Economies of Need

• In Event: Wastescapes: Managing Excess in the Twentieth-Century United States

Abstract

This paper details how workers and others active in consumers' cooperation in the early twentieth century embedded into their business practices a shared refusal of production for profit. Emergent infrastructures enabled co-op ventures to enter large-scale industry and manufacturing through alternative economies that exposed capitalist production as wasteful, yet nonetheless promoted industrial expansion and its underlying consumer practices. Drawing on institutional records and writings, this paper analyzes how cooperative methods built on "production for use” bridged socialist and ecological traditions, exploring the possibilities and limits of attempts to counter capitalist imperatives on industrial landscapes.

Author

• Eve O'Connor, Harvard University