Mercado Bonpland and solidarity production networks in Buenos Aires, Argentina (original) (raw)
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TRACCE URBANE - ITALIAN JOURNAL OF URBAN STUDIES N. 4, 2018
A partire da una ricerca etnografica, in questo articolo analizzo i processi di produzione dell'urbano attraverso pratiche di commoning e processi di autorganizzazione in due differenti esperienze cooperative nell'area metropolitana di Buenos Aires. Analizzando le relazioni tra accumulazione capitalistica, trasformazioni del lavoro e produzione dello spazio urbano, e sviluppando una critica della categoria di informalità, l'obiettivo è presentare le economie popolari come campo ambivalente di conflitto, soggettivazione e possibilità di trasformazione sociale. Ricostruendo i processi socio-spaziali nell'esperienza della cooperativa Juana Villca e della fabbrica recuperata "19 de Diciembre", il contributo riflette sulle ambivalenze, potenzialità e sfide delle esperienze di autogestione del lavoro in quanto infrastrutture di una emergente istituzionalità popolare dal basso. Based on an ethnographic research, this article analyzes the urban making from below through commoning and self organization social processes in two different cooperative experiences in the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires. By analyzing the relationships between capitalistic accumulation, labour transformation and the production of urban spaces, and developing a critique of the category of informality, the aim is presenting popular economies as an ambivalent field of conflict, subjectivation and social transformation possibilities. Delineating the socio-spatial processes in the experiences of Juana Villca cooperative and recuperated enterprise "19 de Diciembre", the contribution reflects on ambivalences, potentialities and challenges of self managed labour experiences as infrastructure of an emergent popular institutionality from below.
Paper presentation at the volunteered session, "Recycling Mauss: 'Old' Solidarities in New Times of Crisis," 111th AAA Annual Meetings: Borders and Crossings, 2012, Nov 14-18, San Francisco. Located in the Belleville district of Paris, la Rotisserie is a ‘solidarity kitchen’ that has no owner or boss but more than 150 contributors (associations, social groups, political parties, art and music bands, etc.) who self-manage the functioning of the place like a restaurant open to the public, with menu prices significantly below the market prices. Cooperation, collectivism, public inclusivity, and reciprocity are the core principles at La Rotisserie. Individual contributors are not accepted; contributors are strictly collective subjects who take action and promote awareness against different forms of injustice within society. Each day, one contributor group takes full charge of running La Rotisserie, including cooking and serving food. In return, the group promotes its cause among the clients and keeps the daily profits. Thus, La Rotisserie participates in the survival and growth of its contributors by enabling them to raise financial means, create social ties, and spread their politics. Contributors, by running the place, ensure the survival of La Rotisserie as a counter-public space where various politics of opposition are cooked at the center of a neighborhood hit by neoliberal urbanization policies. Neither aiming at a pure gift economy nor subscribing under the strict rules of the market, la Rotisserie offers an alternative model of exchange and economic morality, namely solidarity economy, whose specificity does not reside in economic auto-coherence (Caillé 2003) but in its re-inscription of solidarity, reciprocity, cooperation, and collective interest in the heart of the economy as its moral basis (Laville 2007) – an idea that Mauss promoted in his works without developing a systematic theoretical approach to it (Fournier 1997, Mauss 1979). Based on ethnographic research conducted at La Rotisserie, this paper proposes a theoretical reflection on the alternative ways of economic, social, and political organization that solidarity economy urges as well as its moralities, finalities, and implications on the actual market relations in times of crisis.
Networks of solidarity economy, tools for local development and social innovation
International Review of Economics
The article analyzes the capability of enterprises and social enterprises (as reported by Borzaga and Fazzi (Le imprese sociali, Carocci Editore, Roma, 2011); as reported by Drapery (Comprendre l’économie social, Dunod, Paris 2007)) in promoting local sustainable development, starting from the organization of alternative agro-food networks Renting et al. (Environ Plann 35:393–411, 2003). The analysis starts from a case study of 40 solidarity purchasing groups of solidarity economy in Italy. In particular, the article focuses on the solidarity economic network “REES Marche”. Meanwhile, solidarity purchasing groups (SPGs) in the literature have been studied under the perspective of consumers, even those of the Marche Orazi (DES.so. Economia solidali e cittadini consapevoli, Cattedrale, Ancona, 2011), this article means to go ahead underlining also the perspective of producers.The analysis of data raises up 4 types of possible organizations linked to solidarity purchasing groups, with ...
