Popular economies and labor

Popular economies emerged during the last decades in Latin America as assemblages of heterogeneous experiences, subjectivities, forms of labor, self-organized practices and strategies for reproduction of life of popular classes, during the neoliberal capitalistic reorganization of labor and dispossession. These frameworks redefined the relationships between practices of labor, care and reproduction of life of popular classes and the forms of political struggles, but also the forms of social cooperation and labor organization, claims and disputes. The category of popular economy itself is part of intense theoretical, epistemological and political disputes, in academies, social movements and public institutions to confront with the contemporary expansion of wageless life, as an inspiring text by Michel Denning suggest.

Popular strategies contributed so to a complex reconfiguration of social movements, territorial organization and the forms of confrontation and negotiation with the State; on the other side, confronts with extraction of value processes’ from social cooperation and territories, part of the expansion of the frontiers of capitalist valorization and appropriation of space, time and social value. We can consider these baroque economies – as Veronica Gago called them to indicate “the ‘mottleying’ (abigarramiento) of times and logics of operations, of the production of saturated spaces and of plebeian initiatives” (Gago, 2018)  – composed by heterogeneous territorial frameworks that emerged from the multiple crisis generated by neoliberalism. These crises includes several forms of territorial violence, dynamics of exploitation and dispossession developed by different actors in the scenario of the contemporary forms of capitalistic accumulation based on the reconfiguration of exploitation  that Mezzadra and Neilson defined “multiplication of labor”.

In very heterogeneous territories and spaces, popular classes organize and reproduce their life through combinations of different activities, labor, care and several modes of “make life worth living” (Urban Popular Economy Collective, 2022). On behalf of them, heterogeneous and creative ways of enabling practices of self-management and self-organization characterize grassroots organizations and movements: through these motley and contradictory strategies, they deal with dispossession, exploitation, labor and urban transformations. Some of them produce new forms of communality that challenge the neoliberal production of subjectivity, opening up the possibility for “new forms of autonomy, production of the commons and re-comunalization of resources and relationships” (Escobar, 2018).

Operating a complex redefinition of the relationships with the State and other transnational and local institutions, popular struggles in Latin America are contributing to dispute – and sometime modify – the public policies towards the popular classes in several countries and territories. At the same time, they opened up new disputes from popular, ecological and feminist perspective, on the value of labor, care and defense of territories, combining and reinventing different political and ontological perspectives and constantly confronting multiples forms of violence, displacement, exploitation and extraction. Considering popular economies as an extended battlefield where it is possible to investigate the forms that social cooperation assume in the current capitalistic accumulation within the multiples crisis – social, political, economic, climate and pandemic crisis – we can investigate their instituting capacity (Gago, 2014) – in terms of possibility of social and political dispute and understand contemporary political transformations.

The Colombian context

The aim of this blog post is a brief presentation of preliminary reflections on the political productivity of community care and popular economies in the Colombian context, characterized by a large history of neoliberal policies and the historical internal war. Popular, indigenous and community economies in different Colombian territories are constantly confronting with several forms of violence and displacement, part of a dispute for appropriation of territories for capitalistic, legal and illegal accumulation of wealth.

Displacement is connected to the expansion of extractive accumulation of capital – both legal and illegal – as part of the commodity frontier occupying territories, guaranteed by paramilitary violence supporting the private accumulation of territories and the interest of transnational enterprisers. Historically capitalist accumulation in Colombia combines different forms of extractivism, based on agribusiness, large estate, gold or other fossil mine, with variable forms of labor exploitation and new dispositive of financial extractivism (referring to Gago and Mezzadra’s proposal of an expanded notion of extractivism) – connecting different economies, popular indebtment appears as a device that permits articulate money from legal and illegal economies. The implementation of neoliberal policies since the ninenties –  particularly in health, education and public services – and the reconfigurations of the armed conflict and violence in territories – involving guerrillas, the Colombian Army, paramilitary formations, and the drug traffic criminal organizations – contributed to an expansion of poverty and inequality in the whole country.

During the last years Colombia lived very significant political processes: the Peace Accords in 2016 among the FARC guerrilla and the State, the social uprising in 2021 that changed the political scenario (as Natalia Hernandez and me analyzed in a collective dossier for South Atlantic Quarterly); and finally, the elections of Gustavo Petro and Francia Marquez in 2022 (the first leftist president in Colombian history). Confronting dispossession, privatization and violence in territories, in a country where informal workers represent the 56% (DANE – National Statistics Institute), social struggles, community leaders and processes in defense of territories reconfigured deeply commons sense and the political and social disputes and conflicts, combining  daily forms of political activism with care and community frameworks.

The so-called estallido social (social uprising), opened up important processes of politicization, subjectivation and social transformation in Colombia (Castronovo, Hernandez, 2021). As Cortes (2022) argues, “The mobilizations have shown that the very organization of society is hanging by a thread, as a minority hoard major privileges, while others barely have enough to survive. […] More than 21 million people live in poverty and 7.3 million live in conditions of extreme poverty; land ownership is concentrated in the hands of very few property owners: 0.9 percent of the population hoards 40 percent of the land; access to education does not guarantee any sort of social mobility”.

