The Politics and Ethics of the Just Price by Peter Luetchford Giovanni Orlando

Author:Peter Luetchford, Giovanni Orlando [Peter Luetchford, Giovanni Orlando]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, Social Science, Anthropology, Business & Finance
ISBN: 9781787439597
Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
Published: 2019-06-19T04:00:00+00:00

THE ANDALUSIAN CONTEXT

The troubled economic and political history of Cádiz Province makes fertile ground for data collection on the topic of money and just prices. The area has historical experiences of extreme deprivation that are hard to imagine in Europe, and this colors practices and views on money, exchange, and justice.

Andalusia’s history of partisan conflict and violence is extreme. Notably, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the political left rejected the established order in sometimes violent ways. At the same time, they engaged in imaginative experiments, proposing collectivized land ownership and the abolition of money. The radical program was then met with even greater violence as nationalist forces under Franco and the Falange took control in the late 1930s, ushering in fierce repression that lasted until the uneasy transition to democracy in the 1970s and 1980s.14

Experiences of economic marginality and political conflict have bearing on the economic imaginary, material practices, and convictions about exchange. Extreme poverty and exploitative labor relations engendered a political culture that entailed the rejection of capitalism as a basis for justice.15 In its place, there is a long history of claims to collectivized land ownership (reparto) and struggles over minimum working conditions and pay. Insecure employment that depended on the whim of landlords, incited an anarchist ideology of personal autonomy. When dependency on employers is replaced by reliance on the welfare state, this can provoke similar reactions. Manolo pointed out how state subsidies was a well thought out system that “legalised and normalised marginality, taking away your willpower.” La Verde “wanted to do something more than justify claiming subsidies” (Risquez, 1990, p. 36, my translation).

Alongside this political culture, there is a parallel history of local food provision through dense social networks. Despite relative affluence today, this economy still resonates, and is central to local diet. There is a profound commitment to an economy of social reproduction realized through extended family and friendships; the pueblos are imagined and to a degree remain autonomous and self-contained. Money plays a varied and variable role in mediating these relations. Sometimes it is absent. At other moments, payments and price scales are filtered through social relations, such as when differential rents for property are charged to family and friends compared to tourists or outsiders. In the latter case, a maximizing market rate is considered appropriate.

In Spain, society and economy appear rather as a set of the Russian dolls; the autonomous individual is nested within the domestic family, which is then immersed in wider social relations of extended kin, friendships, and alliances, in the town and beyond. These persons, families, and towns are in turn located within municipalities, provinces, and regions. A somewhat forced and fragile national unity is cross-cut by regionalism (Narotzky & Smith, 2006, p. 22), which is further complicated by political and class interests; for Gerald Brenan, “the country was split, both vertically and horizontally, into a number of mutually antagonistic factions” (2000, p. 229).

Multiple and overlapping, yet contested, the political and economic relations I have sketched

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