Quinoa farmers in San Agustín, Bolivia face the dilemma of producing for a growing international market while defending their community interests and resources, meeting their basic household needs, and making a profit. Farmers responded to a changing market in the 1970s by creating committees in defense of quinoa and farmer cooperatives to represent their interests and maximize economic returns. Today farmer cooperatives offer high, stable prices, politically represent farmers, and are major quinoa exporters, but intermediaries continue to play an important role in the local economy. Meanwhile, some farmers rebuff the national cooperatives and intermediaries in favor of a denomination of origin and closer association with local cooperatives. This article, based on 4 months of ethnographic research, explores the reasons for the continued presence of intermediaries on the market landscape and how farmers have worked to create a quinoa economy embedded with fair trade values. Farmers demand stable prices, flexible standards, provision of services, and promises of maintaining the distinctive qualities of San Agustín quinoa. They frame their trades in economic, utility, and solidarity terms to reflect their livelihood strategies, farming capabilities, and personal concepts of fair trade. Meanwhile cooperatives, development initiatives, and intermediaries each argue that their particular buying practices allow farmers to attain household goods, credit, and cash for food and economic security.
In the last years we have observed all over the world ingenious attempts to overcome the effects of the global market. Citizens have joined together and created community projects in an effort to survive and/or to achieve autonomy. “El Arca” in Mendoza is a self-organised cooperative of producers and consumers, a so called prosumer organisation, which aspires through this mechanism to avoid dependence on an external price-building market. Instead, they determine terms of exchange according to self-given rules that include social justice, fair trade, sustainability, and local needs. “El Arca” has been a success not only in terms of regional economic recovery, but also because it has given the community a certain degree of cohesion, and to its members a higher level of satisfaction. This experience is the “living proof” that another type of organisation, and therefore another kind of economy, is possible. The social scientist and economist Karl Polanyi reflected on these issues during the interwar period. He analyses the principle of cooperatives on a philosophical basis—especially from the perspective of a concept of freedom based on responsibility—and therefore considers it as a main condition of the system which will overcome the difficulties of the “market-society.” Democratic-led and democraticowned organisations can solve, according to Polanyi, the antagonism between social demands on the one side and private initiative and market laws on the other. In this sense, they can act as the basic units of a possible “third way” between state socialism and liberal capitalism. Mutual associations are the organisational form per se which allows individuals, in their role as producers and consumers, to act responsibly towards themselves and the community. This will promote, in terms of Polanyi’s thought, a previously unknown form of liberty: a social liberty based on transparency, knowledge, and responsibility. In this article I will provide a detailed analysis of the Argentinean experience from the theoretical perspective offered by Polanyi.
Political practice and dimensions of solidarity economy: a case study from Cochabamba, Bolivia
7th EMES Selected Conference Papers, 2019
In this paper, I examine the political dimensions of solidarity economy and the example of a grassroots solidarity economy market, ECO Feria, in Cochabamba, Bolivia. I ask how actors practise their political dimensions as part of the solidarity economy movement. I analyse Ecoferia in relation to Gibson-Graham’s (2006) framework for community economy and post-capitalist politics and some views on politicisation in the solidarity economy movement. My research framework focuses on solidarity economy that is a concept used in many Latin American countries. Carneiro (2011) writes about some political aspects of solidarity economy and, for example, Hillenkamp (2014) has approached also political processes of solidarity economy in Bolivia through case studies in El Alto. Solidarity economy literature, however, lacks some of the comprehensiveness about politicisation that Gibson-Graham (2006) offer in their writing about community economy. Miller (2013) juxtaposes community and solidarity economy by treating them both as suggestions for radically democratic economic organising and suggesting that solidarity economy is one possibility for practical implementation of the more abstract ideas of community economy. I have turned to the ideas of post-capitalist politics to shed light on and broaden the discussion on the politicised aspects of solidarity economy. I argue, in the lines of Carneiro (2011), that solidarity economy has a focus on repoliticising economy since one central characteristic of solidarity economy is the attention to both economic and political issues. In Bolivia, solidarity economy has been gaining interest in the past 20 years. My case analysis is based on ethnographic fieldwork in Cochabamba, Bolivia, where I have spent in total eight months in three periods between 2016–2018. My data consists of interviews, events, observations, and notes on discussions as well as documents and photos. After transcribing hand-written notes and recorded interviews, I have analysed the materials thematically using atlas.ti. I have used both predetermined theory-based and data-based themes in my analysis, but this paper is mostly based on predetermined codes that cover the research participants’ motivating factors and values and different aspects of organising and activities in different levels of the society. This paper presents the first results of my PhD research about solidarity economy activities and their impact on democratisation in Bolivia. With my research, I hope to offer new information about the political nature of solidarity economy in Bolivia by analysing different dimensions of politicisation through Gibson-Graham’s framework.
