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

© 2006 Bulatlat ■  Alipato Media Center

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