Building a Collaborative Community Economy: The Case of La Comunificadora

This chapter reflects on the role of accelerator programmes and entrepreneurship training in fostering the emergence of collaborative economy projects. More specifically it interrogates the mechanisms enabling a process usually criticised for (re)producing capitalism to produce other understandings and practices of the economy. It uses the example of Barcelona’s La Comunificadora accelerator program. Instead of reinforcing capitalist understandings of the economy and a model of entrepreneurship tied to it, it can be the site of producing a diverse economy (Gibson-Graham 2006), thanks to a politics of language, of the subject and of collective action. Through the values conveyed by the teaching team, participants can resignify and reappropriate a series of notions, such as community. This reframing process is also that of themselves as an ongoing process. Nonetheless, resistances and non-recognitions of the framework presented to the participants, coupled to the precarious conditions of existence of the programme, limit the possibility of transformation of the individuals and of the projects. There is no singular outcome but rather a variety of paths taken.