ABSTRACT
In the context of the 2008 financial crisis and how it has impacted on countries across the globe, it is striking how few scholars have critically analysed why and how past crises have created opportunities for states and capitalists to exploit the so-called ‘bottom of the pyramid consumers’ in the developing world. By situating the analysis within the wider neoliberalization processes, this article seeks to denaturalize the extension of consumer credit to the growing number of informal sector workers who comprise the relative surplus population in Mexico. Drawing on an historical materialist frame, I outline a key feature of the neoliberal Mexican state—what I refer to as the debtfare state—that has served to facilitate accumulation by dispossession strategies. These neoliberal strategies serve to expose and integrate spaces of informality into different facets of the capitalist market, i.e. the credit system, without including them ‘inside’ the capital relation–reproducing spaces of marginality and insecurity.
