* Book: A Postcapitalist Politics. J. K. Gibson-Graham. University of Minnesota Press, 2006

URL = http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/G/gibson_postcapitalist.html

Description

1. From the publisher:

"Is there life after capitalism? In this creatively argued follow-up to their book The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It), J. K. Gibson-Graham offer already existing alternatives to a global capitalist order and outline strategies for building alternative economies.

A Postcapitalist Politics reveals a prolific landscape of economic diversity—one that is not exclusively or predominantly capitalist—and examines the challenges and successes of alternative economic interventions. Gibson-Graham bring together political economy, feminist post-structuralism, and economic activism to foreground the ethical decisions, as opposed to structural imperatives, that construct economic “development” pathways. Marshalling empirical evidence from local economic projects and action research in the United States, Australia, and Asia, they produce a distinctive political imaginary with three intersecting moments: a politics of language, of the subject, and of collective action.

In the face of an almost universal sense of surrender to capitalist globalization, this book demonstrates that post-capitalist subjects, economies, and communities can be fostered. The authors describe a politics of possibility that can build different economies in place and over space. They urge us to confront the forces that stand in the way of economic experimentation and to explore different ways of moving from theory to action." (http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/G/gibson_postcapitalist.html)

2. From the authors, on their aims:

"The first, addressed in The End of Capitalism, involves deconstructing the hegemony of capitalism to open up a discursive space for the prevalence and diversity of non-capitalist economic activity worldwide. The second, tentatively begun in The End of Capitalism, requires producing a language of economic difference to enlarge the economic imaginary, rendering visible and intelligible the diverse and proliferative practices that the preoccupation with capitalism has obscured; we see this language as a necessary contribution to a politics of economic innovation. The third, explored in subsequent action research, is the difficult process of cultivating subjects (ourselves and others) who can desire and inhabit non-capitalist economic spaces. To frame this cultivation process, we step aside from the familiar structural vision of capitalism with its already identified and interested subjects, developing a vision of the "community economy" as an ethical and political space of becoming. In this communal space, individual and collective subjects negotiate questions of livelihood and inter-dependence and (re)construct themselves in the process. Finally, there is the actual practice, under way in ongoing action research, of building community economies in place." (http://academia.edu/2035960/Towards_a_post-Occupy_world)

"In their first chapter Gibson-Graham offer a critical interpretation of the film The Full Monty (1997) to demonstrate that economic agency can be found in unexpected places. Set in deindustrializing Sheffield, England in 1998, two unemployed workers happen upon a Chippendale’s show popular with local women. They then convince fellow out-of-work friends to join them in performing a striptease act. Gibson-Graham are inspired by the film’s characters, who are heavily invested in so-called masculine, gender-affirming occupations, but who reinvent their identities within a changing economic landscape. For Gibson-Graham the film demonstrates that individual identity and sexuality can become key elements in creating new forms of economic agency.

Next, the authors critically read the history of economic development in Australia’s Latrobe Valley to argue that there is nothing inevitable about the way a region’s economy evolves. The development of the Valley might have taken wildly different turns, for example, had Charles Merz not been consulted to write a report on its power-generating resources in 1908. Merz concluded that the state of Victoria could best provide the then-burgeoning city of Melbourne with electricity by building a power-generating station in the coal-rich Latrobe Valley. According to Gibson-Graham, Merz’s report “first enlisted the Latrobe Valley…into an explicitly economic frame of reference and constituted it as a potential site of governmentality.” It is, of course, impossible to say whether the invention of electricity was more of a determining factor in the Valley’s history than the hiring of Merz or the location of Melbourne. Gibson-Graham hope that their historical analysis of the Valley’s development will inspire other economists to join them in “denaturalizing the Economy and its capitalist forms of subjection.”

