Abstract
These are two very different books, but a review of them together works well. Take Back the Economy is the latest product from J.K. Gibson-Graham and the Community Economies Collective (CEC) and can be seen as the third of a trilogy that began with their cheeky feminist call that ‘we do not need to wait for the revolution but can make it in our living rooms’ in The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It) (Gibson-Graham, 2006a), perspectives that were developed in A Postcapitalist Politics (Gibson-Graham, 2006b). Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift are two of geography’s most prolific and thoughtful writers, but not associated with activism. Indeed, recently Thrift was the butt of some perhaps not altogether fair criticism given his position as Vice Chancellor at my alma mater, the University of Warwick, a university known for its spirited politics going back to its foundation and EP Thompson’s concerns that it was becoming Warwick University Limited (Thompson, 1970). In this review I will focus on the ideas in the books’ concerns, not the presumed saintliness or worldliness of the authors beyond commenting that Amin, like Gibson-Graham, has been responsible for some excellent research on activist politics (Amin, 2009; Amin et al., 2002).
Take Back the Economy continues to argue the CEC case that economies are produced from ethical decisions, and that it is the way that ‘Capitalism’ has been that has created a monster that seems overawing, unbeatable. It argues that after 200 years of capitalist exploitation we have ignored the depletion of the Earth’s resources for too long. Not only is capitalism exploitative and unequal: as a species we are consuming more than we are replenishing, not sharing the wealth we have with future generation and distant others, and destroying other species. We need to turn things around. We now need, they argue, an economic ethics for the Anthropocene (Gibson-Graham and Roelvink, 2010). In doing this, we need to ask ourselves how we can produce what we need, distribute surpluses and maintain a commons in ways that respect the rights of other humans and non-humans.
The book is a guide to help activists and community members to think through their ethical consumption decisions, and to identify the options open to them. Each chapter starts with the dominant view of the economy before showing how people across the globe are creating alternatives. Each chapter, on how to ‘take back’ work, business, the market, property and finance, concludes with a set of questions for those reading the book to ask about how they live their lives in the here and now, uncovering the diversity of relations and practices that make economies, and a set of tools and techniques to create alternatives. It is a very hopeful and grounded book to be read in a group, as a guide to thought and action. It is stuffed full of examples of neighbourhood change-makers, although more could be said about the problems they have encountered and overcome on the way. We would expect nothing less from the CEC.
Arts of the Political is very different: definitely focused on the academy, and employing a limited number of poststructuralist thinkers to make its arguments about how the left has lost the power to enchant large numbers of people as, the authors argue, the 19th-century left and early 20th-century women’s movement did. While the CEC enjoinders economic actors to be actively aware of the consequences of their consumption and production decisions, Amin and Thrift argue that people are automatons manipulated by the political right. Most people, they argue, react emotionally and instinctively to stimuli. They do not think through the consequences of their actions in ways that the CEC says they should. Amin and Thrift argue that the right has grasped this essential truth, the importance of dog-whistle politics, and that the left should recognize this unpalatable fact and engage in a cultural battle at the level of affect and emotion. They should manipulate for social justice, not, as the right does, to maintain privilege and inequality. This, as Clive Barnett (2013) argued, is a profoundly depressing standpoint, but one that Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, Alasdair Campbell and James Carville would embrace as practical, hard-headed and realist politics.
What are we to make of this? In part, it is a question of temperament and standpoint. I am a fan of all things J.K. Gibson-Graham. Not everyone is so enamoured. Like Amin and Thrift, they also see people as only dimly being able to understand the systemic forces acting upon them. For them, politics has become managerial, post-political, deracinated. It is not a view I share, and for me the concrete evidence of activists fighting for the better world that Gibson-Graham and other activist geographers in both the majority and minority worlds advocate (Notes from Nowhere, 2003; Pickerill and Chatterton, 2006; Sitrin, 2012) speaks for itself. As Dave Featherstone pointed out, 1 in this work Amin and Thrift engage with these practices only in passing, and condemn them as interesting but inadequate. I do not disagree with Dave’s, or Clive’s, critique, but I am not sure that it is entirely unreasonably pessimistic to recognize that for millions of people waiting in the rain for a bus that does not come, juggling an inadequate income and fending off the bedroom tax, the long processes of resubjectification that the CEC recommend might be a step too far. Nineteenth-century social democracy and early feminism did enchant millions. What can we learn from that? Unfortunately, Amin and Thrift only skate over the lessons.
I would argue that the global justice and climate movements do enchant the many thousands of activists and change who join these groups, and who have a wider effect on social change. Ash Amin discusses very well elsewhere how in certain places, like Bristol, there can be a critical mass of experimentation from grassroots actors. However, might more thought be put to how activists can enchant many more millions so that no longer can we more easily imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism? We need more grounded studies of past practices and organizational practices that can inform our futures and enchant millions to make a better world and, for arguing for that, at least Amin and Thrift have done us a service. For what work is being done in the here and now to that end, we can look to the CEC.