What do you think?
Rate this book
A Postcapitalist Politics
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 poststructuralism, 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 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 postcapitalist 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.
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.
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 poststructuralism, 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 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 postcapitalist 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.
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.
360 pages, Paperback
First published March 17, 2006
15 people are currently reading
511 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
November 26, 2019
A direct repudiation of the vulgar Marxist, accelerationist, etc. approach (capitalism is a totalizing and complete system with no outside, there's no way out of capitalism but through it, attempts at building a new system within the shell of the old are futile and doomed to be coopted, all that stuff has to wait until "after the revolution," yada yada blah blah woof woof). Like John Holloway and Massimo De Angelis, Gibson-Graham (a composite author) view the present system as complete and open ended. The reproduction of capitalism is a contested process. All the parallel commons-based and informal alternatives that exist alongside capitalism offer the hope of supplanting it, if existing resources and energies are united and expanded.
April 29, 2015
Extremely wordy, tedious explanation of basically four principles and their examples. A very diverse set of examples, case studies and ethnographic research conducted over a long time span; however, limited analytical insight as to what all this work introduces as new. That capitalism lacks ethics and we need to think about our consumption, need, redistribution, surplus, damage to the planet? Duh!
This whole postmodern, poststructuralist effort of defining a new discourse, thinking about subjectivity, coordinates and using Foucault and MArx in the same sentence does not really propose anything substantive.If academic inquiry is merely an individual endeavour of formulating endless combinations of ideas and concepts and matching examples, this is a good example. But if the task undertaken is to make a theoretical contribution by way of an empirical inquiry of all the examples referred to in the book, it's not there.
This whole postmodern, poststructuralist effort of defining a new discourse, thinking about subjectivity, coordinates and using Foucault and MArx in the same sentence does not really propose anything substantive.If academic inquiry is merely an individual endeavour of formulating endless combinations of ideas and concepts and matching examples, this is a good example. But if the task undertaken is to make a theoretical contribution by way of an empirical inquiry of all the examples referred to in the book, it's not there.
March 6, 2021
I wanted to like this book, but . . . . I just couldn't get into it.
I liked the dual authorship thing, philosophically.
There are some nice references to a notion of the academy as a commons where people can "not just express what they were thinking anyway but to feel their thought becoming part of the collective adventure" (xiii citing Stengers).
They do manage to open up an "otherwise" that might be useful somehow in dealing with the right in the US: speaking of their work in a particular valley in Australia that had the opportunity to produced cheap power to attract industry but went along with a larger state project that then went away, they discuss the residents' sense that they had been "good scouts" (what they call "the entitlement of the obedient child"). But they then open up a possibility in those feelings: "this anger [could be seen as] an expression of the ressentiment that accompanies subjection and victimization. But we are interested in a more nuanced reading and the suggestion that anger is also a productive expression of outrage in the face of unfair and irrational economic practices. Now that the social contract . . . . has been broken, there is a willingness to face up to what lay behind this contract -- the insecurity and unsustainability of a single-industry region run along state capitalist lines. . . . Animating their righteous blaming of the SEC was a certain self-hatred, some shame at their dependency, their going along, being bought off, slumbering through their economic lives, some uncomfortable sense that they had purchased their own well-being at the expense of the community. In such a moment of interruption . . . and in the angry feelings . . . demands may be forged to recreate what is lost, but a turning is also possible -- one potentially based on economic diversity and more autonomous regional development, if such possibilities were to become imaginable." (41) Maybe. Hochschild certainly documents no such thing in Louisiana.
Notes the importance of Marx in thinking of beings as irreducibly social, not social-after being economic actors (88).
Nice summary of Mondragon creating subjects appropriate to it.
I liked the dual authorship thing, philosophically.
There are some nice references to a notion of the academy as a commons where people can "not just express what they were thinking anyway but to feel their thought becoming part of the collective adventure" (xiii citing Stengers).
They do manage to open up an "otherwise" that might be useful somehow in dealing with the right in the US: speaking of their work in a particular valley in Australia that had the opportunity to produced cheap power to attract industry but went along with a larger state project that then went away, they discuss the residents' sense that they had been "good scouts" (what they call "the entitlement of the obedient child"). But they then open up a possibility in those feelings: "this anger [could be seen as] an expression of the ressentiment that accompanies subjection and victimization. But we are interested in a more nuanced reading and the suggestion that anger is also a productive expression of outrage in the face of unfair and irrational economic practices. Now that the social contract . . . . has been broken, there is a willingness to face up to what lay behind this contract -- the insecurity and unsustainability of a single-industry region run along state capitalist lines. . . . Animating their righteous blaming of the SEC was a certain self-hatred, some shame at their dependency, their going along, being bought off, slumbering through their economic lives, some uncomfortable sense that they had purchased their own well-being at the expense of the community. In such a moment of interruption . . . and in the angry feelings . . . demands may be forged to recreate what is lost, but a turning is also possible -- one potentially based on economic diversity and more autonomous regional development, if such possibilities were to become imaginable." (41) Maybe. Hochschild certainly documents no such thing in Louisiana.
Notes the importance of Marx in thinking of beings as irreducibly social, not social-after being economic actors (88).
Nice summary of Mondragon creating subjects appropriate to it.
