Lucí Cavallero - A Feminist Reading of Debt

A Feminist Reading of Debt

Mapping Social Reproduction Theory

Series editors Tithi Bhattacharya, Professor of South Asian History and the Director of Global Studies at Purdue University; and Susan Ferguson, Associate Professor, Faculty of Liberal Arts, Wilfrid Laurier University

Capitalism is a system of exploitation and oppression. This series uses the insights of social reproduction theory to deepen our understanding of the intimacy of that relationship, and the contradictions within it, past and present. The books include empirical investigations of the ways in which social oppressions of race, sexuality, ability, gender and more inhabit, shape and are shaped by the processes of creating labour power for capital. The books engage a critical exploration of social reproduction, enjoining debates about the theoretical and political tools required to challenge capitalism today.

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Disasters and Social Reproduction:
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Social Reproduction Theory and the Socialist Horizon:
Work, Power and Political Strategy
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Luc Cavallero and Vernica Gago

Translated by Liz Mason-Deese

Foreword by Tithi Bhattacharya

First published 2021 by Pluto Press

345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA

www.plutobooks.com

Copyright Luc Cavallero and Vernica Gago 2021

English translation Liz Mason-Deese 2021

This book has been selected to receive financial assistance from English PENs PEN Translates! programme, supported by Arts Council England. English PEN exists to promote literature and our understanding of it, to uphold writers freedoms around the world, to campaign against the persecution and imprisonment of writers for stating their views, and to promote the friendly cooperation of writers and the free exchange of ideas. www.englishpen.org

The right of Luc Cavallero and Vernica Gago to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Work published within the framework of Sur Translation Support Program of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Worship of the Argentine Republic. Obra editada en el marco del Programa Sur de Apoyo a las Traducciones del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores y Culto de la Repblica Argentina.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7453 4171 2 Hardback

ISBN 978 0 7453 4172 9 Paperback

ISBN 978 1 7868 0846 2 PDF

ISBN 978 1 7868 0848 6 Kindle eBook

ISBN 978 1 7868 0847 9 EPUB eBook

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.

Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England

Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America

Tithi Bhattacharya

I grew up in the foothills of the Himalayas, in a region called the Terai, where wild mountain rivers and low clouds watered in equal measure dense, Sal forests. As a child I remember the smell of the thick Sal leaves, my feet remember their soft crunch on forest floors, the slanted late afternoon light playing tricks on you and revealing flitting animals behind thick trees. But the politician who came to our small town one summer told us that our forests were valuable, the trees could, when cut down and sold, repay Indias IMF loan. Our wild forestsour Sal trees, our cheetahs, elephants, and monkeyswere suddenly yoked to a register of alien comprehension. The forest was no longer a concrete provider for local communities and a habitat for multiple living beings, it was suddenly connected to a world market through abstract relations of indebtedness, power and violence.

I am grateful to Luc Cavallero and Vernica Gago for making sense of that moment that so many of us in the global south in the first wave of the SAP (Structural Adjustment Programs) found so incomprehensible.

This book is thus primarily about making sense. Under capitalism, abstract mechanisms of the market have concrete consequences in the lives of the dispossessed. But those mechanisms, whether they are the intangible extraction of surplus labor on the shopfloor or the opaque financial operations of a subprime mortgage, remain obscured from the vision of those whom they affect and harm. Cavallero and Gago follow in the best traditions of left scholarship in making legible those operations precisely so that they can be resisted.

Under their clear analytic stewardship, we begin to understand the real purpose of capitalist debt, not simply as an operation that creates profit on the backs of the indebted but that produces obedience through financial terror. The book traces how debt organizes our lifeworld whereby we are forced to go into debt to have a home, to pay for healthcare or get an education. Simply put, debt tethers our lifemaking needs to the logic of accumulation. A 2018 reporton Foreign Debt and Human Rights notes how decades of debt-induced austerity cuts to social services mean that women in poor households now spend significantly more of their time performing unpaid care work than women in non-poor households. Precisely, then, because it is social reproduction processes that are most disfigured by debt, we need a feminist reading of debt.

Cavallero and Gago do not simply make the superficial observation that women, due to their relationship to social reproduction tasks, are most harmed by debt operations. Instead, A Feminist Reading of Debt offers a feminist diagnostic of capitalist finance itself. The first theoretical movement for such an investigation is visibilizing debt and its violence. As the authors show, taking debt out of the closet means showing the differential way in which debt operates for women, for lesbians, and for trans people. Such an inquiry demands that we be attentive to the differential of exploitation that is created among the indebted, those of us who spend all day managing accounts are women, housewives, female heads of households, formal workers, popular economy workers, sex workers, migrants, inhabitants of the villas or favelas, Black and Indigenous women, travestis, campesinas, or students. Most importantly, such a methodology of visibilizing debt and showing its sexual and gender difference are ways of removing its power of abstraction.

Throughout the text, the authors perform many such acts of disclosure. In one of the most powerful sections of the book an activist with the unemployed workers organization, Federacin de Organizaciones de Base, relates how loan companies situate themselves strategically at the nodal points of everyday lifemaking, In the neighborhood the school exit the clinic where you take your children to the doctor or to the market where people are constantly circulating. For the loan companies all that is required for eligibility is proof of state assistance for welfare. If someone qualifies for state benefits, they qualify for a loan. In other words, the public benefits of the capitalist state are used as a pivot for indebtedness to private companies. In what the authors call financial terrorism, this financialization of everyday life forces the poorest sectors (and now not only those sectors) to go into debt to pay for food and medication and to finance the payment of basic services in installments with incredibly high interest rates.