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

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.