BOOK REVIEW
Jagna and the Politics of Globalist ‘Alternatives’
Postcapitalist Politics
By J.K. Gibson-Graham
University of Minnesota Press, 2006
Reading J.K. Gibson-Graham and their
affiliation with Australian imperialism in the light of Edward W. Said's
project mentioned at the opening of this review is revealing. Thus we may
see why Gibson-Graham's relationship to the Australian Agency for
International Development (AusAID) is not innocent. Indeed, read with the
linkage Said sought to expose in mind, it is possible to understand why
Gibson-Graham have rejected socialist alternatives to capitalism and
national liberationist alternatives to imperialism. Specifically, by
mapping non-capitalist and underdeveloped sectors in Jagna and
discouraging socialist and broad class and national alternatives,
Gibson-Graham's work aids in opening the Philippines to Australia's
imperialist agenda.
BY JOEL WENDLAND
Posted by Bulatlat
In two famous books, Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism,
Palestinian-American literary critic Edward W. Said detailed some of the
relationships and interactions between European and North American
cultures and their imperialist enterprises. As part of this project he
noted the use of academic disciplines, such as anthropology, geography,
economics, etc., to catalog, chart, classify, and incorporate the various
cultures and peoples encountered by imperialist explorations, the better
to dominate and exploit them. I am reminded of these groundbreaking
results of Said's investigation after reading A Postcapitalist Politics,
the most recent book by J.K. Gibson-Graham, the pseudonym of economists
Katherine Gibson and Julie Graham, stationed respectively at exclusive
universities in Australia and the United States.
A Postcapitalist Politics is billed as a follow-up to the duo's
1996 book, The End of Capitalism (as We Knew It). The general
argument of both books, shrouded in the (post)Marxian jargon associated
with journals like Rethinking Marxism, is that capitalism isn't a
total system, that it is only partial, and that other modes of production
exist alongside it which ordinary people who share a "mutually
interdependent" economic community (there's no such thing as a working
class let alone a usefully defined concept of class) are using continually
to subvert capitalism. In arriving at these formulations, J.K.
Gibson-Graham adopt an anti-state posture, reject anti-capitalist
alternatives such as socialism, and even refuse to acknowledge the dominant global events that are determining so much of what goes
on in the world. You won't find Bush or Australian Prime Minister John
Howard mentioned, and war in Iraq and Afghanistan, "war on terror," and
even contemporary alternatives to capitalism and imperialism such as
Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution or Alternativa Bolivariana para las
Amricas are simply evaded.
But a handful of communities in the Philippines, India, and Massachusetts
are not. In fact, Gibson-Graham devote a couple of chapters to charting
what they call the non-capitalist economic sectors in these various
communities.
Of particular note is
their research (which has identifiably anthropological, geographic, and
economic characteristics) on the Jagna municipality in the Philippines.
This community, they say, possesses only a tiny capitalist sector, and
most of its inhabitants operate and survive in informal sectors or feudal
relationships. In the end, neither capitalism nor this informal sector
provide enough subsistence for most of the municipality's people. As a
result, many families are forced to send a global stream of overseas
contract workers, the vast majority of whom are women, who work in places
like Hong Kong, Japan, and Canada mainly as low-wage domestic workers.
Overseas contract workers support their families through remitting
portions of their incomes back to their communities of origin. Indeed, the
Philippine government has represented remittances of this nature as
patriotic, and these remittances combined amount to an enormous chunk of
that country's GDP.
Useful analysis of this process (see for example Delia D. Aguilar and Anne
E. Lacsamana, Women and Globalization and David Bacon, The
Children of NAFTA), simply put, has suggested that this globalization
of the division of labor, a process that has its origins in capitalist
centers and given its particular character by imperialism, is part of a logical framework and set of practices that purposely
underdevelop certain geographical portions of the global labor market in
order to force people into decisions like becoming migrant workers.
Marxist and anti-imperialist politics typically conclude that broad
organization of people in those marginal regions into communities of
nation and classes (in solidarity with the working classes of the
capitalist centers) are the best method of resisting those global
processes and developing local and global alternatives to them.
Gibson-Graham are having none of that. Indeed, see their cataloging of
non-capitalist modes of survival in Jagna and their argument for an
alternative development, such as local investment initiatives like those
developed by the Asian Migrant Center (a group that convinces migrant
workers to save their remittances in local cooperative investment
projects). Their research on Jagna exposes a "diverse economic community,"
as they call it, composed of family networks, individual enterprises,
small businesses, small farmers (mainly tenants), and others which can be
developed through such investment projects that do not rely on outside
imperatives or goals and which can provide for people's needs in
non-capitalistic ways. Resources can be "marshaled" for community needs
without relying either on capitalist globalization (that promotes the
migrant workforce solution to lack of subsistence) or the state (which is,
in all contexts, authoritarian). Their critique of development completely
ignores and excludes socialist and national alternatives to capitalism and
imperialism. Indeed, local initiatives, also described as being modeled in
different communities in other parts of the world, are posed as the
alternative to global capitalist development.
While their excavation of important cooperative projects provides
worthwhile lessons for people interested in socialist alternatives to
capitalism and imperialism that look beyond no longer existing models for
a broader socialist concept, there is a disturbing element to this book as
evidenced by the location of this book within the framework of those
relationships.
For example, in the preface to this book, Gibson-Graham acknowledge the
receipt of a grant from the Australian Agency for International
Development (AusAID) for the research on Jagna. While Gibson-Graham are
likely to regard their relationship to AusAID as an innocent one something
like, we used their money for our own subversive purposes the relation is
not and cannot be innocent.
According to Australian economist Tim Anderson, under the right-wing
Howard government, AusAID's explicit mission has been transformed from
promoting international "poverty reduction" projects to providing
resources to such projects linked to Australia's "national interest."
Anderson notes that
prior to Howard AusAID served as a mechanism (within the international
jurisdiction of the IMF and World Bank) to impose neoliberal imperatives
regional countries. In other words, aid from AusAID typically came with
"good governance" conditions that have come to typify neoliberal projects
funded by wealthy countries. Under Howard, however, this role has shifted
from forcing aided countries to
adhere the general principles of the globalizing project (austerity,
shrinking public sectors, etc.) to promoting specific Australian interests
such as Australian based corporate enterprises. To be blunt, the role of
AusAID, according to Anderson, has become one of promoting Australian
imperialism among its neighbors in the Asian Pacific islands.
Reading Gibson-Graham and their affiliation with Australian imperialism in
the light of Said's project mentioned at the opening of this review is
revealing. Thus we may see why Gibson-Graham's relationship to AusAID is
not innocent. Indeed, read with the linkage Said sought to expose in mind, it is possible to understand why
Gibson-Graham have rejected socialist alternatives to capitalism and
national liberationist alternatives to imperialism. Specifically, by
mapping non-capitalist and underdeveloped sectors in Jagna and
discouraging socialist and broad class and national alternatives,
Gibson-Graham's work aids in opening the Philippines to Australia's
imperialist agenda. Posted by Bulatlat
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