Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities

Take Back the Economy is the third volume in the J. K. Gibson-Graham trilogy that begins with The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It) (Gibson-Graham 1996) and A Postcapitalist Politics (Gibson-Graham 2006). Gibson-Graham is the authorial voice of Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson, one of the most productive research collaborations I have seen in the field of economic geography. Julie Graham died in April 2010 before the third volume was completed, but her thoughts, words, and influence are evident throughout the book. The collaborative research continues with Jenny Cameron (Australia) and Stephen Healy (United States) drawing on the work of The Community Economies Collective (http://www.communityeconomies.org), created to bring together academic and community activists to promote alternative, diverse, and sustainable economies.

Take Back the Economy has been described by its authors as a “how-to manual,” a guide for the creation and practice of postcapitalist economics. That effort cannot be properly evaluated without referring to the first two books. The End of Capitalism lays out the general theoretical grounds for a poststructural Marxism; it objects to the classical Marxist view of capitalism as a unitary, concrete, massive, and dominant structure constantly expanding through economic growth and exploitation of labor, whose transformation would require the seizure of the state and the socialization of productive wealth through revolution.

Using Althusser's concept of “overdetermination” and Resnick and Wolff's (1987) critique of political economy, The End of Capitalism claims that the “the objective reality” of capitalism comes from the way we have been invited to think about it. Gibson-Graham argues that it is not possible to escape capitalism through the totalizing discursive traditions of socialism and Marxism, and they make a strong theoretical case for the deployment of diverse, small-scale anticapitalist projects to accomplish social transformation. A Postcapitalist Politics provides numerous examples of alternative futures and examples of diverse economies that are not predominantly capitalist. It is here that they introduce their now famous analogy in which wage labor producing for the capitalist market is viewed as only the tip of the iceberg. What lies submerged is the excluded other of capitalism—the diverse economies of household reproduction, cooperatives, volunteering, barter, gift-giving, indigenous exchange, and so on. A Postcapitalist Politics moves the theory forward with empirical analyses of extant community economies with material on the cooperative movement in Mondragon in the Basque region of Spain, and other examples drawn from the Community Economies Collective—Pioneer Valley in Massachusetts and Latrobe Valley in Victoria, Australia—two areas that had suffered from deindustrialization. Take Back the Economy is less theoretical than the first two books but builds on their foundation and serves as a map for getting there from here.

Take Back the Economy (along with the two earlier volumes of the trilogy) is comprised of essays in poststructural economic geography. A review of the book requires a prior word on poststructuralism and postmodernism. Postmodernism refers to a period following the modern; it is an ontological claim that we have entered a new period of postindustrial history where change led by new communication technologies is occurring at a dizzying pace. Poststructuralism is an epistemological claim about “how we know what we know,” about objects such as race, class, gender, capitalism, poverty, nature, and science. Poststructuralism claims that these objects do not exist as concrete real-world phenomena, but that their materiality is formed and constructed through discourse. We are asked to pay explicit attention to the role of language, signs, and representation because all objects of scientific inquiry are discursively constructed and there are no exceptions to this rule. Despite that claim, epistemology is not widely discussed, taught, or examined in the modern university.

There are three important poststructural arguments that run through the entire Community Economies Collective project. First is the claim that often the knowledge through which we have come to understand social problems acts as an obstacle to the very problems we are trying to solve; hence the need for reframing. Consider a statement that appeared in The End of Capitalism:

Marxism has produced a discourse of Capitalism that ostensibly delineates an object of transformative class politics but that operates more powerfully to discourage and marginalize projects of class transformation. In a sense, Marxism has contributed to the socialist absence through the very way in which it has theorized the capitalist presence. (Gibson-Graham 1996, 251)

Second is the argument that conventional social science disables agency by invoking the narrative that problems have “root causes.” Usually these root causes are presented as grand structures such as capitalist exploitation, lack of free markets, or racial discrimination. Although these structural explanations of “what is wrong” sound reasonable and plausible, they have the effect of robbing everyday citizens of agency because to counter such large structures we need other structures that are equally large and unitary; an example is the claim that to overcome capitalism we need a revolution. But the theory of overdetermination states that everything is related to everything else; for example, capitalism is not a concrete singular structure but a discursive material formation that is simultaneously made of other relations—nature, culture, politics, and technology—not just social relations of production. This view implies that capitalism can be engaged at numerous sites at various scales, giving everyday people agency over capitalism. This, the central strategy of Take Back the Economy, is advocated in very first chapter of the book, “Reframing the Economy: Reframing Ourselves.” In this chapter the authors invoke the iceberg analogy to show the diverse productive activities that take place outside the formal capitalist economy, even though we have been told that what really counts is only what is produced in the formal economy.

