Imagining and enacting noncapitalist futures

Socialist Review, 2001

Community Economies Collective*

Feminists...want to leave their husbands, abondon their children, become lesbians, practice witchcraft, and overthrow capitalism.

--Pat Buchanan1

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 twentieth 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 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"2 - 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.3

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.4 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.5 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.