This paper presents an example of alternative moralities and economies to neoliberalism that foster in Europe in response to the Euro-crisis. It is based on ethnographic research on cultural, symbolic and material exchanges among a network of amateur political music bands, each located in different countries within and outside of the Eurozone, namely France (Ma Valise), Germany (Compania Bataclan) and Turkey (Bandista).
What brings these bands together is making music whose lyrics support social change and struggle against various forms of social and economic injustices that are being worsened by the neoliberal crisis world-wide. Caught in between the necessity of selling their music on the market in order to make a living and their desire to see any kind of artistic creation free of charge and accessible to public, they came up with a “third way” alternative: trading their musical production and labor among themselves (exchanging songs, lyrics, musicians, technical knowledge and equipment in return for help in distributing and circulating their music and securing paid performances at home and abroad) and among their local and foreign followers (performing music in exchange for food, shelter, concert venue, travel, odd jobs to earn small cash, etc.).
The bands call this alternative system of exchange based on exchange of services that is interwoven with trans-cultural and trans-national networks, meanings and obligations, a system of “solidarity with no borders, no states and no exclusion.” I argue that these bands, by operating within such a system, aim to minimize the negative effects of neoliberal crisis by reducing the dependency on money and markets for their survival, as well as for the continuity of and the public access to art forms. They also re-inscribe solidarity and collective interest as the ideal moral basis for cultural and economic relations (Mauss, 1925; Laville 2007) in opposition to utilitarianism and individualism that underlie neoliberal morality.
This system of solidarity presents us one of many alternative economic ways through which subaltern people at the economic fringes of Europe are responding to the impacts of the current crisis. In addition, this ethnographic case also enables us to think about how people in Europe are establishing novel communities and identities across cultural, geographic and political borders at a time when official imaginaries about an all-inclusive European identity are being replaced by a strong return to nationalist attitudes. In this paper, I thus analyze the shifting relations and moralities between mutuality and market, and between gift and capital economies (Gudeman, 2008; Hart et al, 2010) during times of crisis and their implications for possible re-definitions and re-constructions of Europe and European identity.
