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Selected Economic Justice Publications |
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As Yunus falls, women’s microcredit hopes sink Khadija Sharife (Eye on Civil Society column) 12 April 2011 One of civil society’s great hopes, that women’s access to microcredit would help eradicate poverty, has been dashed – both top-down with a fallen guru, and bottom-up with unaffordable interest rates in a context of patriarchy.
Last week, the Bangladeshi Supreme Court confirmed government firing of the founder of the Grameen Bank and the most important spokesman for microcredit, 2006 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus. The court called Yunus “a squatter or a trespasser or a usurper” and bluntly denied his appeal, on grounds that at 70, he was ten years over the limit for managing a Bangladeshi bank. But after mass Indian suicides by small borrowers, Yunus was already on the defensive about the direction microcredit had taken. The industry’s drive for profit-seeking was, he admitted toNew Age newspaper last week, “a terrible wrong turn.”
In South Africa the same disillusionment is setting in: although ABSA claims to have ‘impacted’ 30 000 small-scale borrowers with no previous credit history, its current microfinance clientele is just 4000. The main problem, it appears, is that the average cost to ABSA of debt collection from defaulting clients is R6000, but according to Bongiwe Tindleni, the head of ABSA’s microfinance division, “The loans range from R1000 to R15,000.” More
More articles on Microcrocredit from the CCS Library
A run on Grameen Bank’s integrity - Patrick Bond
The danger of Grameenism - Patrick Bond with Khorshed Alam
MICRO CREDIT SNAKES AND LADDERS BETWEEN SOUTH AFRICA’S ‘TWO ECONOMIES - Patrick Bond
Debating Mbekism: Critique of leading SA economics official “utterly inaccurate and misleading” – or?
After publishing an article critical of Pretoria’s fetish for large-scale, highly-subsidised, capital-intensive, energy-guzzling projects, Patrick Bond was confronted by denials from one of the most eloquent SA government economic policymakers, Alan Hirsch, Deputy Director-General in the Presidency. More
 Alan Hirsch
Can reparations for apartheid profits be won in US courts? by Patrick Bond October 2008 The campaign for apartheid reparations is in the US courts at present, pitting black South Africans in the Jubilee and Khulumani organisations (as well as individuals) against three dozen multinational corporations and friendly governments in Washington, London, Berlin and Pretoria. The demand for reparations extends the logic of international anti-racism solidarity campaigning, dating to the sanctions era. Plaintiffs’ use of the Alien Tort Claims Act extends a precedent set by Holocaust victims’ descendants. The US justice system’s conservatism is stretched, due to plaintiff appeals in 2008 reaching even the Supreme Court. And the change in SA government leadership may open up space to debate the critical questions: how to achieve justice from pro-apartheid corporations, and also disincentivise future exploitation in similar circumstances? Can reparations for apartheid profits be won in US courts?
