Abstract
This article focuses on two ways in which smallholders—rural families,
the peasantry—are responding to the contemporary neoliberal environment
in Turkey by resisting commodification. This resistance, which
takes place both by definition, insofar as smallholders refuse to enter,
or properly conform to, the logic of capital, and in terms of its characteristics,
values and practices of autonomy and sharing, is located
in the context of two sites or structures of social commons. These
comprise the maintenance of non-commodity circuits, along with the
development of what may be identified as a new, dual-circuit articulation,
one that involves financial inputs, particularly through engagement
in labour relations, in combination with the non-commodity
circuits. The latter emerges through manifold, variegated, and informal
linkages structured around kin and community and enabled by mobility and migration. Thus, superseding the rural–urban division of
space and going beyond capitalistic relations, these comprise a contemporary
form of ‘solidarity-network-based social commons’. Presented
in this example from Turkey, therefore, are different ways in which smallholder
farming operates as a locus of resilience for extended family
and village/locality interconnectivity that offers a distance from markets,
even as it utilizes them with novel forms of communally oriented
autonomies in a more generalized re-spatialization that extends to the
urban and goes beyond capital.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 337-367 |
Journal | Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy |
Volume | 3 |
Issue number | 3 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2014 |
Keywords
- commons and social transformation
- commons and space
- Rural and agricultural commons
- Turkey