Abstract
J.K. Gibson-Graham explores two responses to the violence of development – the politics of empire and the politics of place. Drawing on the well-known book Empire by Hardt and Negri, the experience of the SID project on Women and the Politics of Place, and a slum dwellers' initiative in India, she attempts to open up alternatives to the dominance of capital and affirm a new political space.
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Notes
Founded by Arturo Escobar and Wendy Harcourt, the WPP project involves more than 20 feminist activists and academics around the world.
All of these diverse forms of labour are in some way subject to capitalist discipline and capitalist relations of production. This fact of being within capital and sustaining capital is what defines the proletariat as a class' (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 53), as ‘the multitude of exploited and subjugated producers’ (ibid: 394).
See Deleuze (1995) on societies of control.
What stands out in the text as (updated and postmodernized) Marxism are the real subsumption of labour by capital, that is, labour becoming a form of capital, by virtue of which it gains a privileged political role as the transformer of the capitalist world order (although the contemporary proletariat/multitude is not an exclusive class category since it includes all labour); the reworked distinction between a class in itself and a class for itself, and the collateral question of how a class created by capitalism becomes a collective subject that makes the world anew; the progressive role of capitalism in bringing us to the point of social and economic transformation (‘capitalism digs its own grave’ in Žižek, (2000) paraphrase of Marx), the ossified relations of production as a fetter on the generative productive forces (including both process and product technology); the distinction between goods and services (material and immaterial production) grounding social distinctions, with the hierarchy reversed; the way the economy and the state (here sovereignty) tend to become either indistinguishable or different versions of the same thing; the treatment of capitalism, Empire, or the system as a structural subject with agency, intentions and desires; and, finally, millennialism.
And also exemplifying a ‘politics of if not necessarily for women’ (see above).
See Hardt (2002), for example, for a vision of networking replacing older revolutionary organizational forms.
In other words, she is the Lacanian ‘subject of lack’, ‘the empty place of the structure’ that Žižek (1990: 251) brought to Laclau and Mouffe's project of radical democracy.
This is the pre-symbolic in Madra and Oszelcuk (2003).
For us, place signifies the possibility of understanding local economies as places withhighly specific economic identities and capacities rather than simply as nodes in a global capitalist system. It also suggests the new place of the local economic subject – as subject rather than object of development, agent rather than victim of economy. The language of place resonates with our ongoing attempts to bring into view the diversity of economic practices, to make visible the hidden and alternative economic activities that can be found everywhere. If we can begin to see these largely non-capitalist activities as prevalent and viable, we may be encouraged to build upon them actively to transform our local economies (Community Economies Collective, 2001; www.communityeconomies.org).
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Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to the students in Julie Graham's advanced graduate seminar for their insightful and collaborative comments: Ken Byrne, Kenan Ercel, Stephen Healy, Yahya Madra, Ceren Oszelcuk, Joe Rebello, Maliha Safri, Chizu Sato, Peter Tamas, Barbara Woloch. I am also deeply indebted to Arturo Escobar, Wendy Harcourt and the other members of the WPP project for their feedback and support. Thank you all.
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Gibson-Graham, J. The Violence of Development: Two political imaginaries. Development 47, 27–34 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.development.1100013
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.development.1100013