Federici 1990. The exception to the
growing debt problem is Latin America, where, on average, the external debt has
declined from 59 percent of the gross domestic product in 2003 to 32 percent in 2008
(Valdivia-Velarde and Seo 2009).
242  The South Atlantic Quarterly • Spring 2014
	 4	 On the debt crisis in Greece, see Children of the Gallery (Ta Paidia Tis Galarias, or
TPTG) 2011 and Graeber 2011b. State and municipal debt has been created, starting in
the late 1970s, through the adoption of laws and provisions forbidding governments
from addressing their money problems by printing new currency and forcing them
therefore to resort to private financial markets (Lazzarato 2012: 18).
	 5	 On the relationship between the growth of “consumer spending” and the privatization
of social relations in the working class, see Cross 1993: 168–83.
	 6	 I place “poor” in quotation marks to highlight the mystification implicit in this concept.
There are no “poor,” only people and populations who have been impoverished. This
distinction may appear minor, but it is a necessary one to prevent the normalization
and naturalization of impoverishment that the concept of the “poor” promotes.
	 7	 Mujeres Creando is the most important autonomous feminist organization in Bolivia.
Based in La Paz, it has been involved since 2002 in the struggle against microfinance
debt and has been the promoter of the research on microfinance from which the
book La pobreza, un gran negocio (Toro Ibañez 2010) originated. On this subject, see
Galindo 2012.
	 8	 Lamia Karim (2011: 86) describes this situation in Bangladesh, where her research
shows that “95 percent of women borrowers gave their loans to their husbands or other
male borrowers.”
	 9	 In Bangladesh, NGOs have made deals with various companies such as Danone, which
promotes its yogurts as crucial for the health of children (Karim 2011: 67, 196). When
NGOs in India tried to make a deal with Monsanto to combine loan offers with seed
purchases people protested (UBINIG 1998). On these marketing strategies, see Shiva’s
(1998) letter to the head of the Grameen Bank; see also Karim 2011: xx.
	10	 As Galindo (2010: 10) points out, those women who excel in policing other women take
on a leadership role in the neighborhood and become collaborators of the NGOs. She
adds that that is what “empowerment” consists of.
	 11	 See, among others, Crossette 1998, Bateman 2010, Bloomberg Businessweek 2010,
Chant 2010, and Toyama 2011.
	12	 As advertised, “Grameen America offers micro-loans, for a maximum of $1,500.” It also
offers savings accounts through commercial partner banks that members are required
to make deposits into. Typically, to receive a loan an individual must be living below the
poverty line and must be willing to create or join a five-member group of “like-minded
individuals” who want to start or expand their own businesses. Borrowers must also
attend weekly meetings at which they repay their loans (Wikipedia 2013).
	 13	 Strike Debt first formed in New York as an offshoot of Occupy Wall Street and is committed
to challenging the legitimacy of debt, on the premise that basic services like
housing, education, and health care should not be commodities reserved for those who
can pay. See The Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual (Strike Debt and Occupy Wall Street
2012). The Rolling Jubilee is a strategy that Strike Debt uses to publicize its program.
By buying hefty debts at discount rates at secondary markets, the fund intends to raise
awareness of the fact that millions of people are enslaved to banks, sometimes for life.
	14	 Among the forms of knowledge instrumental to the management of debtors is what
Karim calls “poverty research,” or producing “an archive of intimate knowledge about
the poor,” so that the task—for those critical of microcredit—is to unmask the micropolitics
inscribed in these research programs and make them “more legible in public
debates” (Karim 2011: 164–66).
Federici • From Commoning to Debt  243
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to Zaire. London: Zed Books.
Bajaj, Vikas. 2011. “Microlenders, Honored with Novel, Are Struggling.” New York Times, January
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