“Oh, Misery, I have drunk thy cup of sorrow to its dregs, but I am still a rebel.”—Lucy Parsons

Capitalism in the 2000s: Some Broad Strokes for Beginners

Abbey Volcano and Deric Shannon

Capitalism, the economic system that we live under, is not in stasis. It is not a monolith, exhibiting the same features in all places and times. Rather, over the years capitalism has assumed different forms in different historical, cultural, and geographical contexts.

Indeed, in broad strokes, one can see how the features of capitalism have historically changed—now in its current neoliberal globalized form and perhaps morphing into some newly emerging form post-crisis. Even if we took a fairly small slice of history, this is not too difficult to demonstrate.

Consider, for example, a single bounded region like the United States (that’s where we’re from, so it’s a history we are familiar with) before the Fair Labor Standards Act made the eight-hour day the law throughout the nation (as a piece of New Deal legislation). Consider what life was like for most working people then and how the economy functioned. This was well before bloated bureaucracies like OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration) gave working people the limited safety standards we have had since the ’70s. It was also before New Deal legislation that gave workers some limited forms of social assistance under other poorly run state bureaucracies.

Workers, at times, worked ten-to-twelve hour workdays—sometimes even more. The state, while always involved in the economy under any form of capitalism (indeed, capitalism cannot exist without a state managing existing class antagonisms), did not provide many of the benefits we’ve come to expect in the 2000s. It was a time of child labor, black lung disease, and companies, at times, owning the entire town that a given set of workers lived in. It was a time when private security firms like the Pinkertons might be brought in to physically assault or in some cases even kill, striking workers. It was a past where racist and sexist assumptions about “worthy” workers had effects on who might be unionized, who might be hired for certain jobs (or hired at all), and who could serve as floating pools of cheap labor for our capitalist masters (not that these practices don’t still exist—rather, they too have changed form).

It was under these conditions that the Great Depression of the 1930s emerged and, eventually, New Deal policies took effect that changed the nature of American capitalism. What emerged was a Keynesian[80] form of capitalism that emphasized social spending in ways unimaginable before the Depression. Still, after this initial Keynesianism, we saw the rise of a capitalism associated with economists from the Mont Pelerin Society, whose membership included Ludwig von Mises (a particularly dystopian right-wing economist) and Milton Friedman (economic adviser to Ronald Reagan). In this shift, we can see the rise of neoliberal globalization and, especially, criticisms of anything standing in the way of privatization and profit-seeking at any cost.

It was in this neoliberal context in which the current “crisis” (more on the use of this particular word later) emerged. And so we are left to analyze capital on the brink of yet another historical change. Questions about what form capitalism might take next and, more importantly, how best might anarchists and other anti-authoritarians analyze, fight, and end capitalism, are the motivating force behind this essay. Here we give anarchist beginners to economics seven ideas that we consider important for analyzing capitalism in the 2000s. This is not intended as a high and mighty economistic analysis for people with a good handle on economics. It is intended for beginners. Nor is it intended as a complete list or set of concerns. Such a project would require an entire book.

Rather, we give seven broad categories for thinking about modern capitalism for anarchists to put to use in understanding how the economy functions, how we might talk about it, and how we might best organize to smash capitalism to bits. What follows then, again in broad strokes, are some suggestions for anarchists when looking at capitalism at this emerging new stage—and what we hope might be the beginning of its end.

Globalization from Above

The dominant narrative of globalization is one of increasing interdependence and cooperation through trade. So the story goes, kind and benevolent institutions like the World Bank (WB), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) would see to the development of co-called Third World nations through capital investment programs. Through large-scale free trade agreements like NAFTA, capital would be able to move freely, aiding in development by providing jobs to workers in underdeveloped nations that desperately needed the money. Further, this process would force state industries into the private sector where wise entrepreneurs could develop them without the interference of incompetent state bureaucrats. This would lead to more even development and prosperity for the underdeveloped world.

And, of course, what goes unstated in this dominant narrative is that the opposite is what is actually taking place—that is, poorer nations have been steadily becoming poorer at the expense of enriching already (over)developed nations. And this process continues.

