The ideal side of the crisis. Mining cooperative members facing recession

Abstract

Even in the most precarious situations, the responses to the economic recessions are not limited to the practical application of survival resolution. These answers generate imaginaries, moral representations and prior experiences that give sense to the events and organize strategies. Taking this fact into account, this paper proposes to analyze the idealistic aspects of the economic global crisis through the experiences of the cooperative workers in the mines of Bolivia. Their logic of interpretation is far from those proposed by the salary and the welfare State. Thus, the crisis appears as an ideal heuristic situation to understand market and labour representations of the social actors. As a matter of fact, we can observe that for the Bolivian miners the breakdown of the miner’s market was less traumatic that the previously unseen prosperity. This assessment reminds us that the sudden excessive accumulation of wealth can be a crisis equal to that experienced by the economical recession.