Moving away from film analysis and historical narrative, the authors begin to construct their “language of economic diversity” in chapters three and four. In chapter three Gibson-Graham employ the familiar iceberg metaphor to suggest that capitalist wage labor is only the visible part of a much wider range of economic relations. Beneath the waterline are a vast number of alternative economic practices including self employment, producer cooperatives, illegal work, under-the-table wage labor, and unpaid labor. Gibson-Graham argue that challenging capitalism’s stronghold on economic thought without condensing alternative economic practices into a single category like “non-capitalist work” requires a whole new language of economic relations. In chapter four the authors extend their discursive project from the realm of the individual to that of the community. If we allow that individuals need new languages to make sense of their diverse economic identities, it follows that cooperative or community economies (such as farmers’ markets and fair trade agreements) would likely benefit from a shared discourse that is neither capitalocentric nor dogmatically anti-capitalist. Gibson-Graham claim that community economies are “explicitly about resocializing economic relations” and that in such communities “economic decisions (about the prices of goods, wage levels, bonus payments, reinvestment strategies, sale of stock, and so forth) are made in the light of ethical discussions.” In defining the community economies they study according to ethical criteria, the authors shift the focus of economic agency away from competition and towards cooperation without disavowing capitalism or embracing communist revolution.

The problem with creating a language of community economy and ethical cooperation, as the authors point out, is that the theoretically-informed discourses one might produce in the academy will have little relevance for actually existing communities. To avoid the risk of creating a “private language” of economic alternatives to capitalism, the authors root their discursive insights in lessons they’ve learned while conducting “action research projects” in Australia, the United States and the Philippines. In these projects, Gibson-Graham attempt to destabilize power relations between academically-affiliated researchers and research subjects by employing local members of each community to help conduct interviews, compile data, and provide results. The authors feel that listening to the way local residents of community economies talk about their economic agency helps economists like themselves better understand and represent new forms of economic participation. Of particular interest is Gibson-Graham’s research in the Janga municipality of the Philippines. According to the authors, Janga has only a tiny capitalist economy that fails to meet the needs of most of its inhabitants. While some inhabitants work in informal sectors of the local economy, many are forced to join the global workforce and support their families by sending money home from abroad. Gibson-Graham argue that such arrangements, where centers of global capital essentially fund underdeveloped regions, are neither necessary nor desirable. They claim that economists should begin recognizing the work of groups like the Asian Migrant Center which helps migrants invest in local cooperative investment projects. The authors note that Janga already has a “diverse community economy” comprised of small farms and businesses, individual entrepreneurship, local family networks and other forms of economic cooperation that can benefit from local investment programs. In Gibson-Graham’s estimation, the Janga municipality has the kind of informal and cooperative economic infrastructure that could eventually provide for its economic stability and enable it to distance itself from both the authoritarian government of the Philippines and centers of global capital." (http://www.dwrl.utexas.edu/orgs/e3w/volume-9-spring-2009/cultures-of-global-economics/anthony-fassi-on-a-postcapitalist-politics)

Review

Joel Wendlandt:

"A Postcapitalist Politics is billed as a follow-up to the duo’s 1996 book, The End of Capitalism (as We Knew It). The general argument of both books, shrouded in the (post)Marxian jargon associated with journals like Rethinking Marxism, is that capitalism isn’t a total system, that it is only partial, and that other modes of production exist alongside it which ordinary people who share a "mutually interdependent" economic community (there’s no such thing as a working class let alone a usefully defined concept of class) use continually to subvert capitalism. In arriving at these formulations, J.K. Gibson-Graham adopt an anti-state posture, reject anti-capitalist alternatives such as socialism, and even refuse to acknowledge the dominant global events that are determining so much of what goes on in the world. You won’t find Bush or Australian Prime Minister John Howard mentioned, and war in Iraq and Afghanistan, "war on terror," and even contemporary alternatives to capitalism and imperialism such as Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution (in which workers’ cooperatives, an important subject of Gibson-Graham’s book, have played an important role) or Alternativa Bolivariana para las Américas are simply evaded.

But a handful of communities in the Philippines, India, and Massachusetts are not. In fact, Gibson-Graham devote a couple of chapters to charting what they call the non-capitalist economic sectors in these various communities. Of particular note is their research (which has identifiably anthropological, geographic, and economic characteristics) on the Jagna municipality in the Philippines. This community, they say, possesses only a tiny capitalist sector, and most of its inhabitants operate and survive in informal sectors or feudal relationships. In the end, neither capitalism nor this informal sector provide enough subsistence for most of the municipality’s people. As a result, many families are forced to send individual members into a global stream of overseas contract workers, the vast majority of whom are women, to work in places like Hong Kong, Japan, and Canada mainly as low-wage domestic workers. Overseas contract workers support their families through remitting portions of their incomes back to their communities of origin. Indeed, the Philippines government has represented remittances of this nature as patriotic, and these remittances combined amount to an enormous chunk of that country’s GDP.

