Imagining and enacting noncapitalist futures

Socialist Review, 2001

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.6 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.7 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.

To the extent that we think of capitalism as coextensive with commodity production, capitalism occupies no more than half the economic space.9 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).10 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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.11 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.