Girvetz 2320
The popular economy is a subjective economic community animated by the entrepreneurial activities of workers who imagine their labors to be outside of capitalist class relations. In contemporary Nicaragua, this popular economy appears in workers’ testimonios, in the project plans of development NGOs, in the "other strategy" for socialist transition promulgated by Sandinista intellectuals, and in the charter of MEFCCA, a gargantuan welfare and development agency nicknamed the "mega-ministerio." Under the Daniel Ortega regime, the popular economy has taken on an unstable — and unsettling — partisan character. This presentation situates the popular economy in the state project of twenty-first century Sandinista welfare developmentalism. It asks where the popular economy came from and how it is reproduced — both as an actually existing economic community, and as a key subjective category through which thousands of Nicaraguans understand themselves, their labors, and their political roles as productive citizens in the present day.
Jonah Walters is a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow at UCLA, where he is a member of the BioCritical Studies Lab, directed by professor Terence Keel. He is at work on a book about the historical development of "less than lethal" police weapons, especially pepper spray and Tasers. His dissertation (The Popular Economy and Its Protagonists: Community, Cooperation, and Development in Nicaragua) proposed a new framework for understanding working-class self-activity and historical "protagonism" in post-revolutionary Nicaragua. He received his PhD in Geography from Rutgers University in 2021.