Financial inclusion has become a ubiquitous feature in global capitalism. The official development literature is replete with studies linking financial inclusion to poverty reduction and empowerment. Yet, few analyses have sought to explore critically advanced forms of financial inclusion in the global North, particularly with regard to the highly profitable and controversial payday lending industry in the United States. The payday industry poses an interesting site of inquiry into financial inclusion because it involves a segment of the working poor, who, despite being financially included, remain economically precarious. The main objective of this paper is to understand the capitalist nature of financial inclusion by posing two specific questions with regard to the payday industry. First, what are the relations of power that constitute ‘the financial’? And, second, how and why this has been reproduced? Drawing on a Marxian approach, I address these questions by theorizing the social power of money and neoliberal forms of governance. I do so by introducing the concept of the ‘debtfare state,’ which, among other things, constitutes an important regulatory and ideological site in which these two social relations converge. Seen from this analytical lens, I argue that the payday lending industry is not characterized by market freedoms; but instead entails structural violence and silent compulsions that are rooted in credit-led capitalism and socially constituted by neoliberal governance and the debtfare state in particular.
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