Szolidáris gazdaság és kapitalizmus
Solidarity Economy and Capitalism

New Movements of Alternative Economy in the Global and Hungarian Context

Summary/Abstract: In face of the global economic and climate crisis, a growing consensus of green, feminist and left movements converges around the idea of a reproductive, democratic economy. This article reviews the specific new models that have gained currency in recent discussions due to support by new Western movements, and then places these models in global and Hungarian contexts. First, it shows how new streams of thinking about reproductive autonomy in economy fit into a long-term tradition of critical thought on capitalism - and particularly, the tradition of critical research and strategic organizing that conceived capitalism not only in its relation to wage labor, but in terms of long chains of accumulation that reach from wage labor to various forms of informal, free and bonded labor, and “cheap” nature. Then, the article shows how system-level contradictions between capital’s limited accommodation capacity and labor’s reproduction have played out in the long crisis of the postwar global cycle starting from the 1970’s. It shows how labor’s capacity to reproduce itself outside of capitalist relations has served both as a puffer and a resource for maintaining relations of accumulation despite a decline in accommodation capacity, and as a new ground for anti-capitalist political organizing. The last part of the article looks at Hungary. It reviews the main shifts through which reproductive labor has been incorporated into accumulation streams throughout the history of modernization, and how growing areas of informal reproductive labor have been part of the social negotiation of the global crisis since the 1970’s locally. The article concludes that informal reproductive labor works as a systemic component in today’s accumulation regime. On the one hand, this shows its power - without the bottom-up subsidies informal reproductive labor provides to capital, systemic structures of accumulation would collapse. On the other hand, this shows that the capacities of reproductive labor are subordinated to accumulation streams. The question of solidarity economy, from this perspective, is how this existing capacity for reproduction can be organized in such a way that connects its power in growing reproductive circuits, and shields them from extraction.

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