[...] The reality behind the microcredit hype is that the vast majority of those who took out a microloan to invest in some income-generating project ended up failing or else displacing other struggling informal microenterprises operating in the same sector.

But profitability is just one half of the explanation for the microcredit model’s widespread support among policymakers, politicians, and ordinary people. The issue of ideology is also central.

Microcredit is supremely attractive to the neoliberal development community and neoliberal politicians. Within these circles criticism of microcredit and the central role that individual entrepreneurship supposedly plays in the development process is simply not tolerated. Instead it is aggressively rebuffed, because such skepticism is, in essence, skepticism of capitalism itself.

This is the reason for the huge PR effort currently being mounted by the World Bank and others — and backed up by a range of like-minded politicians, foundations, and high-profile NGOs in the US and elsewhere — in support of “financial inclusion.” As Mader and Sabrow demonstrate, one of the financial inclusion project’s central goals is to physically rescue high-profile microcredit institutions from (deserved) obsolescence and closure.

However, Kiva’s emphasis on providing small microloans only semi-directly (that is, through microcredit institutions) to micro-entrepreneurs in developing countries has almost nothing to do with actually fighting poverty. The “Kiva experience” is much more about Kiva supporters seeking a form of personal gratification by donating a small sum, as well as validation that their ideology (capitalism) actually works.

[...] To take back the mantle of justice and equality, the Left must delegitimize private foundations and refute the centrality of charity in solving the world’s most pressing problems.

Membership in the BRICS is also key to China’s flexible geopolitical position. While the BRICS grouping has different meanings to different participants, for China it is part of a strategy to construct a counterpole to Western power — not through overthrowing the current global structures, but by bending them in China’s favor. Given the history of Western domination on their continent — and China’s (relative) lack of conditionalities and policy of non-interference — African political elites find this to be a relatively attractive alternative.

[...] Shoppers can donate their bag credits — the five-cent rebate they receive by forgoing plastic bags — to a microfinance fund.

Combining this with traditional donations, Whole Foods hopes to raise $5 million to fund 40,000 small loans to “impoverished entrepreneurs” around the globe. They say that these direct financial transfers, unmediated by government agencies, can “empower the poor and the communities around them.”

If community programs have consistently floundered, both in the past and today, what’s left? A return to the rule of experts? Bigger dams and better seeds? If faced with two approaches — that of the development expert, asking “What can we do for the poor?” and that of the community developer, asking “What can we do with them?” — then the grassroots approach seems at least less condescending.

Yet there is a third question that inhabitants of the Global North might ask, one that would be far more productive. “What have we been doing to them?”

That question implies a different framework, one that proponents of participatory development rarely consider. It raises the possibility that there might be some causal relationship between government policies in the Global North and the continued poverty of the Global South. Rather than focusing merely on poor people in poor places, it zooms out, capturing the North and South together through a wide-angle lens.

[...] One consequence of rapid industrialization was bringing huge numbers of former peasants together into new factories where they rapidly got absorbed into trade unions and were quickly radicalized. But now since workers don’t stick around in the factory long enough to be politicized, to be drawn into organizations, it means that economic development and urbanization isn’t bringing with it a kind of radicalized working class the way you saw in the past.

I think the first step towards that is to see that the fundamental problem these days is not North versus South, the fundamental problem is that in any country where working people try to raise their voice, the first power they come up against and they have to confront is their own ruling classes.