Centre for Space, Place and Society

Abstract
How do we move past capitalism? This thesis sought an answer to this question by engaging with a group of people that I referred to as ‘caretakers’. They are farmers, shepherds, activists and others who live and work in a mountain valley of the Western Italian Alps and are attempting to create a post-capitalist alternative. The objective of this study was to investigate how caretakers maintain (or not) this alternative while living and working in a territory that is profoundly shaped by capitalism. What are their political objectives, their strategies but also their challenges? Through an ethnography, and a combination of ecological and autonomous Marxism with anthropological approaches to value, I studied the material, everyday process of change in the mountains. My results show that post-capitalist actors not only develop strategies to refuse and resist capitalism, but they also necessarily collude with it. Without compromises, caretakers could not keep on going because enacting radical change in the neoliberal mountains is exhausting. Surely, this bears consequences on the process of change itself and on caretakers, too. However, I proposed not to consider compromises and exhaustion as ‘flaws’ of an otherwise positive, fully non-capitalist political vision. On the contrary, I argued that post-capitalist debates needs to make compromises, exhaustion and the multiple relations between alternatives and capitalism the center of their work. Only by doing so can we account for the lived reality