Popular economies in the pandemic

CLACSO Working Group on Popular Economies: Theoretical and Practical Mapping

Provisional cartography in times of isolation and global crisis

Latin America has become the epicenter of the global pandemic in recent weeks, and the situation has worsened in different territories, revealing structural inequalities and violence linked to race, gender, and class, and intersecting with diverse management by local and national governments, but also in relation to the dynamics of self-organization, cooperation, and struggle specific to each geography, linked to cycles of revolts, mobilizations, and resistance that precede this situation.

The crisis we are experiencing, which has erupted with the pandemic, is of a scale difficult to grasp. It is likely that collective life is being reconfigured every week, and at the same time, the ways of investigating, mapping, and reporting on what is happening are changing.

It is evident that the pandemic has not generated a crisis, but rather has accelerated the dynamics of the civilizational crisis of capital, exacerbating its contradiction with the reproduction of life through expressions such as increased levels of inequality, the devastation of both formal and informal working conditions, and the intensification of the dependence on and invisibility of reproductive labor, both in the home and in community spaces. Isolation measures, simultaneously a general rule but selective in practice in each country, declared mandatory at different times and with varying intensities in each place, constitute a significant aspect of the new conditions of collective reproduction amidst the planetary crisis.

This translates into impacts on the modes of circulation, production, and distribution of wealth; the collapse and paralysis of important sectors of the economy and the relaunch of others; the implementation of emergency measures in food, housing, health, education, and the economy; the deployment of various population control mechanisms with clear classist, sexist, and racialized segmentation, along with the militarization of certain territories; border closures and restrictions on mobility; and new ways of working, earning income, and providing resources that deepen inequalities and hierarchies in urban and rural, national and transnational spaces. In our region, this panorama is particularly evident amidst an accumulation of neoliberal dispossession, increased external and domestic debt, and the long-term effects of the precariousness of public services that characterize financial hegemony capitalism in the Global South.

DOWNLOAD REPORT