Read
December 19, 2008I'm a big fan of their first book, The End of Capitalism (as We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy, and I loved this one too. In The End of Capitalism, they make a compelling (and often very funny) argument that we should stop focusing on capitalism so much (seeing it everywhere, spending lots of our energy critiquing it)—they call this tendency “capitalistocentrist” and say that such a focus is self-defeating in that it sustains a notion of capitalism as ubiquitous, inevitable, or as super-powerful. Instead, in a queer theory vein, they argue that we should develop our eye for the diversity of economic life, and recognize the extent to which non-capitalist transactions (household work, lending practices, stealing, for example) mark our lives and relationships. In this second book, they do what they recommend in the first: they turn their attention to all kinds of alternative economic ways of being and interacting, both in everyday life and in community projects. Here’s what they say about the transition between the books:
[In the End of Capitalism]. we spoke to our readers as somewhat wayward feminists who seemed to relish our positioning as mildly outrageous, quirkily funny, and ambiguously gendered. 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 shining armor we of the earlier book (and much less fun, we fear).
I, for one, enjoyed both gears of their writing and found the second book just as fun (and thought-provoking) as their first. I’m looking forward to teaching it!
[In the End of Capitalism]. we spoke to our readers as somewhat wayward feminists who seemed to relish our positioning as mildly outrageous, quirkily funny, and ambiguously gendered. 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 shining armor we of the earlier book (and much less fun, we fear).
I, for one, enjoyed both gears of their writing and found the second book just as fun (and thought-provoking) as their first. I’m looking forward to teaching it!
April 22, 2020
Found this on my roommate's shelf and the intro had me hooked. Unfortunately, the rest didn't quite live up to it. The authors are right that making new subject positions can be an incredibly powerful tool to combat capitalism (I am not "unemployed" I am "a caretaker," "a gardener," etc.), and they've left me with a lot to think about to that end, but they seem to lose sight of the material limits of that effectiveness. A community might be able to redefine itself, and even to work cooperatively to grow wealth and social well-being, but that doesn't stop a developer with enough capital from forcing them all to leave. Also, they shift focus between disparaging other leftists and disparaging capitalists/neoliberal thinking in a way that makes it seem like they are only arguing what is convenient to their argument at any given time rather than forming their argument through the weaknesses in other viewpoints.
May 8, 2014
This is a really dense book, especially at the beginning. I didn't finish it, but I hope to one day. An interesting look at postcapitalism through a feminist lens.
July 25, 2024
At the beginning I thought this would be a dense and difficult read, but past the first 30-40 pages it gets much clearer. Really digestible and filled in a lot of the gaps in my language of these ideas
In their feminist poststructuralist fashion, JKGG put a "queering" lens to traditional notions of economic development, and encourage new subjectivities for relating to the economy on the basis of the real diversity of "non-capitalist" human economic activity.
Challenging marxist tendencies, they try to expand the language of economic discourse beyond "capitalocentrism" to bring focus to the real alternatives and how they (re)produce value for local communities. In the action studies, bringing focus to alternative, informal, unpaid, relational, household, self-organized and/or subsistence activities opens a necessary new perspective in contexts of political discontent and economic struggle. There's a needed reorientation around the plethora of ways we create value and purpose in our daily lives. Drawing attention to new and renewed commons is one way this is achieved. Life after capitalism won't be simply smashing power and exiting the tunnel but a progressive process of experimentation embedded in communities
In their feminist poststructuralist fashion, JKGG put a "queering" lens to traditional notions of economic development, and encourage new subjectivities for relating to the economy on the basis of the real diversity of "non-capitalist" human economic activity.
Challenging marxist tendencies, they try to expand the language of economic discourse beyond "capitalocentrism" to bring focus to the real alternatives and how they (re)produce value for local communities. In the action studies, bringing focus to alternative, informal, unpaid, relational, household, self-organized and/or subsistence activities opens a necessary new perspective in contexts of political discontent and economic struggle. There's a needed reorientation around the plethora of ways we create value and purpose in our daily lives. Drawing attention to new and renewed commons is one way this is achieved. Life after capitalism won't be simply smashing power and exiting the tunnel but a progressive process of experimentation embedded in communities
June 18, 2019
A supposedly fun thing I'll never read again.
Very good ideas buried deep inside very dense academic techno babble.
I understand that the authors need to stretch out and reinvent the language used for identity/economy/politics, but this was done in an unenjoyable way.
That said, the central theses presented were excellent, and their approach qas sound. I felt their action research project data was too small a data set for some of the conclusions they drew around how to shift beyond capitalist identities.
The authors have written a follow-up on 'how' to develop the types of post-capitalist economies and societies they point to in this book; hopefully it is written for more popular consumption, otherwise the authors' great ideas will not reach the global audience necessary.
Very good ideas buried deep inside very dense academic techno babble.
I understand that the authors need to stretch out and reinvent the language used for identity/economy/politics, but this was done in an unenjoyable way.
That said, the central theses presented were excellent, and their approach qas sound. I felt their action research project data was too small a data set for some of the conclusions they drew around how to shift beyond capitalist identities.
The authors have written a follow-up on 'how' to develop the types of post-capitalist economies and societies they point to in this book; hopefully it is written for more popular consumption, otherwise the authors' great ideas will not reach the global audience necessary.
February 27, 2023
Provocative way of looking at economics and politics that opened my mind.
Written by two thinkers who combined their name into one, tre cool.
If you liked "The Gift" by Lewis Hyde, this might engage you well.
Written by two thinkers who combined their name into one, tre cool.
If you liked "The Gift" by Lewis Hyde, this might engage you well.
March 16, 2011
alternative and collective economies
for my folklore masters thesis
for my folklore masters thesis
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews