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Mediating or Regulating Indebtedness? The South African case

Beschreibung

Deborah James, UK

Are people powerless in the face of big business? Does their sense of powerlessness increase if they are brought into complicit relationships with it - such that it and its practitioners appear intimate rather than hostile and remote, and such that their daily livelihoods depend upon their participation? Why do things stay the same, despite the best efforts of reformers and legislators? This paper explores some of the limits, situated at the level of the everyday, to planned and legislated intervention in problems of indebtedness. I look at how, as attempts were made to regulate a little-known aspect of South Africa's discriminatory system that has been dubbed "credit apartheid", older styles adapted, existing in parallel with - and despite the stringent requirements of - new regimes. Forces of state and market have intertwined to create a redistributive neoliberalism, enabling brokers and intermediaries to insert themselves into the interstices of the system. People of all sorts make money "from nothing" by charging commissions or adding interest at every point in the value chain. Over a century of the country's transition, spaces have opened up for such figures. In an era when the race-based separation of the population into discrete spatialised territories was proceeding apace, traders and commercial operators relied on agents who bridged the gap between the white-owned world of increasingly formal business and the rural/township world of economic informality. These figures were difficult to pigeonhole since they assumed the features of those employing them (or those to whom they were representing their employers). Agents then set up on their own, always relying on the profits to be made from "selling on tick". The paper provides a set of cases to illuminate and explore this situation, illustrating how difficult it is to separate bad from good protagonists; perpetrators from victims, or benefactors from beneficiaries.

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