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Paper short abstract

Based on an ethnographic research with popular carework and textile workers experimenting collective labor in Suba, Bogotá, this paper aims to explore the challenging processes of politicization of social and labor relationships in popular economies during the first Colombian popular government.

Paper long abstract

The current challenging policrisis can be productively observed form the perspective of popular economies to understand forms of production and reproduction beyond the separations between social, political and economic dimensions of life, focusing on their boundaries and resonances, beyond the logics and category of informality and its political implications. Popular economies are part of complex transnational processes of reconfiguration of forms of labor, historical and contemporary processes of exploitation, extraction, violence and economic development (Gago, 2014; Cielo, Gago, Tassi, 2023). Based on an ethnographic research in Bogotá, Colombia, in dialogue with Latin American experiences and debates, this paper aims to contribute to analyze political implications of popular economies’ frameworks experimenting processes of social organization and the production of infrastructures for collective labor in urban popular territories. Reflecting ethnographically on the dynamics of politicization of social, racialiced and gendered labor/class relationships, in the experience of popular careworkers and textile workers in urban areas of Suba, in Bogotá, this paper aims to explore both processes of politization of productive and reproductive activities, and its reconfiguration, as constitutive dimensions of contemporary forms of popular labor and forms of life. Making popular economies a particularly important space for analyzing processes of subjectivation and for developing a notion of the common as social interaction and mode of production, this paper situates its reflections in the context of the first popular government in Colombia, exploring its challenging disputes on public policies for popular economies that confront neoliberal and far-right discourses in a deep polarized political scenario.