Postcapitalist Politics

* 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)

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)

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.