Paper short abstract:

Cape Verdean migrants’ mutual-help circulation deals with commodities unaffordable in the formal system. Even though similar goods and services can be purchased, mutual help is governed more by trust than contract. Thus the tasks it completes cannot be valued according to exchange-value equivalence.

Paper long abstract:

Amidst a backdrop of commodity exchange and economic inequality, Cape Verdean labor immigrants circulate "gifts" of mutual help in order to ensure their horizontal mobility on the Lisbon periphery. This mutual-help circulation tends to deal with "commodities" that would otherwise be inaccessible or unaffordable: "good" childcare, help at baptisms and funerals, home-building assistance, interest-free credit, and job-market placement. Obligation to kin and friends can often camouflage the economic relations of these practices. In systems of mutual-help circulation, labor-power - not cash - is the principal commodity, which can cancel out "debts" without the exchange of money. Even though similar goods and services "appear" to be available for purchase on the Lisbon periphery, the giving and receiving of mutual help is thickly woven into relationships governed more by trust and proximity than by contracts or market relations. Thus, tasks completed by mutual help cannot be valued by a price system establishing market equivalence. In other words, one cannot simply determine the value of mutual help, for it does not replace products existing in the market. Like commodities, labor has two distinct values: a value in use and a value in exchange. The significance of mutual help depends equally as much on the task completed (use-value) as it does on the social relations that exist between the giving and receiving parties (exchange-value). That low-paid Cape Verdean labor immigrants continue to utilize these mutual-help networks challenges notions of "individual self-sufficiency" and the supposed "desirability" of abstract, anonymous markets.