Third, is the argument that the net result of totalizing preoccupations such as economy, unemployment, inflation, national debt, and revolution is that we exclude, ignore, and marginalize the need for creating diverse community economies here and now. That brings us directly to the material covered in A Postcapitalist Politics and Take Back the Economy. In Postcapitalist Politics there are lengthy case studies of economies that illustrate the principles of diversity, investment in community, ethical business practices, and care of the planet. Take Back the Economy continues the theme of describing extant community economies, and in addition it provides an operational manual of how to create such economies in an ethical manner.

To Gibson-Graham, Cameron, and Healy, taking back the economy through ethical action means the following:

• Surviving together well and equitably.

• Distributing surplus to enrich social and environmental health.

• Encountering others in ways that support their well-being as well as ours.

• Consuming sustainably.

• Caring for—maintaining, replenishing, and growing—our natural and cultural commons.

• Investing our wealth in future generations so that they can live as well.

Following this the authors aver:

An Economy centered on these ethical considerations is what we call a community economy—a space of decision making where we recognize and negotiate our interdependence with other humans, other species, and our environment. In the process of recognizing and negotiating, we become a community. (p. xix)

In Chapter 1, “Reframing the Economy: Reframing Ourselves,” the authors first describe the widely held view of the economy as a well-oiled machine, a unitary bounded whole with its own internal laws and equilibrating mechanisms. To create a conceptual and physical space for alternative community economies, the authors proceed to reframe the discourse by opening the economy up to the play of diverse economies with multiple actors; they show how the formal economy of capitalist commodity and labor markets is just a very small part of the totality of productive activity. Gross domestic product is hardly a measure of all productive activity because there is a range of activities that happen outside the formal market economy: unpaid housework, volunteering, bartering, gift-giving, producer and consumer cooperatives, noncapitalist firms, and so on. Reframing the dominant discourse of the economy allows us to valorize those activities that happen outside formal capitalism of firms and wage work.

Chapters 2 through 6 are organized roughly around key factors of production: labor, entrepreneurship, markets, land, and capital. Each chapter contains a rich medley of examples and case studies.

Chapter 2, “Take Back Work: Surviving Well,” is about labor. The chapter begins with a description of work within capitalist firms and then describes a series of changes that individuals, groups, and communities have made to enable people to live well. The chapter contains examples and a list of instructions for changing the nature of work to help people survive well.

Chapter 3, “Take Back Business: Distributing Surplus,” begins with an example of the closing of a ceramic factory in Argentina that was later taken over by workers and run very successfully as a worker-owned enterprise. This chapter contains one of the most lucid and clear discussions of Marx's labor of theory of value I have read. Using examples, the chapter shows how the surplus created by labor is distributed under different rules of management, or what Marx would have called social relations of production. In a community economy the surplus is distributed for the well-being of the people and of the planet. Taking back businesses can happen through transitioning to more participatory forms of enterprise and encouraging both worker-owned cooperative enterprises and social enterprises where the business is run with an explicit goal of contributing to the social good.

Chapter 4, “Take Back the Market: Encountering Others,” begins with a focus on capitalist markets and a description of supply chains. The subtitle of the chapter calls attention to the length of the modern supply chain, which creates separation and anonymity between producers and consumers. For example, the user of a cell phone might know nothing about the exploitation and violence associated with the production of some of the raw materials that go into the manufacturing of cell phones. The users of cosmetics might know nothing about the treatment of animals used in product development experiments. The authors propose a device called the “distant other dandelion” to map the network of producer nodes involved in supply chains to help consumers practice ethical consumption. The dandelion is a very effective technique, mapping the complexity and connections of global commodity chains. It is unrealistic, though, to think that individual consumers of chocolate, coffee, or cell phones can keep track of what goes on in complex supply chains far away from the sites of consumption. The authors address this issue by describing the work of a number of activist groups that do research and report their findings on the Internet. An example is a Web page titled “Guide to Greener Electronics,” which acts like an Internet ethical consumer guide that goes beyond price and product quality to report on working conditions of labor and environmental impacts of production and consumption.

Chapter 5, titled “Take Back Property: Commoning,” begins with the emergence of private property in production and the rise of capitalism. Reminiscent of the Polyani thesis, the authors describe how private property arose out of privatizing the commons; they also lay out a series of steps on how to regain the commons. Early in the chapter they critically engage the Hardin (1968) thesis, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” which claimed land held in common will inevitably decline because people act in their own self-interest without regard to the interests of others; he was making a case for private ownership. Invoking the research of several economic anthropologists, the authors show that the use of commons throughout history has been sustainable when tradition governed the management of the commons. Commons have deteriorated where tradition breaks down. The Enclosure movement in England showed that the rise of private property was an actual agent in the breakdown of tradition and the commons. The chapter begins with the remarkable story of the Aboriginal population that was displaced from the Northern Territory of Australia, and how in the absence of the sustainable land management practices that had been going on for thousands of years, there was noticeable degradation of fragile dry environments. In the 1970s the rights of the indigenous Australians to this land were recognized and conservationists began to adapt native people's knowledge to scientific fire management practices. The chapter contains many other examples of commons including descriptions of open-source software like Mozilla Firefox.