Global political-economic and geopolitical processes, structures and trends 2 September 2008
An August 2008 World Health Organisation study concludes that a “toxic combination of bad policies, economics, and politics is, in large measure, responsible for the fact that a majority of people in the world do not enjoy the good health that is biologically possible.” CCS director Patrick Bond contributed this analysis (as well as a coauthored study on water and health) to the Commission's Globalization and Health Knowledge Network: "This chapter assesses major shifts in global political economy and geopolitics since the 1970s, which have brought together processes of governance and liberalization in often uncomfortable ways. These processes have important manifestations in society, including the generation of structural constraints to improved health policy. Geopolitical realignments and neo-liberal policy ascendancy can be observed in a series of several dozen moments in which key events reflect important power shifts. The context has been a series of durable economic problems: stagnation, financial volatility and uneven development. Political alignments have followed, and remain in an adverse balance of power, from the standpoint of redistributive socio-economic reform. Any expectation that global governance offers solutions, given the prevailing political-economic and geopolitical processes, structures and trends, should be carefully reevaluated." More
Global political-economic and geopolitical processes, structures and trends
Global Uneven Development, Primitive Accumulation and Political-Economic Conflict in Africa By Patrick Bond
The world is witnessing a political-economic passage on a global scale: from economic stagnation, amplified uneven development and financial volatility to worsening primitive accumulation (‘looting’) and socio-economic conflict. Considering Africa’s plight in this way suggests intellectual links between the political economy and security disciplines. Reforms proposed at the global level by elite bodies are apparently ineffectual and actions taken by elites in the name of conflict resolution often undermine peace because they reinforce the very dynamic of external looting. If these reforms continue to fail, it is to popular struggles that we should turn, especially in Africa where oppression is most extreme and global and local elites have the least credibility. For social movements, the objective of transforming power relations as the basis for ending conflict and underdevelopment requires engaging this new theoretical approach with a critique of capitalism. Conflict and peace theorists should also consider other innovations in political economy which address uneven and combined development, primitive accumulation and imperialism more broadly. More
Primitive Accumulation, Enclavity, Rural Marginalisation & Articulation By Patrick Bond
In March 2006, the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Centre for Civil Society in Durban aimed to reinvigorate a tradition of political economy by considering the legacies of Guy Mhone and José Negrão (who died in 2005) along with two others whose work was based on accounts of ‘primitive accumulation’: Rosa Luxemburg and South African sociologist Harold Wolpe (who died in 1996). The analytical traditions are diverse but complementary. Together they capture many of the ways that primitive accumulation continues to structure and reproduce systems of inequality. More
The Dispossession of African Wealth at the Cost of Africa's Health By Patrick Bond
This article synthesizes new data about the outflow of Africa’s wealth, to reveal structural factors behind the continent’s ongoing underdevelopment. The flow of wealth out of sub-Saharan Africa to the North occurs primarily through exploitative debt and finance, phantom aid, capital flight, unfair trade, and distorted investment. Although the resource drain from Africa dates back many centuries—beginning with unfair terms of trade, amplified through slavery, colonialism, and neocolonialism—today, neoliberal (free market) policies are the most direct causes of inequality and poverty. They tend to amplify preexisting class, race, gender, and regional disparities and to exacerbate ecological degradation. Reversing this outflow is just one challenge in the struggle for policy measures to establish a stronger funding base for the health sector. More
Transcending Two Economies In the pages that follow, a group of South Africa’s leading political economists tackle President Thabo Mbeki’s ‘two economies’ thesis, the framework most popularly invoked for contemporary poverty policy in South Africa. In short, poverty can be beat if sturdy (market-focused) ladders are found between the second and first economy, which unfortunately at present are ‘structurally disconnected’. On at least two earlier occasions, a critical mass of university-based intellectuals gathered in various publications to contest ideas of this sort: the mid-1970s when radicals fought liberals over the relationship between race and class; and the early 1990s when the South African version of the Regulation School was established. Both contributions were flawed, we will see. Since then, there has been a growing sense of the need to revisit and reconstruct old frameworks, in part because of the tremendous upsurge in popular social struggles associated with new types of exploitation. More
