Capitalism, mutual aid, and material life: Understanding exilic spaces

Abstract

Anarchist and Marxist scholarship differ mainly in emphasis: anarchists tend to emphasise cooperation, while Marxists have traditionally focused on exploitation and domination. The most recent wave of anarchist scholarship analyses nonstate spaces and practices that stand outside the logic of state and market, while Marxist analyses are still dominated by processes of accumulation and the capital relation. The aim of this brief intervention is to suggest that both approaches are needed, and that understanding life at the edges of capitalism, including possible emphases on relations of mutual aid instead of market competition, is necessary for a complete understanding of capitalism as a system.

How ecovillages work: more-than-human understandings of rentabilidad in Mexican ecovillages

“…These examples reveal paths forward in the sustainable development discourse, and suggest the generative possibility of revising the conceptual rubrics against which alternatives to development are compared. Insisting that ecovillage communities be formatted as “models” (which either succeed or do not) glosses over the complex daily negotiations that occur in the experimental and marginal spaces that seek to position themselves against the status quo (O’Hearn and Grubačić 2016 ). Removing the expectation that alternatives be “profitable” in a colloquial sense allows us to understand ecovillage projects as sites of productive experimentation, rather than scalable models.…”

“…Understanding ecovillages as kinds of “exilic spaces,” or spaces on the margins of social and economic life “in which people attempt to escape from capitalist relations and processes” (O’Hearn and Grubačić 2016 :148), I ask how ecovillage communities renegotiate their relationships to the broader social and economic systems in which they are entangled (Dawson 2013 ). Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in two ecovillage communities in two states in Mexico, I call attention to instances in which interlocutors engaged with the concept of rentabilidad (profitability) in the contexts of the regenerative agricultural systems and community spaces they construct.…”

“…Ecovillages are inherently speculative ventures, or as Burke and Arjona ( 2013 ) note, laboratories for alternative political ecologies, inviting—and indeed, necessitating—the reimagination of human lives with greater consideration for the natural world. In this sense, such communities might be understood as “exilic spaces” (O’Hearn and Grubačić 2016 ), in that they seek to build autonomous and self-sustaining agricultural, social, and economic systems while also reflecting a stance of resistance to neoliberal capitalist structures. At the same time, communities may also remain dependent on connections to broader regional or global markets in diverse and interconnected ways.…”

Noiva do Cordeiro community: contributions from elements of a system based on substantive economy

“…Not denying the mercantile logic, but taking advantage of its structure for the dissemination of its own productive logic, the Noiva do Cordeiro community shows itself as a unique case, in the field of substantive organizations. Above all, for taking economic organization and division of labor as potential for social relationships through exchanges, instead of being characterized as the organization of productive arrangements for accumulation (O'HEARN and GRUBAČIĆ, 2016).…”

Lessons from exits foreclosed: An exilic interpretation of the Mexican and Russian Revolutions, 1910–1924

“…Current debates concerning systemic exit from capitalism and state administration have focused on alternatives and their possibility, the form they can take, their construction and maintenance, and their relation to long historical processes of world-systemic accumulation, expansion, incorporation, and social reorganization (Gray 2004; Grubačić 2014; Grubačić & O’Hearn 2016; O’Hearn & Grubačić 2016; Scott 2009; Zibechi 2012). Recently, a novel contribution to this debate was made by Andrej Grubačić and Denis O’Hearn in Living at the Edges of Capitalism: Adventures in Exile and Mutual Aid .…”