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.