Useful analysis of this process (see for example Delia D. Aguilar and Anne E. Lacsamana, Women and Globalization and David Bacon, The Children of NAFTA), simply put, has suggested that this globalization of the division of labor, a process that has its origins in capitalist centers and given its particular character by imperialism, is part of a logical framework and set of practices that purposely underdevelop certain geographical portions of the global labor market in order to force people into decisions like becoming migrant workers. Marxist and anti-imperialist politics typically conclude that broad organization of people in those marginal regions into communities of nation and classes (in solidarity with the working classes of the capitalist centers) are the best method of resisting those global processes and developing local and global alternatives to them.

Gibson-Graham are having none of that. Indeed, their cataloging of non-capitalist modes of survival in Jagna and their argument for an alternative development, such as local investment initiatives like those developed by the Asian Migrant Center (a group that convinces migrant workers to save their remittances in local cooperative investment projects). Their research on Jagna exposes a "diverse economic community," as they call it, composed of family networks, individual enterprises, small businesses, small farmers (mainly tenants), and others which can be developed through such investment projects that do not rely on outside imperatives or goals and which can provide for people’s needs in non-capitalistic ways. Resources can be "marshaled" for community needs without relying either on capitalist globalization (that only promotes the migrant workforce solution to lack of subsistence) or the state (which is, in all contexts, authoritarian). Their critique of development completely ignores and excludes socialist and national alternatives to capitalism and imperialism. Indeed, local initiatives, also described as being modeled in different communities in other parts of the world, are posed as the alternative to global capitalist development.

While their excavation of important cooperative projects provides worthwhile lessons for people interested in socialist alternatives to capitalism and imperialism that look beyond no longer existing models for a broader socialist concept." (http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/4602/1/230)

Discussion

Richard White:

"It is one thing to recognize these other forms of economic production, exchange and consumption, and another to argue that they are still pervasive and relevant within a "capitalist" society. To be able to make a convincing argument to this end would again be to puncture a hole in a commonly held axiom: that the Market is becoming all powerful and all pervasive. Here the contribution to the heterodox economics literature made by Professor Colin Williams, attempting to map the limits of capitalism and expose "the view of a hegemonic, all-encompassing, totalizing and victorious capitalism" (2005: 275) as an illusion has been highly significant. It is with respect to his application of the Time Budget Study to evidence the relevance of non-commodified activities that I want to pay attention to here.It is worth saying that two methodological approaches in particular have been significant in providing a robust evidence base o cite the importance of work beyond profit-motivated monetary transactions. These are the more qualitative-based approach captured in Household Work Practice Surveys (see for example Williams,2005; White 2011) and the quantitative based Time Budget Studies. Essentially, the Time-Budget Survey monitor an individual's time-use using detailed records that indicate how people have allocated their time over a set period. Using such a methodology then allows the comparative proportion of time that people have spent informal work, and non-exchange work (i.e. unpaid domestic work) to be evaluated.

The results run counter to the capitalist hegemonic thesis in many ways, most notably that

(1) paid work is the dominant form of work and

(2) non-exchanged work is contracting relative to paid work: i.e. western countries are becoming more commodified over time.