Competing Explanations of Zimbabwe’s Long Economic Crisis By Patrick Bond
When did Zimbabwe’s apparently endless economic downturn actually begin? February 2000, when Robert Mugabe began authorizing land invasions? November 1997, when ‘‘Black Friday’’ decimated the currency’s value (by 74% in four hours)? The prior months, when war vets were given pensions and Zimbabwe put troops into the Democratic Republic of the Congo to back the Kabila regime and secure investment sites? September 1991, when the stock market crashed once interest rates were raised to high real levels at the outset of the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP)? The early 1980s, not long after Mugabe took power? Or around 1974, when per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) began a fall that has not yet reversed itself? More
Are Norway's Global Financial Reforms Post-Imperialist? Patrick Bond
Given the prevailing global balance of forces, what can the North’s most progressive government do, particularly if it’s in financially excellent shape? Global reforms have been few and far between since neoliberalism took hold at the world scale during the 1980s, especially in financial markets: from the 1982 Third World debt crisis outbreak in Mexico, via hundreds of major riots across the South against structural adjustment policies, to the mid-late 1990s emerging markets crashes (whose epicentre was also Mexico in 1994) and Joe Stiglitz’s late 1990s “Post-Washington Consensus” gambit at the World Bank, to the status quo UN Financing for Development summit in 2002 (also held in Mexico) and subsequent failures to democratize the Bretton Woods Institutions during the 2000s, notwithstanding the election of mainly Centre-Left and Left governments in Latin American. Is there a new day dawning from one of the northernmost capitals, Oslo? Might a “Post-Imperialist” North-South agenda emerge thanks to its leadership, particularly in aid and finance? Do trends in the petroleum markets permit a self-interest review of Norwegian foreign financial policy? More
Microcredit Evangelism, Health and Social Policy By Patrick Bond
The awarding of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize to Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank, provides an opportunity to consider the use and abuse of microfinancing, especially because credit continues to be touted as a poverty-reduction strategy associated with health education and health care financing strategies. Not only is the Grameen diagnosis of poverty dubious, but many structural problems also plague the model, ranging from financial accounting to market failures. In Southern Africa, to illustrate, microcredit schemes for peasants and small farmers have been attempted for more than 70 years, on the basis that modern capitalism and peasant/informal system gaps can be bridged by an expanded financial system. The results have been disappointing. A critical reading of political economy posits an organic linkage between the “developed” and “underdeveloped” economies that is typically not mitigated by capitalist financial markets, but instead is often exacerbated. When applied to health and social policy, microcredit evangelism becomes especially dangerous. More
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A COLLOQUIUM ON THE ECONOMY, SOCIETY AND NATURE: PAPERS |
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Altvater, Elmar (2006) The social formation of capitalism, fossil energy, and oil-imperialism. Centre for Civil Society Colloquium on the Economy, Society and Nature: 1-21. More 
Amri-Makhetha, Judica (2006) Tribute to Professor Guy Mhone. Centre for Civil Society Colloquium on the Economy, Society and Nature: 1-3. More 
Ballard, Richard (2006) Social Movements in Post Apartheid South Africa: An Introduction. Centre for Civil Society Colloquium on the Economy, Society and Nature: 1-20. More 
Bhengu, Sithembiso (2006) Exploring interlocking linkages of wage labour to livelihoods Beyond the rural-urban divide. Centre for Civil Society Colloquium on the Economy, Society and Nature: 1-14. More 
Bond, Patrick (2006) South African subimperialism. Centre for Civil Society Colloquium on the Economy, Society and Nature: 1-69. More 
Bond, Patrick & Desai, Ashwin (2006) Explaining uneven and combined development in South Africa. Centre for Civil Society Colloquium on the Economy, Society and Nature: 1-29. More 
