“Still good life”: On the value of reuse and distributive labor in “depleted” rural Maine

Abstract

This article explores the production of wealth through distributive labor in Maine's secondhand economy. While reuse is often associated with economic disadvantage, our research complicates that perspective. The labor required to reclaim, repair, redistribute, and reuse secondhand goods provides much more than a means of living in places left behind by international capitalism, but the value generated by this work is persistently discounted by dominant economic logics. On the basis of semistructured interviews, participant observation, and statewide surveys with reuse market participants in Maine, we find that the relational value of reuse, produced through caring, flexible, distributive labor, is especially significant. We argue that paying attention to the practices, politics, and value of distribution is critical for understanding wealth in communities perceived to have been left behind by global capitalist systems, particularly as wage labor opportunities and natural resources grow increasingly scarce. "Shutting Down Paper Machines" Sharon Bray (2017, 242) mill still hums but we all know next week 500 families will tighten trousers, put guns, camps, 4-wheelers up for sale, cancel winter vacation plans the work of Bucksport paper machines used to show up on every page of Life magazine, made from trees cut with chain saws, hauled in from Road 9 on the airline, put through drum barkers, clanked along overhead conveyors into steam and noise of the wood room where shifts of union men wore ear protectors workers jostled for places on the Sunday list-double time better than church train cars brought in chemicals, carried out white clay-coated rolls of paper silence and darkness come on they sold our mill for scrap metal

Circular economy disclaimers: Rethinking property relations at the end of cheap nature

“…Schindler and Demaria argue that without a new commodity frontier to exploit -which might fuel the next expansionary phase of capitalism-attention has turned toward making existing systems more efficient by capturing lost value. We have suggested that we may indeed be moving increasingly toward a time when accumulation is tied not only to the appropriation of surplus labor, the exportation of surplus production or the accumulation of nature, but increasingly the very detritus of a failing system (Isenhour and Berry, 2021). Unfortunately, as our case studies illustrate, this new focus on improving the efficiency of the system is often at the expense of people who have long been practicing circularity as discards are increasingly claimed as corporate property, essentially excluding informal workersresellers, repairers, cleaners, waste pickers-whose livelihoods often depend on this work and whose labor creates significant local social, economic and ecological value (Anantharaman, 2017;Millar, 2018;Berry, 2022).…”

Incidental sustainability? Notes from a thrift store in Germany

“…Capitalist hyper-consumerism is less than a century old, and even in the thoroughly capitalist Global North there remain many stubborn survivals of earlier cultures of frugality, repair, sharing, and care (Isenhour and Berry, 2020). Talking to older people in Europe or the United States about sustainable lifestyles, one hears remarks like: 'we always did this' or 'we fixed things' or 'we wore hand-me downs'.…”

“…Larger ventures are often located on urban fringes or in commercial districts that provide sizeable premises at lower rents. Charitable thrift stores operate beyond the urban limelight and work in unattractive spaces where they handle huge quantities of consumer waste (Isenhour and Berry, 2020; Minter, 2019).…”

“…For many customers or participants, thrift stores, repair cafés, clothes-swapping parties, or tool-sharing cooperatives are part of a ‘deliberative project of value transformation that challenges dominant paradigms and cultural constructions while building alternative social and physical structures from the “ruins of modernity”’ (Crocker and Chiveralls quoted in Isenhour and Reno, 2019: 1). They are critical elements in landscapes of alternative economies (Isenhour and Berry, 2020).…”

Embodied value: Wealth‐in‐people

“…A similar alternative economy is generated by people bringing new value to discarded goods in rural Maine (Isenhour and Berry ). Distributive labors describe how time, energy, and knowledge are used to find, acquire, fix, clean, market, and redistribute goods.…”