The collated results from time-budget studies conducted across twenty western countries (including UK, USA, France, and Canada) show that the time spent on non-commodified work accounts as a percentage of all work undertaken accounts 43.6%. Indeed France (45.3%), Norway (46.7%) and Finland (44.6%) all exceed this figure. This surely then suggests that a far higher proportion of working time is engaged in non-commodified work then one which is suggested by those commentators who take for granted the "fact" that we live in a commodified, capitalist world (see Williams,2005: 42 for further discussion). Taken individually or collectively, such figures not only counter those who celebrate the encroachment of 'the market' into daily life as natural, but also those who see it as inevitable even though they view the spectacle of a commodified world as having negative consequences. Indeed the core assumptions upon which the commodification thesis arises are further undermined when we look at how the allocation of working time in western economies has changed in recent decades. Furthermore we could fully expect, if the commodification thesis is to be empirically true, that a transition away from unpaid work and towards paid formal work would be clearly portrayed in a longitudinal survey of time use. However, when subsistence and paid work as a percentage of total work time is looked at across 20 countries (from 1960-present) such a linear trajectory toward commodification is not supported. Indeed, the findings are the opposite. Paid work as a percentage of total working time across the 20 countries is diminishing . What I want to consider is how to ensure that this trajectory is sustained and increased, as we seek to embrace and develop more extensive non-capitalist spaces in future society." (http://academia.edu/2035960/Towards_a_post-Occupy_world)

A Feminist Political Economy for Social Change ?

Richard Schmitt:

"According to Gibson-Graham, political change is not produced by rational argument but only if we alter the emotional, pre-reflective roots of our thinking. We must become different persons by changing “whatever enables us to act prior to reflection, the habitual, the embodied knowledge, the ways of being in the world that we almost never think about.” (PP, 128) But how do persons change? Freud tried to answer that question and so from a Left perspective did Wilhelm Reich (Reich 1970) and Herbert Marcuse (Marcuse 1964). Feminists theorists have interesting answers to that question derived from the experience of women liberating themselves. (Scheman 1980) Gibson-Graham set up several “action research” projects in which she explored methods for human change. A Postcapitalist Politics reports on these action research projects.

Conversations with business leaders and development specialists in the Connecticut Valley, begin with agreement on all sides that the poverty in the area can only be alleviated by attracting more industry – i.e. by developing according to capitalist views of "development." But then worries surface about the social dislocations brought by capitalist affluence and business practices; suggestions for alternative ways for improving life other than through capitalist "development" emerge as the conversations continued. The experiment suggests that it is possible for people to surrender their entrenched attitudes and presuppositions for a while. The unreflective stances of people may change. (PP 131)

An action research project in a formerly prosperous region of Australia, now mired in poverty, discovers that change is frightening. The inhabitants are invested in being victims because as such they are powerless, cannot change their situation and thus do not have to take risks. (PP 140) One of the changes needed, in such situations, is from people seeing themselves as passive victims to seeing themselves as capable of solving some of their problems through collective efforts. One of the techniques used to produce such a change is to make inventories of potential in a given community. That encourages everyone to consider their strengths, to be positive and envisage the possibility of change. (PP 141) The result of a lot of brainstorming was "almost 50 ideas of activities that might be undertaken by newly authorized subjects of the community economy. Once beginning to free themselves of their fear of change, people come up with interesting ideas of how to confront their problems other than by capitalist "development." (PP 148) "Coming to a new language and new vision of economy turned out to be an affirmation not only of difference but also of economic capacity. The people engaged in our research conversations had a chance to encounter themselves differently -- not as waiting for capitalism to give them their places in the economy, but as actively constructing their economic lives, on a daily basis, in a range of non-capitalist practices and institutions.” (PP 152)

These action research projects are tentative beginnings for developing an alternative socialist practice by changing the deep, pre-reflective emotions and habits that have animated socialist politics for so long. Making these changes is not easy. Gibson-Graham herself feels the ambivalence of vacillating between the emotional roots of traditional socialist conceptions -- paranoia, discouragement etc.-- and the alternative politics of possibility rooted in the feminist experience and theory. (PP 131) Many readers of these books will reject these suggestions out of hand, unable to distance themselves from firmly entrenched attitudes and emotions and unwilling to consider the possibility of a very different left politics from what some of us have practiced for a long time. Others will find themselves uncertain, like Gibson-Graham herself. But like her, we should make a major effort to resist the temptation to remain in the old oppositional but profoundly discouraged attitude of prevailing Marxist orthodoxy. Instead we should cultivate our hopeful energies. We have very little to lose except decades of failure." (http://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviewofbooks/reviews/2010/74)

More Information

J. K. Gibson-Graham is the pen name of Katherine Gibson and Julie Graham, feminist economic geographers who work, respectively, at the Australian National University in Canberra and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. They are the authors of The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It) and Class and Its Others.

Postcapitalist Politics

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