Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on valuation processes rather than value systems in examining value and the commons. It interrogates contradictions and limits in commons value(s) and explores ongoing practices of overcoming them in a post-capitalist politics of the commons.

Paper long abstract:

This paper engages with a range of theories of how non-capitalist value(s) relate to capitalist value processes (e.g. by Terence Turner, David Graeber, Massimo De Angelis) in order to argue for a perspective on value and the commons that focuses not on distinct value systems but examines multiple, intersecting, always already impure processes of valuation. Complementing approaches that see the danger to the commons primarily in the cooptation and enclosure by a capitalist system, the paper suggests to also analyze what contradictions and limits pertain to valuation processes in the commons. Drawing on ethnographic examples, it undertakes a first interrogation of such contradictions and limits through a focus on labor, reciprocity, and membership in the commons. A post-capitalist politics of the commons must – and often does – engage in practices of overcoming such limits. While this seems to recall a capitalist crisis response of turning seemingly fixed limits into barriers that can be passed (e.g. Harvey 2010), the notion of growth that underlies commons value(s) fundamentally differs from capitalist value accumulation.

Paper short abstract:

Pushing the boundaries of the commons, this paper argues that industrial modernization is commoning women’s labor with allusions to a natural resource and a tradition. Based on an ethnography in the Antalya region of Turkey, it shows how women's work has been imagined as a common resource.

Paper long abstract:

"Tomatoes are like children” became a proverb since the industrial tomato production is introduced to the Antalya region at the epicenter of Turkey’s Mediterranean coast. The size of plastic greenhouses in the coastal valleys of Antalya is modeled according to the year-long labor performable by a nuclear size family. Yet, in this industrial model of agriculture women's work, framed as part of the family labor and without direct access to cash, has been imagined as a common resource in the market and in the family. Theoretically, pushing the boundaries of the commons, this paper argues that industrial modernization has been commoning women’s labor with allusions to a natural resource and a tradition. The skill is subsumed once women’s work in the tomato greenhouses is likened to caring for children. Descriptions of this gendered labor by experts, firms, bureaucrats and traders fuses the boundary between reproductive labor and factory work. Thus, the tomatoes are called "our children".

While the industrial modernization tale in Antalya created statistical categories of “family farming” and “small producer”, the criteria of achievement is described based essentially on the quality of women’s labor. This paper highlights the power of capital in creating categories that subsume and exploit women’s labor in the family as commons. Based on ethnographic research, the paper further argues that women’s consciousness of the value and exploitation of their own labor creates a political space which reclaims this commons.

Paper short abstract:

This paper will equire if a common political ground can be built in a region where access to land is differentiated, and the Hass avocado trees, which are imagined as the commons, exist nowdays only in private property

Paper long abstract:

In 2016 Hass avocado growers from the Mexican state of Michoacan mobilised to demand export companies a fair price for their produce. For two weeks they stopped harvesting fruit in an attempt of intervening the supply and therefore to rise its prices. This came to be known as the Hass avocado grower’s movement.

Whilst identifying themselves as a movement of equals against a common enemy brought together a large number of people, class differences and historical inequalities complicate the narrative. By using ethnographic material that will show how class shapes different types of Hass avocado growers and therefore production value varies from one grower to the other, this paper will discuss these how material conditions of reproduction shaped the movement and other political strategies promoted by its leaders.

The Mexican state of Michoacan is the world’s largest Hass avocado growing region. This industry dates from the 1960s, but was propelled by the signing of the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994. The core of its production lays on lands that were collectively held during most of the twentieth century, however this regime was dismantled and transformed into private property by state reforms in the 1990s. This paper will equire if a common political ground can be built in a region where access to land is differentiated, and the Hass avocado trees, which are imagined as the commons, exist nowdays only in private property.

Paper short abstract:

The process of translating resources from the commons into exchange-value has been a long and complex one, and notably, not necessarily something in opposition to capital accumulation and market exchange. The paper aims at reflecting upon these processes and the abstractions emerging from them.

Paper long abstract:

The European Alpine mountain range is an area that has been particularly prone to anthropological research on what Eric Wolf (who worked in the Alps) called the 'closed corporate community' and on the common resources around which those communities have been established. Historical and anthropological research in the Alps revealed the impressive assortment of social arrangements and also the intricate historical developments that emerged from the management of those commons.

With the aid of fieldwork data gathered during an ongoing Ph.D. research, the present paper will propose a reflection on the changes of the management of the commons in an Italian alpine valley. This case-study shows how the corporatist management of the local commons helped capital accumulation and the creation of a native class structure. The process was legitimized through Hapsburg state-building and then Italian Christian Democracy's policies, especially those relating small entrepreneurship. The capillarity of religious institutions in those same alpine communities enabled the widespread consensus the party received in the area and thus the diffusion of said policies.

The extension of the concept of 'real abstractions' out of the original Marxian idea about commodity exchange – to include the emergence of what Gramsci called 'conceptions of the world' out of specific ways of translating resources from the commons into exchange-value – will help to overcome oversimplifying views of the commons as constitutively anti-capitalist. In this paper, I will attempt to answer which abstractions emerged from value translations and how they emerged from previous modes of production.