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Accepted Paper:
commons value(s): thinking about contradiction, limits, and practices of overcoming
Katharina Bodirsky
(University of Konstanz)
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.