Chapter 6, “Take Back Finance: Investing in Futures,” begins with a definition of finance conventional in its inclusion of money, savings, investment, taxation, debt, and insurance. It then briefly describes the explosive growth of this sector in recent years, the proliferation of risky ventures bordering on “gambling,” and the subsequent global financial crisis. Given the importance of finance to their project, the authors say, “If we want to take the economy for people and for the planet, we must reclaim finance as an enabler of futures not as an end in itself that is liable to self-destruction” (p. 161). The first example of alternative finance discussed in the chapter is Spain's La Caja Cabral (The Working People's Bank), the financial arm of the Mondragon worker-owned cooperative network. Given its ethical investment portfolio, it was able to withstand the global financial crisis of 2008 quite well. There is a long discussion of Norway's efforts to use revenue from North Sea oil to finance the development of renewable resources. The chapter discusses a tool called the Diverse Finance Identifier, as the authors provide a long list of financial institutions that exist outside mainstream market institutions. These include alternative market institutions such as state banks, credit unions, and microfinance, and nonmarket finance concepts such as sweat equity and rotating credit funds. The chapter ends by giving a series of activities that community activists can engage in to generate finance for ethical community economy projects.

The book is a practice-oriented sequel to the more theoretically oriented first two volumes of the trilogy, and as such has the feel of a “how-to” guide in the practice of postcapitalist economics. The book has no maps but there are hundreds of illustrative figures, strangely, with no figure numbers. There are extensive endnotes in each chapter with very useful bibliographies and Internet sources. This is an important book and I agree with Arturo Escobar's assessment (appearing on the book's back cover) that, “Take Back the Economy is the single most farsighted and practical work enlightening us on the path to a steady transition towards a genuine postcapitalist world.”

I wish to end the review with a friendly, but critical theoretical remark, one that I hope can deepen the value of this book to academics and practitioners. The term market is used throughout the book in an ambiguous sense, equating markets with capitalist markets. I wish to explain this ambiguity by invoking Marx's discussion of use value and exchange value and his formulas for the two circuits of exchange. One of these circuits is C—M—C where C is a commodity that is sold in the market for a quantity of money M that enables someone else to buy another commodity C. Here the market facilitates exchange through the medium of money M. The other circuit of exchange is M—C—M' where a quantity of money purchases a commodity (usually labor) with the sole intent of making M' as large as possible. Both circuits work through markets, but the meaning of the word market is quite different in the two circuits.

As Marx ([1867] 1967) pointed out:

The circuit C—M—C starts with one commodity, and finishes with another, which falls out of circulation and into consumption. Consumption, the satisfaction of wants, in one word, use value, is its end and aim. The circuit M—C—M, on the contrary, commences with money and ends with money. Its leading motive, and the goal that attracts it, is therefore mere exchange value. (149)

Further:

The simple circulation of commodities—selling in order to buy—is a means of carrying out a purpose unconnected with circulation, namely, the appropriation of use-values, the satisfaction of wants. The circulation of money as capital is, on the contrary, an end in itself, for the expansion of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. The circulation of capital has therefore no limits. (151)

In one market money functions as capital with the sole purpose of expanding the value of capital, and in the other, money functions as a means of facilitating exchange so people are able to have the use values they desire. The distinction that Marx makes in the two circuits of exchange is crucial, but this point is undertheorized in Take Back the Economy. One of the most perplexing facts of the modern corporate economy is its chronic inability to produce basic use values at affordable prices. By basic use values I mean nutritious food, healthy bodies, safe comfortable homes, access to transport, and literacy. When the end purpose of production is the expansion of exchange value (M') then the question of what kind of use values are produced in the market becomes secondary and incidental to production. This is best exemplified in the United States, which produces 18.8 percent of the world's gross domestic product. In 2010, 17.2 million households (one in seven) were deemed food insecure. The U.S. economy spends $2.7 trillion on health and yet a large proportion of its 316 million people suffer from high rates of obesity, cardiac disorder, hypertension, Type II diabetes, asthma, and cancer, and millions have no health insurance. This illustrates the contention that expansion of exchange value does not guarantee the production of basic use values.

Take Back the Economy needs a better discussion of the dual role of markets—as a medium of exchange to obtain basic use values and a mechanism for expanding exchange value. Even though the trilogy—The End of Capitalism, A Postcapitalist Politics, and Take Back the Economy—is an explicit critique of the classical Marxist discourse of capitalism, all three books privilege social relations of production, namely, who owns the means of production. Social relations of production are crucial to the creation of community economies, but in my judgment an explicit focus on what use values gets produced is equally important.