The IMF, WB, and WTO (in its role in supervising international trade) require structural adjustment programs to the countries that apply for their loans. What these “structural adjustments” mean are privatization of social services and increasing deregulation of their economies. Essentially, then, these nations are under threat from these institutions—either implement more “free” market policies, or don’t have access to these loans. Thus, poorer nations are blackmailed into opening their markets to foreign investors who have a greater stake in making a buck than in seeing the economies of these countries develop. Rather than developing these nation’s economies, it eviscerates them and makes loads of money for foreign investors, most typically from (over)developed nations (though with payoffs and perks for local elites). Now similar demands are being made on (over)developed nations in the form of “austerity measures” in order to receive aid for their ailing economies (see Hahnel’s chapter in this collection)—in some cases leading to increased resistance to capital in these nations (e.g., the general strikes in France and Spain, the student occupation and protest movements in England and Italy, and so on).

In addition, capital mobility hardly led to a global economic arrangement where workers would compete on some (non-existent) “level playing field” for jobs, leading to greater productivity that benefited everyone. Rather, it caused what many economists call a “race to the bottom,” where workers in the most tenuous economic circumstances are forced to work for wages well below the standards set by union victories in (over)developed countries. In other words, if a given union fought for, and received, decent wages in a factory in an (over)developed nation, the company could simply pack up and move its factory to an underdeveloped nation without the same history of union organizing and battles (and, in many cases, where the governments of those nations actively allow or help union-busting efforts). In this way, they’re able to make huge sums of money that would otherwise have gone to paying workers a decent wage—thereby raising the net incomes of savvy capitalists and further impoverishing workers without many choices.

What occurred, then, was specifically a globalization from above. Sure, capital and business could move around freely. But where was the promise of “globalization” for working people and the poor? Indeed, when workers try to have the same mobility—particularly workers of color from the global South—they are labeled “illegals,” etc., and subject to arrest and deportation. Also, the economies of these underdeveloped nations became subject to the whims of international capital, typically located within (over)developed nations. This set the stage for the same kinds of paternalistic manipulations that were part and parcel of the colonial project—now a purer economic imperialism (or what has been referred to as colonization by proxy).

Anarchists still need to shift the discourse from “globalization” to something altogether different (or, perhaps, a “globalization” of a distinctive kind)—which is what the alterglobalization movement has been trying to do, with perhaps its most spectacular effort at the Battle of Seattle in 1999. What was new and unique in this mobilization was the broad support that we had in opposition to the WTO in particular, and globalization from above in general, from indigenous groups, unions and worker’s rights organizations, feminists, environmentalists, students, etc. (and, of course, these groupings included anarchists). Keeping these networks alive has been a challenge for anarchists, as has finding the best ways to argue for a confrontation, rather than a reconciliation, with capital and the state within them. One of the important strategic debates among anarchists today continues to be our role in such movements and mobilizations, their importance, and how we might also mobilize in our workplaces and communities against these impoverishing institutions and social relations.

“I have found a flaw”

In late October 2008, Alan Greenspan admitted to a congressional committee that he was partially wrong, in the now famous sentence: “I have found a flaw.”[81] Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to his retirement in 2006, is known as a cheerleader for deregulation, one of the main components of neoliberalism, also known as the “Washington Consensus” (funny choice of words since “consensus” is pretty much the exact opposite of how this new form of economic [dis]organization came into play). Greenspan was censured for the subprime mortgage and credit crisis of 2007, with Time magazine placing him as number three in a list of twenty-five people to blame.[82] Although Greenspan did admit that he was wrong (saying that he had “put too much faith in the self-correcting power of free markets and had failed to anticipate the self-destructive power of wanton mortgage lending”), he refused to take personal blame for the crisis.[83] We agree with him here (he’s not personally to blame). The entire global economic system, at its roots, is horridly flawed and blaming one person (or twenty-five people) is an easy way to get around a basic critique of capitalism as a system (and what was supposed to be its current savior: neoliberalism).

As an attempt to save capitalism, the philosophy that Greenspan advances (neoliberalism) advocates for expanding “free” trade, deregulating markets and economies by removing government oversight, and privatizing everything from water to schools and parks, as a process aimed at reversing Keynesian economic policy. As a result of the influence of neoliberal ideas, the response to the current crisis of capitalism in the (over)developed world in our current period has been austerity measures. The common themes here have been raising the retirement age, increasing school tuition, cutting funds available to potential students, and so on—in short, cutting social spending.

