Paper short abstract:

By combining diverse economies approach of Gibson-Graham and decolonial thought, I examine Turkish cut flower cooperative auctions as an alternative market design generating diverse prices, which reward the value produced by farmers rather than exploiting them as in the existing capitalist markets.

Paper long abstract:

The pioneering work of JK Gibson-Graham challenged neoclassical orthodoxy by showing how market exchange, wage-labour, and capitalist enterprise constitute only one subset of a broader ensemble of diverse economic practices with multiple forms and outcomes, which cannot be reduced to the logic of profit, growth, and accumulation dynamics of capitalism. From their non-essentialist perspective practices such as wageless labour, non-monetised transactions and non-capitalist enterprises are not peripheral, but essential to our lives, both in the Global South and North. Recent scholarship (Bledsoe et al, 2022) qualified Gibson-Graham through racialised capitalism by revealing how diverse economies were a necessity for black and indigenous communities pushed to zones of deprivation by colonising powers.

In this paper I argue that a conversation between diverse economies and decolonial approaches can offer invaluable insights to demystify totalising discourses on capitalist economy and rethink alternatives. I use my own ethnographic research on Turkish cut flower farmers, who come from a history of forced migration and contributed to the building of a grassroots cooperative with several regional auctions. Auctions are not only sites of mutuality and solidarity for members. In its operations, market, price signals, supply and demand, often associated with an ideal capitalist economy, are subverted, manipulated and re-designed to serve fair exchange relations, which reward and compensate the value produced by farmers. Auctions generate diverse prices through complex relations of competition, support, and protection between participants. The principles of this design can inform alternative development policies which overlooked the positive role diverse markets can play.