Cooperation Practices: Survival Strategies, Alternative Movements or Capitalism Re-embedment? (Prácticas cooperativas: ¿estrategias de supervivencia, movimientos alternativos o reincrustación capitalista?)

Abstract

Cooperation practices are the backbone of human society's social and material reproduction. The neoclassical discourse has attempted to hide the importance of cooperation in social and material reproduction. Nevertheless, human history offers plenty of examples where reciprocity, cooperation and/or solidarity are the core of economic practices.We aim to address these issues through two ethnographic examples. The first case analyzes discourses and practices that emerge in proximity to food provisioning networks composed of consumers' food cooperatives and small organic food producers. The second case examines the path of a financial services cooperative, Coop57. 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 into 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 of social reproduction in its extended 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.