ABSTRACT
Finance and bank lending have been a feature of many progressive community development initiatives ranging from the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh to the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act in the United States and the French Parti Socialiste’s initial plan to “socialize” credit in the early 1980s. However, in these initiatives finance usually has been subordinated to “productive” investment, and access to credit has been predicated upon ensuring adequate profits for moneylenders. As a result, progressive financial policy has often faced the challenge of promoting community development while furthering capitalist class exploitation. This chapter considers these tensions by exploring the class dimensions of various credit policy initiatives. It shows that in some instances if the class aspects and effects of bank lending are taken into account, then communal forms of production may be fostered, thereby furthering community development in a manner that enables nonexploitative class relations. The chapter also argues for developing broader notions of “productive investment” and “rate of return.” This would allow important gender, racial, class, and environmental concerns to be incorporated into our understanding of what it means to be “productive” or to have a “return” on an investment.
