Financialization from the Margins: Notes on the Incorporation of Rosario's Sub-Proletariat into Consumption Credit (Argentina, 2009-2015)

This paper discusses how Rosario’s subproletariat has been massively incorporated into consumer credits, based on two field works carried on in 2009 and 2013 in Rosario’s (Argentina) main industrial district. I argue that this specific case study provides an interesting entry point in order to critically discuss the concept of financialization, and to enlarge our usual understanding of debt, for two reasons.  First, Rosario’s subproletariat’s relation to financial institutions changed dramatically within only a few years: indeed, while almost every household contracted at least one consumption credit to a financial institution in 2013, almost no formalized financial institution provided any kind of credit or saving device to this population until 2010 (except some limited credit facilities to buy household appliance). Thus, because Rosario’s subproletariat’s financial practices faced a dramatic change in such a short period, it is possible to understand financialization as a process inscribed in time by comparing two fieldworks carried on with an interval of only a few years. Second, the incorporation of the urban subproletariat into consumer credit goes in hand with the recognition of people’s rights as citizens (and not only as workers, as peronism historically intended to achieve), which lead to the incorporation of nonregistered workers’ families into the national social protection system, from 2010 onwards. Among other things, such incorporation took the form massive cash transfers intended to people who did not usually perceive formalized and regular income. This changed their relation to time and made them potential clients for the already growing consumption credit industry. Yet, because such contrasted processes (recognition of people’s rights as citizens and their incorporation into consumption credit) are interwoven, financialization cannot be seen as a monolithic process. I would argue rather that Rosario’s subproletariat’s financial practices reveal a specific articulation of monetarized rights and duties, through a critical engagement with the concept of debt.

The two fieldworks on which this paper is based have been carried on in Rosaio’s northern suburbs, known as ‘industrial cordon’ (cordon industrial). This area is characterized by the presence of several harbors alongside the Parana River intended to export Argentina’s agricultural production throughout the world, and by the setting up of industries specialized on the transformation of such products, from the 1930s onwards (agri-food, biofuels, pulp mills, automotive industries, etc.). The expression “subproletariat” refers to people who migrated to Rosario’s industrial cordon from Argentina’s northern provinces, from the last military dictatorship onwards (1976-1983): because they arrived in a period of deindustrialization, they have not been integrated into some kind of stable work relation, as previous migrants often enjoyed. Most of them settled in a medium sized neighborhood of Capitan Bermudez, on which the fieldwork focused.

The fieldworks carried on in 2009 and 2013 are called up in order to understand financiatization from bellow, through a detailed analysis of financial practices of people who have historically been marginalized and excluded from financial institutions. Following Jean-Michel Servet (2015), financialization is conceived as a process through which the reproduction of everyday life relies more and more on savings and debts, and by the interconnection of people’s monetary needs and financial capital, through the intermediation of financial institutions. Drawn on the fieldworks carried on in Argentina, I argue that financialization consists on a complex, non-linear process. It is complex because it should not be restricted to the exploitation labour by financial capital through the new forms of consumption credit: indeed, this is only one part of the picture, as the new credit instruments are used alongside a wide variety of complex and compartmentalized informal practices, characterized by consumer ties, family or neighbourhood solidarities, household’s protection, or emancipation. Financiarization is also a process that involves time, because the transformation of the subproletariat’s financial practices is inserted into wider social transformations. On the one hand, the transformations of the social protection system and the extension of consumption credit allow the subproletariat to access new forms of consumption, from which they were previously excluded. On the other hand, the new forms of consumption credit are vectors of a new form of alienation, characterized by a profound feeling of alienation of people’s time, because of the existing hiatus between the time of financial institutions (formalized on a monthly basis), and the time of people’s work (made by erratic and non formalized payments). Finally, I argue that conceiving debt as a way of quantifying rights and obligations allows to highlight the political implications of the articulation of this new alienation through consumer credit and the recognition of people’s rights, through their integration into the national social protection system.

The paper will be structured as follow:

 

1. A project of inclusion through social protection and consumption (2003-2015)
2. Neoliberalism’s legacy: monetarization without financial intermediation (2009)
3. The working class and the new forms of consumption credit (2013)
4. A new form of exploitation
5. The subproletariat: both creditor and debtor of different kinds of debts