The idea of a Solidarity Economy has emerged in Latin America, as a development paradigm and social movement, with the goal of creating an “alter-modernity” that bases the modernization of society on erasing the distinction between “public” and “private” spheres. The potential to achieve this goal arises from the fact that a Solidarity Economy would be sustained by a concept of social justice that: (1) contains at its core an approach to community that includes all living and inanimate beings; and (2) recognizes the emancipatory potential of the norms, social dynamics, and forms of organization of subaltern groups. Organic intellectuals working with the popular classes in Latin America have identified the concept of social justice as being a core aspect of the sociability of the subaltern social group referred to as “the poor” (Icaza, 2008) or the “pobretariado”/”pooretariat” (Löwy, 1996). In this light, it is useful to view the concept of the Solidarity Economy as a proposal to decolonize livelihoods, collective action, and politics from the predominance of the instrumental logic of procedural rationality, which is at the core of a conception of public life that was spread around the world as a result of Western colonialism. As an alternative, Solidarity Economy proposes a perspective on public life which reconciles substantive rationality with the “logic of the better argument,” which according to Habermas (1981) defines the procedural rationality that structures the Western public sphere. Such de-colonizing reconciliation is based on: 1) An economic logic that is the opposite of that of mass production. Productivity and profit are not ends in themselves, but are desirable solely to the extent they promote social emancipation. 2) An institutional logic of public recognition and support for the norms, social dynamics, and forms of organization of subaltern groups, in a way that addresses the structural inequalities that prevent them from participating in public life in equal conditions to those of the most privileged sectors of society.
Assembling Responsible Food Markets: The Case of Cooperativa La Manzana in Southern Chile
Food, Agriculture and Social Change. The vitality of Latin America, 2017
This chapter explores the entanglement of a group of consumers, producers and food that have assembled a cooperative of responsible consumption in the city of Valdivia, in southern Chile. The case of the Cooperative La Manzana describes the process of formation, the agents, their organizing practices, the events and contingency leading to decisions and further actions that have brought this assemblage into existence. Beyond the interest of recording an initiative unfolding from social sites distant from the global north and the national center, the article reflects on the conceptual shortcomings of existing analytical frameworks on alternative foods networks and explores De Landa’s Assemblage Theory in the attempt of overcome some of these limitations. The centrality of affects and values in the process of creating new subjects – the responsible consumer – and new objects – the food cooperative itself - makes us realize the need of extending his - too structural - interpretation to the flow of emotions and lived experience as a way to understand the open-ended process of becoming a responsible market.
Cooperative Practices: Survival Strategies, “Aternative” Movements or Capitalism Re-Embedding?
ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES OF SOLIDARITY AND RECIPROCITY, 2019, Peter Simonic (Ed), Ljubljana University Press, Faculty of Arts. , 2019
HOSARALMO collective is a pen name shared by the four authors with the same representativeness for all of them: Patricia Homs, Diana Sarkis Fernández, Raquel Alquézar and Núria Morelló. Cooperation practices are the backbone of human society’s social and material reproduction. Despite human history is plenty of examples where reciprocity, cooperation and/or solidarity are the core of economic practices, the neoclassical discourse has attempted to hide his importance. In this article, we aim to address these issues through two cooperative practices analyzed like a ethnographical cases. The first case analyzes discourses and practices that emerge in proximity food provisioning networks composed of consumers’ food cooperatives and small organic food producers where different forms of cooperation and reciprocity articulate socioeconomic exchanges. The second case examines the path of a financial services cooperative, Coop57, during its 18 years of existence. Its financial role in the cooperative and associative arena seeks to stimulate a social transformation where the foundations of the economy (financing, consumption, production and redistribution) connect each other in a network to bring about a more powerful change in the dominant socioeconomic relations. These cooperative practices can be read both: 1) as a place of struggle for life which flourishes at the interstices of capitalist colonization for profit and 2) as an object of a capitalist project of integration (Narotzky, 2004) of social reproduction in its extend accumulation process. We oppose this perspective to the concept of “diverse economies” and discuss the heuristic value of the idea of hegemonic dispute in everyday life for thinking about these cooperative practices.
Sociologia Ruralis, 2012
This article aims at analysing the features and the dynamics of those alternative agri-food networks in which consumers act as initiators. Drawing on a survey of ongoing initiatives at national level and on evidence from empirical fieldwork in a specific territorial context showing a variegated and dynamic reality at this regard (Tuscany), the article analyses consumers' evolving attitudes and behaviour, around and even beyond food, unfolding during their involvement in these initiatives. In particular, it focuses on the experience of the solidarity-based purchasing groups, consumers' organisations promoted by groups of citizens aiming at getting control of the food they consume. Using an actor-network perspective, the article analyses how purchasing and consumption routines change when consumers join these initiatives. The article also discusss the potential of these initiatives as drivers of change along with the following questions: to what extent do these initiatives challenge dominant food practices and system governance? On what basis are these initiatives sustainable and are replicable in different contexts? How can they foster other forms of civic engagement? In this regard, the article tests a transition management approach, considering solidarity-based purchasing groups as socio-technical niches within broader socio-technical regimes in a macro landscape characterised by the globalisation of the food system. In particular, it analyses the critical points where niches enter in conflict with existing socio-technical regimes, and the way in which these groups act to remove legal, technological and cultural barriers to their development.