Anticapitalism or Postcapitalism? Both!

Prefiguring alternatives through the articulation of post- and anti-capitalistic politics: An introduction to three additional papers and a reflection

“…Especially this last ecosystem is of particular importance, as alternative organizations’ relations to existing institutional actors – e.g. the university (Esper et al, 2017), investors (Meyer and Hudon, 2017), the state, and civil society (Barin-Cruz et al, 2017), but also social movements, trade unions and political parties (De Coster and Zanoni, 2018; Husted and Plesner, 2017) – are key not only for their existence but also for their ability to challenge the capitalist economy (Miller, 2015). As critics have observed, the political antagonism of alternative economy organizations should not be assumed, but rather needs to be constructed (Böhm, 2014; Dean, 2015a, 2015b).…”

“…In his commentary to Dean’s and Healy’s speeches, Miller (2015) goes back to the original work of Gibson-Graham (1996a) to argue that post-capitalism and anti-capitalism should be combined: ‘A thousand possibilities exist between the dangerously liberal image of proliferating points and the dangerously authoritarian image of the party’ (Miller, 2015: 365). He points to the necessity to chart alternative livelihoods and work at establishing linkages and synergies between them, while at once reconstructing a radical critique.…”

Cooperatives

“…As the introduction has made clear, cooperatives are political institutions as much as they are economic ones. Frequently, they are therefore close to social movements, endorsing for example 'postcapitalist and anticapitalist politics' (Miller 2015). Co-ops may unite and fuse with other social movements or even antagonise them, as has been the case with the trade union movement (Kasmir 1991(Kasmir , 2000.…”

‘Stand back and watch us’: Post-capitalist practices in the maker movement

“…In its precarious performativity and revalorization of the unexceptional and everyday, this post-structural re-reading of economic geographies recasts the ‘economic system’ in a manner complementary to theories of practice, not least through a shared mistrust of both methodological structuralism and agential individualism. Rather than closed and all-encompassing, from the anti-essentialist and pluralistic perspective of the diverse economies approach, capitalism becomes ‘an always vulnerable and incomplete social process of colonization and discipline’, one which can be struggled against by ‘proliferating movements that enact life-affirming value relations both outside and against the values of capital’ (Miller, 2015: 366).…”