[p2p-research] Fwd: Julie Graham -- A Postcapitalist Politics for Difficult Times

[Michel Bauwens]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <dante.monson at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 5:44 PM
Subject: Fwd: Julie Graham -- A Postcapitalist Politics for Difficult Times
To: Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>


introducing Gibson-Graham's writings :*

" Imagine if rather than having to "overthrow"
capitalism (now a virtually unimaginable project) leftists could pursue
the other revolutionary options available to Buchanan's feminists— what if
we could leave capitalism, abandon capitalism, become socialists, practice
socialism? "*


2. About Julie Graham
3. Community Economies Collective - Imagining and Enacting Noncapitalist
Futures
4. Link to Gibson-Graham’s papers, books and projects


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sixteen Beaver <lists at 16beavergroup.org>
Date: Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 2:46 AM
Subject: Saturday Night -- 10.03.09 -- Julie Graham -- A Postcapitalist
Politics for Difficult Times
To: general at 16beavergroup.org



Saturday Night -- 10.03.09 --  Julie Graham -- A Postcapitalist Politics
for Difficult Times

1. About this Saturday
2. About Julie Graham
3. Community Economies Collective - Imagining and Enacting Noncapitalist
Futures
4. Link to Gibson-Graham’s papers, books and projects

___________________________________________________
1. About this Saturday

What: Talk / Discussion with Julie Graham
When: Saturday 10.03.09 @ 7:00 pm
Where: 16 Beaver Street, 4th floor
Who: Free and open to all

Julie Graham’s talk is both directly and indirectly related to two
previous events at 16Beaver: World Capitalist Crash Course with Loren
Goldner & Howie Seligman and Connective Mutations with Franco Berardi.
J.K. Gibson-Graham’s work offers an alternative, differentiated vision of
economy incorporating a rich plethora of non-capitalist economic
activities, and a political imaginary that envisions economic
transformation through place-based actions and the transformation of
subjects. Through collaborative action research with communities in the
US, Australia and Asia, J.K. Gibson-Graham demonstrate that it is possible
for individual and collective subjects to create innovative, participatory
economic institutions and practices. In chapter 6 of their most recent
book, A Postcapitalist Politics, “Cultivating Subjects for a Community
Economy,” they say, “If to change ourselves is to change our worlds, and
the relation is reciprocal, then the project of history making is never a
distant one but always right here, on the borders of our sensing,
thinking, feeling and moving bodies.”

Julie and Kath’s work presents a unique combination of grass roots
political activism and an intense theoretical engagement with a number of
traditions: political economy, feminist, queer and psychoanalytic theory,
cultural geography, and, most recently, Eastern teachings. Rather than
just talking about economies, their work engages the subjects of
economies, including ourselves.

We are sending this email out early with the hopes that you may be able to
read it for a more lively discussion.

___________________________________________________
2. About Julie Graham

Julie Graham is a scholar activist who teaches rethinking economy and
economic alternatives at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. Under
the pen name J.K. Gibson-Graham, she co-authored with Katherine Gibson The
End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political
Economy /(2nd edition, Minnesota, 2006), which challenges the usual vision
of capitalism as the dominant or only viable form of economy, and A
Postcapitalist Politics (Minnesota, 2006), which focuses on building
community economies in the face of globalization. Over the past 20 years
she has been engaged in research, activism and teaching related to diverse
development pathways and community economies, including the economy of
generosity that is fueled by gifts of labor, goods and money; the
non-capitalist market economy made up of worker collectives and
self-employed individuals; and the social economy comprised of non-profits
and alternative capitalist businesses. She is a founding member of the
Community Economies Collective, a university-based group involved in
building community economies in Australia, the US, and the Asia Pacific
region.

___________________________________________________
3. Community Economies Collective, "Imagining and Enacting Noncapitalist
Futures,"

IMAGINING AND ENACTING NONCAPITALIST FUTURES

The Community Economies Collective

Feminists…want to leave their husbands, abandon their children, become
lesbians, practice witchcraft, and overthrow capitalism. (Pat Buchanan)

Inspiring, isn’t it? Imagine if rather than having to "overthrow"
capitalism (now a virtually unimaginable project) leftists could pursue
the other revolutionary options available to Buchanan's feminists— what if
we could leave capitalism, abandon capitalism, become socialists, practice
socialism? What follows is the unfinished story of such an imagining. It’s
the story of a search—for a new way of thinking socialism and a new way of
performing it. It’s also the story of a group of people who began a
research project together and became a desiring collectivity.  We started
out, embarrassingly, with no real desire for “socialism.” Yet maybe that’s
not so surprising. Over the last hundred years, the word has been drained
of utopian content and no longer serves, as it once did, to convene and
catalyze the left. This makes it difficult even to speak of “the left” or
to use the pronoun “we” with any confidence or commitment. As
self-identified leftists at the end of the 20th century, we found
ourselves tongue-tied, not knowing who or what we might speak for. But
what if the current dispersed and disidentified state of the left could be
seen as an opportune reversal, and the absence of a mobilizing vision
could be read as a new kind of presence? If formerly there was certainty
(if not unanimity) among leftists about the lineaments of a desirable
society, now there is silence, tentativeness, and openness to possibility.
The project of creating alternatives has become a voyage to unknown
destinations, accompanied by unfamiliar or unexpected companions.   In
this vacant/pregnant environment our group came to life in 1997—a
collection of students, postdocs and faculty members, loosely knit across
continents, who hoped to become desiring economic subjects of a
“socialist” sort (even if that initially meant little to us). Without a
destination we set forth, tired of waiting for a revolution we didn’t want
and tired of waiting generally. From the perspective of a more literate
moment (after many courses and reading groups), it seems clear to us now
that we were embarking on what William Connolly has called a “politics of
becoming”3—a process through which we would not only begin to envision
other worlds, but also cultivate ourselves and others as possible
inhabitants.

