End of Capitalism (As We Knew it): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy

Why does the future (not to mention the present) seem to offer no hope of escape from capitalism? Ironically, the author argues, it is not the economic discourse of the right but primarily the socialist and Marxist traditions that have constituted capitalism as large, powerful, active, expansive, penetrating, systematic, self-reproducing, dynamic, protean, victorious, and capable of conferring identity and meaning. In this book J. K Gibson-Graham explores the possibility of more enlivening modes of economic thought and action, outside and beyond the theory and practice of capitalist reproduction. She draws critically on feminist and post structuralist theorizings, of subjectivity and the body, and on anti-essentialist aspects of Marxism. She seeks (and finds) protean forms of capitalist representation not only in economic policy and contemporary urban space but in the discursive practices of feminism, cultural studies and the politics of the left. Challenging the usual vision of capitalism as necessarily and naturally hegemonic, J. K. Gibson-Graham liberates a space of economic difference, one in which a noncapitalist politics of economic invasion might take root and flourish.