Peasants on the internet? Informalization in a global economy

Abstract

Considered here is an increasingly influential approach, associated mainly with the work of Keith Hart, to the informal sector economy worldwide. His view is that the trend towards informalization is liberating, an economically empowering method whereby the urban and rural poor avoid state regulation, taxation and control. For this reason, Hart regards the new technology embodied in the internet as a means of realizing the autonomous community implied in informal sector economic activity; both combine to give expression to an authentic form of grassroots political democracy. Against this view it is argued that the new technology emancipates only the bourgeoisie, and that it is the urban and rural poor who suffer most from a decline in the capacity of the state to regulate and tax capital.

The Memory Bank: Money in an Unequal World, by Keith Hart. London: Profile Books, 2000. Pp.320. £20 (paperback) ISBN 1861972083