Reinventing the Common: Practices, Experiences, and Conflicts in the Popular Economies of Argentina

An article by Alioscia Castronovo, South Atlantic Quarterly (2019).

Starting from ethnographic research on popular economies carried out in the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires, I aim to contribute to reflection on the common as a mode of production, analyzing the popular community frameworks, practices of self-management of work, and the processes of political subjectivation in the experience of the textile cooperative Juana Villca. In dialogue with the experiences and subjectivities encountered in the field, I reflect on the relationships between crisis, self-organization, and conflict, analyzing the productivity of the political dimension and the politicization of production and reproduction in self-management dynamics. In the article, I maintain that these experiences constitute the infrastructure of an emerging popular institutionality, which, considered as such, contributes to the analysis of the common as a mode of production and social relationship capable of building a political and productive alternative.

Alioscia Castronovo

South Atlantic Quarterly (2019) 118 (4): 821–838.

https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-7825636