How Subjectivity Brings Us through Class to the Community Economy

Abstract

This essay is an appreciative set of reflections on the bold intellectual work that Julie Graham helped to create. Throughout the essay I focus on the ways that this work is made possible by yet changes the coordinates of class analysis, by situating class within the more expansive field of the “community economy.” This new field of inquiry, knowledge, and social action is where subjects and economic representations are joined; it is the domain of economic subjectivity, in which we enact the economy and the economy inhabits us. This new problematic is made possible by class analysis, yet it also poses some challenges to class as an “entry point,” both for knowledge about the economy and for a conception of communism as the goal of political activity. My aim is to explore these links and examine the openings toward which they point us.

Key Words:

• Class
• Communism
• Community Economy
• Individuality
• Subjectivity

Acknowledgments

I thank George DeMartino for offering valuable comments on an earlier draft of this essay. To Esra Erdem and an anonymous reviewer I offer heartfelt gratitude for their patience and insightful questions and comments that helped me think and write more clearly. Thank you both for your generosity.

Notes

1. I use the term problematic in a fairly loose way, inspired by Althusser's work, to refer to the field of analysis, its objects of analysis, and the kinds of questions to be explored and knowledge to be created.

2. Others associated with Rethinking Marxism have also been doing work that addresses the relationship between subjectivity and economic representations, constituting a thematic family of work. Interested readers should consult the special issues of Rethinking Marxism on these topics: “The Common and the Forms of the Commune,” edited by Curcio and Özselçuk (2010), and “Subjects of Economy,” introduced by Amariglio and Graham (2006). For a sustained and related example of a poststructural Marxian analysis that takes a deconstructive approach to the ways that economic representations (mostly within the profession of economics) can be opened up and their gaps revealed, see Ruccio and Amariglio's (2003) wonderful text, Postmodern Moments in Modern Economics.

3. See the two volumes Re/Presenting Class and Class and Its Others (Gibson-Graham, Resnick, and Wolff 2001, 2000, respectively), in which many good examples of this new work are collected. The introductions to these two texts provide among the clearest and most compact discussions of poststructural Marxism.

4. We can see one example of this tendency in an early and important class analysis of the household by Fraad, Resnick, and Wolff (1989), which helped to create some of the class diversity mentioned above. For example, in their discussion of the attitudes that household partners may have toward one another and each other's labor, they write, “We separate questions about how individuals understand their situation (i.e. are persons aware of being exploited or oppressed; do these conditions occur against their wills?) from the situation itself” (14).

5. For work on how subjectivity shapes the nature of the class process, see Amariglio (2010), Cameron (2000), Kayatekin and Charusheela (2004), and the insightful characterization of their work in Madra (2006, 212) and J. K. Gibson-Graham (2006, 216n34). It is interesting that many of these cases address noncapitalist class processes, especially feudalism and communal class processes.

6. See the work of the Community Economies Collective for a more complete characterization of this work and for links to many essays, project descriptions, and resources (http://www.communityeconomies.org/home).

7. I thank George DeMartino, who helped clarify this difference in an email exchange about the papers for this symposium.

8. See also their discussion of David Harvey and Hardt and Negri in Gibson-Graham (2002, 29–30).

9. It is interesting to contrast this to the way Marx (1992) sometimes refers to a “transparent” correspondence between social categories and experience in precapitalist formations. As he writes in his ironic characterization of the medieval “world of darkness,” for example, “No matter, then, what we may think of the parts played by the different classes of people themselves in this society, the social relations between individuals in the performance of their labour, appear at all events as their own mutual personal relations, and are not disguised under the shape of social relations between the products of labour.” He refers to these social relations as appearing in their “transparent and natural form” (173).

10. For an earlier and important effort in typology building that also places class processes in a broader framework, see Cullenberg (1992). Here the presence/absence of wage labor and commodity production are included with appropriation as coequal terms to produce a wider range of “class sets” than a focus on appropriation and distribution alone permits. This wider typology also enlarges the ways of conceiving of a society beyond capitalism, a theme further developed in Chakrabarty and Cullenberg (2001).

11. Though starting from a very different set of influences, there is an interesting relationship between the work of Gibson-Graham and Elinor Ostrom, who writes about the creation and adaptation of institutions of common property resource use by groups around the world. Like Gibson-Graham, Ostrom refers to her work as open-ended, starting with a diversity of cases that belong together yet are not essentially similar. See Ostrom's (1990) classic text, Governing the Commons.

12. This way of putting it harks back to an earlier conception of an imagined communism articulated by Resnick and Wolff (1988) in which the very distinction between necessary and surplus labor time would vanish.

13. This issue could easily unfold into a full-length treatment itself, and I have chosen to bypass any detailed consideration of it in this essay.

14. Madra (2006, 221) asks whether policy debates over Social Security can be a place for cultivating a sense of “social responsibility” across generations, space, languages, and social differences because it may be one way to promote a kind of communist ethic, that is, a more inclusive and expansive sense of entitlement to the surplus. Özselçuk (2006, 236) argues that state workers in the “public economy” may have a clear sense of a “destructured” economy in which multiple forms of economic organization are healthy, and she poses a good question: are these opportunities to “resuscitate the ‘expansive moments’ of ‘wanting’ in identity politics before the latter flattens into a state of ressentiment or melancholy?” Such questions grow out of the “community economy” approach.