“The” End of Capitalism (as We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy ; with a New Introduction

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U of Minnesota Press, Mar 24, 2006 - Social Science - 299 pages
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, victorious, and capable of conferring identity and meaning. What this has meant for left politics is the continual deferral of anticapitalist projects of social transformation and noncapitalist initiatives of economic innovation, since these presumably would have little chance of success in the face of a predominantly or exclusively capitalist economy. 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.

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Contents

Chapter 1 Strategies
1
An Encounter in Contradiction
24
Chapter 3 Class and the Politics of Identity
46
Chapter 4 How Do We Get Out of This Capitalist Place?
72
Chapter 5 The Economy Stupid Industrial Policy Discourse and the Body Economic
92
Chapter 6 Querying Globalization
120
Chapter 7 PostFordism as Politics
148
Chapter 8 Toward a New Class Politics of Distribution
174
Chapter 9 Hewers of Cake and Drawers of Tea
206
Ghosts on a Blackboard
238
Chapter 11 Waiting for the Revolution
251
Bibliography
266
Index
286
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Page 111 - As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.
Page 26 - In its rational form it is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing...
Page 36 - This was the moment when language invaded the universal problematic, the moment when, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse — provided we can agree on this word — that is to say, a system in which the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences. The absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the play of signification infinitely.
Page 36 - With this certitude anxiety can be mastered, for anxiety is invariably the result of a certain mode of being implicated...
Page xvii - The conclusion would be that the political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our days is not to try to liberate the individual from the state, and from the state's institutions, but to liberate us both from the state and from the type of individualization which is linked to the state. We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries.
Page xvi - ... double bind', which is the simultaneous individualization and totalization of modern power structures. The conclusion would be that the political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our days is not to try to liberate the individual from the state, and from the state's institutions, but to liberate us both from the state and from the type of individualization which is linked to the state.
Page 145 - As spatial barriers diminish so we become much more sensitized to what the world's spaces contain
Page 36 - Henceforth, it was necessary to begin thinking that there was no center, that the center could not be thought in the form of a present-being, that the center had no natural site, that it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of nonlocus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play.
Page 83 - The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation.

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