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- Convenors:
-
Catherine Neveu
(IIAC (CNRS-EHESS))
Maria Ines Fernandez Alvarez (CITRA, CONICET-UMET FFyL, UBA)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- 6 College Park (6CP), 0G/007
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 26 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel will have as its main aim to locate and analyse how alternative production and consumption initiatives challenge dominant neoliberal economic and political logics by enacting new imaginaries for desirable futures and question value itself by reordering what matters to people's lives.
Long Abstract:
The neoliberal era is characterized by a growing penetration of all spheres of social life by (liberal) economic and financial logics. Democratic and political engagement is not immune from such dynamics. If a number of research has shown that electoral dynamics are overdetermined by the financial resources of candidates, much less is known about the interactions between economy and democracy understood as activities and practices that concur to building the commons. It is as if questioning the role of money in democratic processes was only dirtying, trivialising or desacralizing practices and forms that should necessarily be "pure" and "disinterested". One can nevertheless observe today a growing engagement, in particular around "the commons", in practices based on reciprocity, co-responsibility and collective use-right, developed outside of mercantile relations and capitalist logics and that try to deal with the democratic dimensions of economic issues. Obvious examples are shared gardens, barter- or free-zones, solidary finance or local currencies, but also social movements that develop self-organised economic spheres that challenge the dominant logics of exploitation, including by questioning the 'right to work' in neoliberal conditions as the only desirable future. While such initiatives are often seen as isolated experimentations that do not challenge the global order, it seems more relevant to question the extent to which they enact new social, democratic and economic imaginaries that can contribute to challenge the dominant neoliberal economic and political logic and how they question value itself by reordering what matters to people's lives.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 26 July, 2022, -Theodoros Karyotis (Ghent University) Alexandros Kioupkiolis (Aristotle University)
Paper short abstract:
Based on fieldwork with four radical cooperatives, we examine the extent to which market-oriented alter-economic endeavours can balance economic viability with the establishment of new modes of decision-making, production and consumption informed by solidarity and egalitarianism.
Paper long abstract:
Starting in 2010, austerity policies in Greece upended social life and ushered in a prolonged period of political effervescence and social experimentation. A loose network of endeavours in the intentional economy emerged thus as an integral part of a grassroots cycle of contention. Animated by self-management and solidarity, they perceive their activity not only as a means of ensuring a livelihood but also as a hands-on critique of capitalist relations and a proposal for an ethico-political alternative.
While many such endeavours exist outside the bounds of the formal economy, others operate in various fields of industry, commerce and services. Our focus in this presentation is on value-driven cooperatives, where the egalitarian and transformative ethos guiding daily practice is being constantly tested against the imperatives of market competition and economic viability. Being subjected to regulatory pressures and market dynamics, radical cooperatives have been both celebrated for prefiguring alternative modes of production, consumption and decision-making, and criticised for subjecting politics to the laws of the economy and reproducing the entrepreneurial assumptions of neoliberalism.
Are cooperatives successfully promoting equality and inclusion in economic decision making? Can the imperative of economic viability divert them from their original aims and values? Can they fight alienation and enact different everyday relationships? Importantly, what is their conception of politics and how do they pursue social transformation? Based on fieldwork with four radical cooperatives, we survey the recent tide of grassroots economic endeavours in Greece, providing a critical snapshot of actually existing intentional economies and their alter-political potentials.
Piotr Goldstein (German Centre for Integration and Migration Research (DeZIM), Berlin)
Paper short abstract:
The new economic and social imaginaries are the driving force of a new Polish community in Manchester, UK. This paper, based on the experiences of making the ethnographic documentary "Spółdzielnia/Cooperative", will discuss the challenges of showing these imaginaries on film.
Paper long abstract:
Spółdzielnia/Cooperative is a visual ethnography portraying the everyday work of a socially engaged cooperative in Manchester, which is run mainly by Polish migrants. The film is, after "Active (citizen)", the second ethnographic documentary of the Visualising the Invisible Project, which looks at the activism of migrants and ethnic minorities outside of their community organisations. The film, focused on a group of young Polish migrants who create their own community that exists in parallel to the formal "Polish Community" epitomised by the Polish church, Saturday school, etc., is also a story of alternative future making. The new economic and social imaginaries are the driving force of this community. The paper, based on over five years of participant observation and the experiences of making the film, will discuss the challenges of showing on video these social and economic imaginaries as well as the day-to-day hard work of the involved activists.
Samuel Shapiro (Université Laval)
Paper short abstract:
Preconceived ideas that dominant logics come from the nation-state and alternatives to them come from below can be usefully challenged through institutional ethnographies. This reveals the diversity and nuances of state institutions and that nation-state is not the necessary form of the political.
Paper long abstract:
Many anthropologists have studied how new collective imaginaries question neoliberal logics through redefining what is important, which this panel’s convenors refer to as “value.” In this paper, based on ethnographic fieldwork at the Parliament of Quebec, I seek to focus on two aspects of this situation that have received comparatively less attention. Firstly, anthropologists should question dominant logics through ethnographic studies of “the state” or “bureaucracy,” including their symbolic centres such as parliaments. This reveals an evolving and fluid boundary between “state” and “society” (e.g. new political parties and viewpoints, private citizens becoming elected officials). Moreover, parliaments and other “state” or “bureaucratic” bodies contain a diversity of perspectives within them. The points of view that form government or hold influence today will not do so forever in most democracies. Secondly, collective imaginaires can occur at several scales of the political that are far from limited to the nation-state, civil society or transnational processes. Entities that do not fit into these neat categories (e.g. international organizations, federated entities) and whose future political form or role is uncertain or debated need to brought into these conversations on an equal footing. Multiple perspectives on the future of these political entities coexist within parliaments (as well as in broader society) alongside a diversity of other debates and political cleavages. Just as dominant logics can be challenged by centres of power, the nation-state is not the necessary or default form of the political.
Maria Ines Fernandez Alvarez (CITRA, CONICET-UMET FFyL, UBA)
Paper short abstract:
Based on a collaborative research with cooperatives of street vendors in Argentina, this paper explores the links between aspirations for the future, forms of value production involved in making a living and process of production of the commons that challenge notions of work and well-being(s).
Paper long abstract:
The study of aspirations and expectations for the future has gained attention in the analysis of the dynamics of contemporary capitalism, especially in relation to neoliberal and crisis processes, from an ethnographic perspective that focuses on everyday experience. This paper proposes an analysis of how aspirations and projections to the future shape processes of dispute around making a living that are embedded in a broader dynamics of production of the commons. My analysis is based on a collaborative research developed with cooperatives of street vendors in Argentina that are part of the Unión de Trabajadores y Trabajadoras de la Economía Popular (UTEP). These organizations carry out a process of dispute for rights and improvements in the living conditions of those who are part of the popular economy that can be understood as a process of production of the commons that combines modalities of collective appropriation of spaces and resources with the production of collective forms of care and well-being. From an ethnographic perspective of the common that interrogates the complex overlaps with the logics of exchange and market value, I explore the link between aspirations for the future and forms of value production involved in making a living. I ask how this process of production of the common is embedded in dynamics of capital accumulation as it contests notions of labor and well-being(s) involved in the ways of making a living that are produced in growing contexts of precariousness and dispossession that dispute the socially and legally enabled ways of producing life.