JK Gibson Graham – a Postcapitalist Politics

A Postcapitalist Politics This page intentionally left blank A Postcapitalist Politics J. K. Gibson-Graham University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis • London See pages 263–64 for copyright information on previously published material in this book. Copyright 2006 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gibson-Graham, J. K. A postcapitalist politics / J.K. Gibson-Graham. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 13: 978-0-8166-4803-0 (hc), 978-0-8166-4804-7 (pb) ISBN 10: 0-8166-4803-4 (hc : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8166-4804-2 (pb : alk. paper) 1. Economic policy. 2. Capitalism. 3. Political science. I. Title. HD87.G52 2006 338.9—dc22 2005032836 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For Bernice, Don, Elspeth, Eve, Helen, Jack, K, Megan, and Ramonda This page intentionally left blank Contents Preface and Acknowledgments ix Introduction: A Politics of Economic Possibility xix 1. Affects and Emotions for a Postcapitalist Politics 1 2. Reluctant Subjects: Subjection and Becoming 23 3. Constructing a Language of Economic Diversity 53 4. The Community Economy 79 5. Surplus Possibilities: The Intentional Economy of Mondragón 101 6. Cultivating Subjects for a Community Economy 127 7. Building Community Economies 165 Notes 197 Bibliography 241 Previous Publications 263 Index 265 This page intentionally left blank Preface and Acknowledgments Hope is the difference between probability and possibility. —Isabelle Stengers, “A ‘Cosmo-Politics’—Risk, Hope, Change” This is a hopeful book written at a time when hope is finally getting a hearing but also a battering. Between the completion of the manuscript and the writing of this preface, the seemingly intractable nature of the world’s problems has impressed itself on us quite powerfully. A recently aired BBC documentary on “global dimming” showed how airborne industrial pollutants are blocking sun- light from reaching the earth; as these pollutants are reduced, global warming will presumably proceed at a much faster rate than is currently projected. Ac- cording to the documentary, the Ethiopian famine that killed ten million people in the early 1980s was due to the failure over more than a decade of the year- ly monsoon, as the water-laden tropical air mass was prevented from moving northward by the northern hemisphere’s pollution haze—a shocking wake-up call about global responsibility. On top of all the environmental news, one of us has just discovered that she is not exempt from what feels like a breast cancer epidemic in women of the “developed” world. From the global scale to the place closest in, we have been presented with the enormity of “what pushes back at us” (to use the words of our inspirational activist friend Ethan Miller) when we at- tempt to imagine and inhabit a world of economic possibility. Both of these “events” highlight in different ways the ethical imperatives and challenges of the interdependence that this book attempts to bring into focus. All too clearly we are being presented with the unintended effects of “development.” All too starkly we can see that increased consumption, with its promise of heightened well-being, is bought at the expense of the destruction of the global ix x . Preface and Acknowledgments atmospheric commons we have taken for granted over the past two centuries. It is not only African families who have borne the brunt of “our” development, but perhaps also women in wealthy countries and cancer sufferers in general, whose bodies are registering something counterintuitive—the downside of a “good life.” We can only feel awed by and grateful for the complexes of committed and competent surgeons, oncologists, radiographers, and their instruments and institutions that interact with a state and privately supported knowledge commons to address breast cancer (something the feminist movement has made a priority). We can only feel ashamed that our respective nations (Australia and the United States) are the two industrialized countries that have refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol to limit greenhouse gas emissions and begin to arrest global warming. How is it that the wealth of nations readily flows into tackling one piece of this interdependent picture and is vigilantly restricted from addressing the other? In our bitter moments we are tempted to relate this asymmetry to the perceived workings of the economic growth machine in which low-cost coal and oil burning are seen to be central and women’s post–childbearing bodies are basically irrelevant. Our respective governments are prepared to direct resources into breast cancer research and treatment, and will even foot the bill for much of the scientific research that has identified the interactions of global dimming and global warming, but agreeing to put in place the already existing technology and regulations that could halt destruction of our environmental commons is at pres- ent beyond them. For us, this is a matter for urgent discussion and a case where rethinking what constitutes an “economy”—if we are willing to countenance the continued existence of such a domain—may actually be crucial. In this book, we broach global and local interdependence around economic issues of necessity, surplus, consumption, and commons. We bring these issues out of the realm of abstract theorizing and into everyday practices of liv- ing together and building alternative futures. Our own interdependence as the collective author J. K. Gibson-Graham gives us the fortitude (foolhardiness?) to address such monumental issues and the embodied insights into processes of self-cultivation that might equip us to become ethical subjects of a postcapitalist order. Emerging from the mutuality of our relationship and especially our interdependence with others, the book is the neatly bound tip of a ramshackle iceberg. We recognize that publishing and affixing our name to this volume consigns its contributing factors to subaqueous obscurity. “Authored, authorized, and au- thoritative,” as Sadie Plant cautions, “a piece of writing is its own mainstream” (1997, 9). What is wondrous to contemplate is its emergence at the confluence of events, people, relationships, and things, and to watch it flow toward the pooling oceans of anonymity, to be dispersed and taken up once again in the hydrological cycle of de- and retextualization, and eventually transmuted into other streams and icebergs. In less watery but no less embracing terms, we might simply acknowl- edge our understanding that “all and everything is naturally related and inter- Preface and Acknowledgments . xi connected” (Plant 1997, 11; quoting Ada Lovelace) and leave it at that. But we will not get away so easily. Gratitude is not entailed in a moment of metatheoretical recognition; it is an orientation toward the world, indistinguishable from its em- bodiment in everyday practices. Here we wish to indulge in a practical exercise of gratitude by tracing a few of the interdependencies that made this book. We’ll start with the interdependence between A Postcapitalist Politics and its predecessor, The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy, published in 1996. We are immensely appreciative of the offer of the University of Minnesota Press to reprint that book along with A Postcapitalist Politics, and we especially value Carrie Mullen’s bracing enthusi- asm for both projects. Separated by a decade of thinking, researching, and liv- ing, these two volumes are intricately interconnected and yet very different. In The End of Capitalism, J. K. Gibson-Graham was the quintessential “theory slut,” happily and carelessly thinking around, playing with “serious” and consequen- tial subjects like political economy, loving the theory she was with, offering ebul- lient arguments and heady claims about representations of capitalism and their politically constraining performativity. We spoke to our readers as somewhat wayward feminists who seemed to relish their positioning as mildly outrageous, quirkily funny, and ambiguously gendered. It might come as a shock, then, that A Postcapitalist Politics has a completely different feel; it reads like a wholesome, even earnest, treatise on how to do economy differently. The authorial stance is open, exposed, even vulnerable, entirely different from the shimmering armor of the earlier book (and much less fun, we fear). In writing that book we felt a perhaps unwarranted confidence, conferred by our lengthy training in political economy, that no one could say things about capitalism that we hadn’t heard be- fore and didn’t have a response to. This book offers us no such safe havens. What, apart from menopause and inevitable aging, has contributed to this shift in stance and affect? Perhaps it has been our awakening to the different kinds of politics that are possible, along with an enhanced ability to hear as well as speak. In our own relationship, which has spanned almost three decades as well as the Pacific Ocean, time differences of fourteen to sixteen hours (depending on daylight savings), and countless other spatiotemporal dis- and con-junctures, an opening up to listening to each other has had transformative micropolitical effects. As with the projects we review in this book, we have been confronted by the challenges of collaboration—the comforts and discomforts of collectivism, the bounds and liberties of (joint) identity, the struggle to make collaboration work not just for itself but for its participants.

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