Imagining and enacting a postcapitalist feminist economic politics

Abstract

We, like Hester Eisenstein, have been encouraged by the resurgence of interest in discussions about capitalism, socialism, and alternative economic systems and by the innovative organizing energies of those who believe that another world-a postcapitalist world-is possible. Indeed, our forthcoming book A Postcapitalist Politics (Gibson-Graham 2006b) takes up the very question of an alternative economic politics and, as the sequel to The End of Capitalism (as We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy (1996, 2006a), does so with feminist politics as its guiding inspiration. So it is fascinating to both agree with Eisenstein's core plea, that the women's movement align itself with the struggle for alternatives to the current economic world order, and yet diverge in so many ways from her challenging stock-taking of feminism's achievements and failures. We wonder whether our idiosyncratic offerings in answer to the question What is to be done? (we might ask, What is being done?) could in any way satisfy Eisenstein, built as they are upon an affiliation with poststructuralist feminism, queer theory, and antiessentialist Marxism. In this brief response to her engagingly personal and provocative essay, we identify some of the theoretical insights we have drawn from these lines of thought and the key elements of feminism's political contribution that we build on to forward our postcapitalist (feminist) political imaginary. As the narrative of her life experience illustrates, Hester Eisenstein has benefited from the gains feminism has been able to effect and she is somewhat amazed at the ease with which discrimination could be reversed, virtually in one lifetime. This leads her to observe that gender has been a much more malleable feature of public life than either race or Her assessment seems to oddly devalue the achievements of feminism, suggesting that was an easier target than these other dimensions of social life. Taking Eisenstein's ascription of success at face value, we would prefer to ask, How have feminists been so successful? rather than why or whether is more malleable. In other words, we would like to focus on the strengths of feminist politics and avoid the implication that the achievements of feminism are less than revolutionary because they are not addressed to the most resistant, most structural aspects of our existence. We are also uncertain about admonition and reproach and their usefulness to feminists; perhaps we might more easily build (upon) a feminist economic movement through an accounting of past successes and an enticement to pursue new ones. For us the successes of feminist politics haven't led to a sense that struggles are somehow easier or even a diversion from the more difficult tasks of transforming race and class. Instead we've taken the victories and strategies of feminism as something to be learned from and extended into other realms. Indeed, this is what we have done to develop exactly what Eisenstein asks for, an engaged feminist political economy. It is feminism's introduction of a different vocabulary (dare we say language, or even discourse?) to describe women's lives and their social context, and feminism's unique focus on practices of the self-consciousness-raising, personal and local group actions-that offer the outline for us of a new postcapitalist economic politics. As Eisenstein notes, both the vocabulary of feminism and the practice of feminism have been life-changing for her, leading to new career pathways and an altogether different subjectivity. This is surely a good advertisement for a politics of social change. But somehow this is not enough for Eisenstein, and here we want to understand and share the dissatisfaction she feels. In the United States, the lives of many poor women are arguably worse than they were before the movement, and neoliberalism and capitalist globalization seem to be relatively untouched by feminism. …

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