Post-capitalist beer: Economies of qualities, scaling and diffusion in Catalan eco-communities

This paper explores how post-capitalist economic practices diffuse and have a wider transformative impact. Scholars typically answer this question by focusing on how such practices ‘scale up’ or by tracing spatially diverse transformative pathways. These approaches, however, overlook how a good’s characteristics shape the way post-capitalist practice spreads, and relatedly, how consumers become attracted to specific goods. This paper addresses this gap by expanding upon Callon et al.’s ‘economy of qualities’ – read through the lens of post-capitalist transformation. By examining two beer breweries in Catalan eco-communities, it showcases two different economies of qualities, one of which diverged from classical formulations. It problematizes the standardized good as the basis for both consumer attachment and wider diffusion and presents ‘translation’ as an alternative that is more attuned to more-than-human liveliness and local specificity, nuancing key assumptions of this framework. In turn, it shows different economies of qualities, based on standardization or translation, respectively, underpinned different spatial transformative strategies for (post-capitalist) practices, namely scaling and eco-localization.