Gibson-Graham: The End of Capitalism (as we knew it)

Gibson-Graham, J., The end of capitalism (as we knew it), Blackwell Publishers.

Gibson and Graham provide a post-structural, feminist critique of orthodox Marxism. They conclude that Marxists have actually hurt their chances of overthrowing capitalism because they have engaged in a discourse that allows capitalism to be something larger, stronger and more intimidating that it actually is. The capitalist beast is not as imposing a beast as Marxism has painted it out to be. “Marxism has produced a discourse of Capitalism that ostensibly delineates as object of transformative class politics but that operates more powerfully to discourage and marginalize projects of class transformation…Marxism has contributed to the socialist absence through the very way in which it has theorized the capitalist presence” (Gibson and Graham 1997:252) Gibson and Graham provide a scathing critique of Marxist interpretation of globalization. These two authors fall into the Held and McGrew globalization skeptics position as they do not believe that the “penetration” or “immanent penetration” of capital into every corner of the earth is a reality, or that if such a reality did start to occur, that it could not be stopped.

They compare the “rape-script” with the “globalization-script” in one of their more striking passages. The “rape-script” allows all of us to see women as being rape-able and men as being possible rapists. Gibson and Graham take parts of the rape-script from Sharon Marcus where she, “challenges the inevitability of the claim that rape is one of the ‘real, clear facts of women’s lives’” (Gibson Graham 1997:121). We, by extension, are to challenge the reality that globalization/capitalism is one of the real, clear facts about the existence of citizens throughout the world.

This understanding of how the discourse surrounding rape has reinforced the idea that women are rape-able, open and vulnerable while men are hard, strong and potential violators helped to shape Gibson and Graham’s ideas surrounding globalization. The penetrating power of globalization has become, in many circles, an inevitability. Global capital will permeate and enter into any of the open, vulnerable developing countries. This has created a discourse that speaks us and shapes us; the globalization-script, and the eventualities it implies, may not be a reality. We are asked by the authors to reevaluate the potential for community based exchange that do not reinforce the dominant, globalization-script.

We must not become the victim of capitalism, we must make ourselves powerful. Even if our power is not initially evident, it becomes something greater as we reclaim the dialogue and shape it to our ends. This is how we make globalization lose its erection. This is how we create a world that is not dominated by one homogenizing economic system and dialogue.

Gibson and Graham then encourage us to go out and foster community based economic systems that value people. We are not to become subjects in the dominant discourse, but rather work on being stewards of our rhetoric and speak ourselves into a new discourse that does not build capitalism up into something that it is not. Gibson and Graham see globalization not as a real phenomenon that is inevitably creating one economic playing field where we will all gather. It is, on the other hand, a real phenomenon with limited scope whose real size has been artificially, and perversely, enlarged through an inaccurate discourse. The power to reshape our world does not lie in the hands of a few elite capitalists shaping the world in the interest of capital mobility, or politicians shaping the world in the interests of national capital or of global stability. The power to shape the world lies in the hands of individuals who are stewards of their rhetoric.