“Taking care of our territories”: preliminary hypothesis and questions   

Starting from my ongoing research on the political productivity of self-organization in popular economies and the dispute for a social transformation in Colombia, I will share some preliminary questions and reflections on the relationships between popular social practices, caring territories and political transformation. During meetings, interviews, conversations in different territories, experiences and contexts, constantly return, in social leaders and activists’ speeches, the sentence “we are taking care of our territories”, referring to a constellation of social practices related to the reproduction of their life. These practices are part of an extended conception of territories and labor, including multiple dimensions of living, and connecting with diverse ontologies that coexist and cooperate in reproduction of life and defense of territories. So we could investigate: what kind of popular frameworks are configuring these processes? Do these assemblages of practices and subjectivities reconfigure political, social and cultural conflicts?

The multiplication of urban community gardens, the self-organized markets of popular economy vendors and the indigenous struggle in defense of territories, represent specific pregnant examples of these assemblages that constitute an emerging battlefield for urban collective life. Taking in account heterogeneous experiences, I will refer to three different examples that permit us to investigate these processes from the perspective of care, community and popular economies.

First, in the metropolitan area of Bogotá, community garden are expanding in several neighborhoods, combining different traditions, cultural heritage, modes of use the space, reinventing peasant and indigenous economy and traditions in the urban space, community frameworks and forms of care. Recent experiences are connecting gardens both with popular economies, markets, and infrastructures, and with community kitchens – ollas populares – that during the social uprising and pandemic crisis represented very important social infrastructures for popular classes’ reproduction. They also contribute to new forms of political subjectivation involving young people in popular neighborhoods, leading with the ecologic and pandemic crisis, using, occupying spaces or enabling the social reconfiguration of urban abandoned areas confronting speculations and neoliberal urbanization.

Second, popular economy markets, in Suba district, situated in the northern area of the capital city Bogotá, in the neighborhood of Lisboa, and in others, represent a central community framework for reproduction of life and a specific popular infrastructure. Hundreds of vendors, women and men, takes care of territory by inhabiting this urban space for working, but also caring – children, people who needs, neighborhood, territory – and offering security – because the space is never empty, always inhabited  – and services, the whole day and night. As from several ethnographic researches emerges, popular economies workers by inhabiting spaces take care of that territories.  Reproducing their life, taking care of other people, makes possible a popular concept of security – not based on police but on community – while they work offering cheap services – like food, coffee and other stuffs. In this case, their forms of organize labor – and their agency -“taking care of our territories” – enable the possibility of living in a safe place day and night, and contribute to collective life in the neighborhood (Bernal, Giraldo, Ramirez, 2023 – published in the collective book of the GT CLACSO).

In the same district, the indigenous Cabildo Muisca – the first urban cabildo in Colombia – experimented during the last years a self-organized Guardia Indigena – indigenous self-defense – in Suba district, in order to take care of their ancestral territory from a cultural, community and ecological perspective. They started organizing in that form during the national strike and uprising, influenced by other historical indigenous self-defense organizations, redefined and expanded their forms of organization and community care practices during the pandemic crisis. They have been inspired by the centrality of experiences such as the Indigenous, Cimarrona and Peasant Guard, and the First Line in the cities and in the points of resistance during the National Strike and the social uprising. All these experiencies constitute exercises of territorial control, spaces for self-organization, self-defense, forms of caring territories, through collective agency, popular education, democratic pedagogy and articulation of different subjectivities, territorial assemblies in defense of life and the right to protest. Actually, in the urban area where they live, they are combining new forms of collective organization among the indigenous community, and networking with students, feminist and ecological movements. They are involved in social struggles and processes of defending territories – especially ecological struggles –from Municipal infrastructure’s projects – and recuperating territories, abandoned or designated for speculation, for social activities, productive gardens and ecological care. These examples permits us to open the research on the preliminary hypothesis: “taking care of our territories”, emerging from the combination of self-organization, community care and popular economies practices, enable new complex fields of political disputes.

These forms of agency – “taking care of our territories” – dispute social and ecological transformations, by connecting frameworks and struggles, and by reconfiguring the collective production of infrastructure and services, based on self-organization, that makes possible reproduction of life for urban majorities in the contemporary crisis. Some broader questions on social and political horizons of transformation follow – and inspire my research: do collective strategies of indigenous, popular and communal economies empower forms of social and political autonomy? What kind of possible reconfigurations of the relationships between community and State are emerging?  Are these experiences and practices able to create new forms of institutionality, in resonance with the contemporary political process in Colombia?

The author is post doc researcher at Padua University, Italy, PI STARS Starting Grants project on popular economies in Colombia; member of the International Advisory Board of Revaluing Care in the Global Economy; member of the GT CLACSO “Economías populares: mapeo teórico y práctico“

Cover image by the author, licensed under Creative Commons