Speaker
Description
This paper explores the potential for a counter-hegemonic circular economy, grounded in a degrowth-planning program that prioritizes sufficiency and reduced material consumption. We investigate how the self-management of labour (autogestione) shapes workers’ sense of self and their relationship to ecology and the production process. To do so, we engage with the concept of subjectivity in relation to ideology and labour processes. Empirically, we examine Ri-Maflow, a factory on the urban fringe of Milan, where residential and industrial areas intersect. Since 2012, Ri-Maflow has been self-managed by workers who aim to establish a production line focused on the reuse and recovery of waste materials, reintegrating workers, and revitalizing territories.
To disentangle how a counter-hegemonic circularity could emerge, we start from a multifaceted approach to ideology building on a combined reading of Žižek, Gramsci, and Hall. Ideologies shape reality and space through habitual practices that, though seemingly non-ideological, reinforce particular subjectivities and their relationship to materiality. We define subject-material relations as the ideologically mediated co-constitutive relations between subjects and objects in the production and consumption process. For instance, mainstream approaches to the circular economy often place responsibility for circularity on consumers, emphasizing their role in linking consumption, waste, and new production. This paper argues that fostering a counter-hegemonic circularity requires critically examining and reimagining subject-material relations through alternative socio-spatial practices. In the circular economy, revaluing ‘circular work’ as essential for social reproduction could be a starting point for creating subjectivities that embody an ethics of care. We reflect on the role of planning in reorganizing and revaluing care work to support circularity at multiple scales.
Through the Ri-Maflow case study, we explore how self-management can alter workers' subjectivities and their relationships with materiality. We examine the tensions between hegemonic economic structures and counter-hegemonic ways of organizing production and labour around material recovery. Finally, we suggest planning practices that could empower workers in reshaping material flows and reduce dependency on extractive economies.
| Keywords | subjectivity; work; self-management; counter-hegemony; waste; reuse |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
