Being the Revolution, or, How to Live in a “More-Than-Capitalist” World Threatened with Extinction

Abstract

Much of J. K. Gibson-Graham's work has been aimed at opening up ideas about what action is, both by broadening what is considered action (under the influence of feminist political imaginaries and strategies), and by refusing the old separation between theory and action. But the coming of the Anthropocene forced Julie and me to think more openly about what is the collective that acts. In this lecture I ask: what might it mean for a politics aimed at bringing other worlds into being to displace humans from the center of action and to see more-than-human elements as part of the collective that acts? The lecture proceeds with sections discussing (1) elements and limits of a feminist imaginary of possibility, (2) the synergies between a politics of building community economies and the political imaginary of actor-network theory, and (3) the materiality of emerging community economy assemblages.

Key Words:

• Collective Action
• Feminist
• More Than Human
• Politics
• Socio-Technical Assemblage

Notes

1. This lecture was presented by Katherine Gibson on 20 September 2013 during a plenary session at the Rethinking Marxism conference, “Surplus, Solidarity, Sufficiency,” held at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

2. This action was inspired by the stunts of the Yes Men, who in the United States famously caused Dow Chemical stock to drop precipitously when they faked an announcement that Dow had agreed to liquidate Union Carbide and properly compensate Bhopal victims, and also by those of the Australian comedians from The Chaser, who gate-crashed the 2007 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Leader's Summit in Sydney by driving into the restricted zone in a vehicle posing as the Canadian delegation. They were only detected when one of the crew emerged from the car dressed as Osama Bin Laden.

3. I agree with Miller (2013, 531) that building concrete connections via a statement of shared values, as does the solidarity economy, might not be appropriate for a community-economy politics in which the possibility of partial connection “is always before us … yet to come.”

4. See “About Solar Citizens,” accessed 9 September 2013, http://www.solarcitizens.org.au/about.

5. See “Carbon Cops,” ABC Television, accessed 9 September 2013, http://www.abc.net.au/tv/carboncops/.

6. See “Earthworker Co-Operative,” accessed 9 October 2013, http://earthworkercooperative.com/what-is-eurekas-future/.

7. See the Beyond Zero Emissions website, accessed 9 September 2013, http://bze.org.au/.

8. This contemporary company has genealogical connections with the UK engineer Charles Merz, who produced the technical report that masterminded the development of centralized mass electricity generation in Victoria's Latrobe Valley in the 1920s (Gibson 2001).

9. Further research is needed to explore the way that community-owned renewable energy networks, like that of the Community Power Agency, are part of this articulated vision. See “About Us,” Community Power Agency, accessed 9 September 2013, http://www.cpagency.org.au/index.php?pg = About_Us.