Legacy

It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing
deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late
capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations.4
Seeking a politics of desire and invention, we found the prevailing (left)
economic imagination to be a colonized territory, offering us very little
in the way of models or alternatives. Think about “socialism,” for
example, which bears the unbearable burden of providing a complete and
total alternative to capitalism, itself envisioned as total and complete.
If capitalism is characterized by private ownership and market relations,
socialism must entail state ownership and non-market allocation. Yet
socialism cannot simply present itself as capitalism's opposite. It must
also be its equivalent—expansive yet sustainable, efficient but not
exploitative, it must have capitalism's strengths without its weaknesses.
To its great disadvantage, socialism has been largely defined by
capitalism, as its opposing counterpart and suitable replacement. And the
project of building socialism has been similarly constrained. To the
extent that capitalism is understood as a systemic form of economy, the
enactment of socialism is a task of systemic transformation. Before
socialism can be constructed, a capitalist totality must "break down" or
be "overthrown." We wanted to step outside the confines of economic
monism, where capitalism is everywhere and its opposite (a now discredited
socialism) is the only alternative. This would require reading the
economic landscape through a lens of difference rather than sameness,
enabling ourselves to see capitalist and noncapitalist (even socialist)
activities coexisting there. If we could locate noncapitalist activities
here and now, if we could see them as prevalent and sustaining, perhaps we
could find more possibilities of participating in their creation. Perhaps
too the imagined scale and temporality of socialist politics could undergo
a shift, becoming more partial and proximate.

Rereading the economy

In The End of Capitalism (as we knew it) J.K. Gibson-Graham argues that
representations of capitalism constrain our political imaginations and
economic possibilities. If we understand capitalism as necessarily
expansive and naturally dominant, we eliminate the imaginative space for
alternatives and the rationale for their enactment. It seems that we need
to conceptualize the economy differently in order to enact a different
economy. More specifically, we need to de-naturalize capitalist dominance
and to represent noncapitalist forms of economy (including ones we might
value and desire) as existing and emerging, and as possible to create.
Rereading the economy does not mean simply investigating the interstices
and bringing minority practices to light; it involves opening up the
entire economic space to resignification. Fortunately there are many
others to guide us in such a radical undertaking. Most recently, feminist
theorists have produced a powerful critique of conventional economic
representation and an accompanying re-visioning of “the economy.” On the
basis of accountings of unpaid labor performed in households and
neighborhoods (including childcare and housework), feminists argue that as
much as 50 percent of all economic activity in both rich and poor
countries is excluded from labor force statistics and national income and
product accounts. Calling upon a time-honored definition of economic
activity, their intervention helps us to see the discursivity and
contingency (not to mention interestedness) of concepts of economy. It
reminds us that to call a society or economy "capitalist" is an act of
categorical violence, one that obliterates from view the economic activity
that engages more people for more hours of the day over more years of
their lives than any other.

A diagram from a popular radical economics textbook conveys the point
visually:    (see PDF)

To the extent that we think of capitalism as coextensive with commodity
production, capitalism occupies no more than half the economic space. But,
as Bowles and Edwards point out, not all commodity production can be
considered capitalist (that is, if we understand capitalism as involving
commodity production by free wage labor under exploitative conditions in
which the surplus is appropriated by nonproducers). Commodities are just
goods and services produced for a market—they can be produced under a
variety of different production relations. Slaves (unfree and unpaid)
produced cotton for a market in the antebellum US south. Worker
collectives (who appropriate their own surplus), self-employed people
(also self-appropriating and thus not exploited), and slaves (without
freedom of contract) in the prison industry today produce goods and
services for a market, but not under capitalist relations of production.
In this reading, perhaps 40 percent of the total product of the US economy
is produced under capitalism. That allows a lot of room for other kinds of
things in the social space of economy. The project of rereading the
economy depends on the familiar (to Marxists at least) proposition that
knowledge is neither neutral nor singular; instead multiple, politically
inflected knowledges coexist in unstable relations of dominance and
subordination. Rereading the economy entails excavating subjugated
knowledges, both academic and popular, and drawing upon them as
resources—to bring what is unsayable into language and what is hidden into
visibility.  Rereading is necessary to empower novel social and political
possibilities but it will never be sufficient, as those who are impatient
with language activism frequently remind us. Moreover, it exposes us to
the dangers of intellectual arrogance and social isolation. Nevertheless
we pursue it because we feel deeply that representation is powerful and
that visibility as a project has transformative force (this is something
the queer contingent in our group will not allow us to forget or
underestimate). Part of fostering a different economy involves cultivating
a language of economic difference, within which alternative economic
projects can be conceived, and through which alternative economic subjects
can be validated and come to self-recognition.

To continue reading please download ...

Community Economies Collective, "Imagining and Enacting Noncapitalist
Futures," Socialist Review, Vol. 28, no. 3+4 (2001).

http://www.sduk.us/beaver/community_economies_collective.pdf


___________________________________________________
4. Link to Gibson-Graham’s papers, books and projects

www.communityeconomies.org






__________________________________________________
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