Chitonge, Horman (2006) The Role of Civil Society in New Approaches to Development. Centre for Civil Society Colloquium on the Economy, Society and Nature: 1-20. More 
De Angelis, Massimo (2006) Enclosures, Commons and the “Outside.”. Centre for Civil Society Colloquium on the Economy, Society and Nature: 1-14. More 
Devey, Richard & Skinner, Caroline & Valodia, Imraan (2006) Second Best? Trends and Linkages in the Informal Economy in South Africa. Centre for Civil Society Colloquium on the Economy, Society and Nature: 1-21. More 
Duchrow, Ulrich (2006) Property for People, Not for Profit: Alternatives to the Global Tyranny of Capital. Centre for Civil Society Colloquium on the Economy, Society and Nature: 1-13. More 
Freund, Bill (2006) South Africa: A Developmental State?. Centre for Civil Society Colloquium on the Economy, Society and Nature: 1-7. More 
Frye, Isobel (2006) The “Second Economy”; Short hand, underhand or sleight of hand?. Centre for Civil Society Colloquium on the Economy, Society and Nature: 1-19. More 
Guy, Jeff (2006) 'no eyes, no interest, no frame of reference': Rosa Luxemburg, southern African historiography, and pre-capitalist of modes of production.. Centre for Civil Society Colloquium on the Economy, Society and Nature: 1-15. More 
Hart, Gillian (2006) Denaturalising Dispossession: Critical Ethnography in the Age of Resurgent Imperialism. Centre for Civil Society Colloquium on the Economy: 1-29. More 
Hopfmann, Arndt (2006) The Accumulation of Capital« by Rosa Luxemburg in Historical Perspective. Centre for Civil Society Colloquium on the Economy, Society and Nature: 1-7. More 
Hunter, Nina (2006) Crises in Social Reproduction in a Developmental State: Home-Based care in KwaZulu-Natal. Centre for Civil Society Colloquium on the Economy, Society and Nature: 1-18. More 
Kamidza, Richard (2006) Governance and the Economic Partnership Agreements Negotiations : a contestation of the European Union’s interests and exclusion of the poor constituencies in Eastern and Southern Africa. Centre for Civil Society Colloquium on the Economy, Society and Nature: 1-27. More 
Legassick, Martin (2006) South African political economy. Centre for Civil Society Colloquium on the Economy, Society and Nature: 1-54. More 
Legum, Margaret (2006) Capitalism In South Africa’s Political Economy. Centre for Civil Society Colloquium on the Economy, Society and Nature: 1-3. More 
Mapadimeng, Simon (2006) On Ubuntu Culture and Economic Development in South Africa: A Critical Review of Debates.. Centre for Civil Society Colloquium on the Economy, Society and Nature: 1-51. More 
Masondo, David (2006) Revisiting the Relationship Between Capitalism and Racist Forms of Political Domination and Post-1994 South African Policy Alternatives. Centre for Civil Society Colloquium on the Economy, Society and Nature: 1-19. More 
Meth, Charles (2006) What was the poverty headcount in 2004? A critique of the latest offering from van der Berg et al. Centre for Civil Society : 1-50. More 
Moore, David (2004) The Second Age of the Third World: from primitive accumulation to global public goods?. Third World Quarterly Vol 25, No 1, pp 87–109: 1-23. More 
Mwilima, Ntwala (2006) The role of the Labour movement under present conditions of globalization. Centre for Civil Society Colloquium on the Economy, Society and Nature: 1-6. More 
Padayachee, Vishnu (2006) Progressive Academic Economists and the Challenge of Development in South Africa’s Decade of Liberation.. Centre for Civil Society Colloquium on the Economy, Society and Nature:: 1-23. More 
Palmi, Renato (2006) Stitching For Survival: H ome-Based Clothing O perations in the Informal Economy. Centre for Civil Society Colloquium on the Economy, Society and Nature: 1-19. More 
Perelman, Michael (2006) Articulation from Feudalism to Neoliberalism. Centre for Civil Society Colloquium on the Economy, Society and Nature: 1-18. More 
Pillay, Devan (2006) Zuma, the Scorpions and the Developmental State . Centre for Civil Society Colloquium on the Economy, Society and Nature: -. More 
Skinner, Caroline & Valodia, Imraan (2006) Two Economies? A Critique of the Second Economy Notion in Recent South African Policy Discussions . Centre for Civil Society Colloquium on the Economy, Society and Nature: 1-10. More 
Vally Salim & Spreen, Carol Anne (2006) Education Reforms and Education Rights: How policies continue to create inequality in South Africa . Centre for Civil Society Colloquium on the Economy: 1-27. More 
Whitehouse, David (2006) Chinese workers and peasants in three phases of accumulation. Centre for Civil Society Colloquium on the Economy, Society and Nature: 1-7. More 
Zandamela, Horacio (2006) Labour Market Discrimination and Its Impact on Credit Absorption Capacity in Mozambique Rural Settings: A Conceptual Note. Centre for Civil Society Colloquium on the Economy, Society and Nature: 1-36. More 
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