The political economy of debt and discipline : Insights from contemporary rural Colombia

This paper explores the connections between indebtedness and economic growth in the context of rural Colombia. It investigates the expansion of interest-bearing debt and the transformations that this has elicited on the lives of peasants in the country’s most important hub of cocoa production: El Carmen de Chucurí. Within a framework combining agrarian studies, political economy and economic anthropology, the study is based on detailed ethnographic data which allowed a rich and nuanced understanding of the phenomena at play. In order to comply with timely debt repayment, peasants have been forced to adopt “maximizing strategies” based on a specific (capitalist) form of economic rationality, and to extend their work routines at the expense of their health. Theoretically, I argue that these transformations of mindsets and bodies, respectively, can be understood as part of the overarching disciplining effects of debt. In particular, changes in subjectivities and labour have materialized in a renewed push towards increasing cocoa’s productivity and profitability. By focusing on the consequences of indebtedness on the debtors’ lives, this paper challenges the conventional idea that economic growth is only the outcome of a “natural desire” for improvement. Instead, rising productivity margins of cocoa can also be read as the result of a compulsion for growth in order to repay loans. In advancing the imperative of accumulation and profit maximization that characterizes the capitalist mode of production, debt repayment can thus be seen as a powerful assistant in the reproduction of capitalism in the countryside.