Bursting the Microfinance Bubble: On Fragile Claims to Post-Capitalist Governance In Venezuela and Bolivia

Post-capitalist declarations aside, Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez and Bolivian President Evo Morales have both recently introduced their own staterun microfinance banks. To fully grasp the nature of the Bolivarian Revolution’s “new” social economic paradigm, it is first necessary though to consider how and why capitalist systems differ in an institutional manner. Accordingly, the following research will employ a French Regulation School theoretical scope, which offers a holistic, systematic approach for explaining productive logics, in particular, capitalist evolution or non-evolution over time. Attempts to classify the diverse nature of capitalist varieties in today’s neoliberal era have, in fact, largely ignored the Third World experience. By mapping the interactions between growth patterns, institutional compromises and social norms underpinning periods of capitalist stability in Latin America, this paper will move beyond current theorization on the historical trajectory of capitalism to identify a hybrid, rentier growth model. Using the case study of microfinance, the objective of this research is to therefore offer a neoliberal, populist interpretation of Latin America’s socalled, alternative economic model. How post-capitalist then are Hugo Chávez’s and Evo Morales’ “post-neoliberal” movements? Can we really make reference to a new dynamic of capital accumulation when state-run microfinance banks continue to operate as agents of industrial development, providing loans, moreover, to Venezuela’s oil and Bolivia’s natural gas sectors?