These austerity measures affect an enormous part of the population—the working classes are tightening our belts and watching whatever is left of welfare become even less available. At this point, more and more people are seeing flaws in the way our economies are (dis)organized and this is an important opportunity for radical movements, as there is a sort of “permanent working class insecurity” now.[84] Radical critique of the economy is becoming more and more palatable to hitherto “happy” citizens. As anti-capitalists, we have a better chance of getting our ideas across to other working-class people since none of us can any longer rely on good (or even “acceptable”) wages and working conditions for ourselves or our children. We need to move beyond our often insular and inward focus and turn outward to the working class (of which we are a part). Today class is becoming an important topic again—and as anti-capitalists we need to help put class and anti-capitalism back on the agenda. And we need to break through the commonly held illusion that supposed “experts” like Greenspan are doing anything more than weaving myths for our age’s new ruling religion.

David Graeber said in his recent Void network interview:

In terms of the specifics, yes, all that we’re seeing is the run-off of a huge housing bubble, centered on the US, but global in its scope, that opened the door for an almost unimaginable succession of financial scams, in fact, the most extraordinary and all-encompassing set of financial scams in the history of the world. Yet the perpetrators of these scams—the international banking class—are still being treated as the arbiters of economic morality. How did we end up here? Why is anyone taking the pronouncements of these crooks in any way seriously? That’s the question we should be asking.[85]

These are also questions we need leveled at wealthy class warrior “experts” like Greenspan. In an age where Keynesianism is increasingly seen as somehow “left-wing,” we must point out how multinational corporations and the super-wealthy few have, through neoliberal policies, avoided the kinds of tax responsibilities that could easily fund much more generous social programs and public sector works than we have seen in even the most liberal of social democracies. And, as anarchists, we need to point out how even those social democracies fall short of providing alternatives to exploitation, crisis, war, poverty, hunger, and all of the ill effects inherent in capitalist society. In this way, we can link our analysis of the current situation to broad visions of libertarian communist futures.

Polls Show Increased Interest in Socialist Alternatives

There have been a handful of significant polls in the United States conducted recently that have shown that people are becoming more interested in socialist alternatives, especially young people. One poll shows that younger Americans are evenly divided: 37 percent prefer capitalism, 33 percent socialism, and 30 percent are undecided.[86] This is a fundamental ideological shift that’s taking place, replacing the Cold War anti-communist hysteria with people openly expressing support for socialist alternatives. This is huge for the United States and shows that there is ample space for anarchists to tell people about our own versions of socialism—libertarian alternatives—and perhaps make some headway in putting forward anarchist economic visions. The political climate probably hasn’t been better for us in the United States in (many of) our lifetimes.

How do we take advantage of this? We believe that anarchists need to express class struggle values. By “class struggle” we don’t mean “class first” or “class-centric.” Rather, “class struggle” means that we are fighting against class exploitation and we are explicitly anticapitalist. Further, society will be changed by ordinary (extraordinary?) working people—not politicians, not wealthy capitalists, and not tenured professors and other “experts”—if we are to have a liberatory future. Again, this doesn’t mean that we should reduce the struggle against all forms of domination to class. We do not believe that all other hierarchies will automatically dissolve or wither away if we overthrow capitalism. It means that all oppressions intersect in complex ways (more on this later) and all forms of domination are unique.[87] Class is unique in that we advocate for a struggle between the classes to resolve the contradictions in (and abolish) capitalist society. Too often, radicals forget this unique feature of class and strategize to fight against “classism” rather than struggling to end class society altogether (as if we just wanted capitalists to treat us nicer under capitalism).

With these polls we can see that younger folks in the United States are turning toward a more positive view of socialism and that many don’t know what they prefer. A large part of this confusion comes because there is not enough education of what, exactly, socialism even is. Thus, popular education is a strategy that we need to start having a larger stake in. We live in a time when people are looking for answers, people are either precariously employed or under- or unemployed, and people have a direct interest in understanding alternatives to capitalism. If we aren’t providing visions of these alternatives, we can be sure that people with wealth and power and their lackeys running news media will happily provide ready-made “explanations” that reinforce the widespread confusion about socialism in the United States.

A part of this task, too, means updating our class analysis. We need to abandon the fetishized, historical view of the working class as a group of rugged (usually white and male) factory workers. Too often we rely on these ideas of the “normal, average worker” that fail to take into account the ways that capitalism (and, by extension, the workforce) has changed and the ways that feminists, anti-racists, and others have intervened to update our ideas of who is included in the class. We aren’t just factory workers (in large portions of the United States, the factories have been moved elsewhere). We are service employes, line cooks, people who do reproductive labor like raising children and keeping house. We are unemployed people and students who are waiting for the time we are pushed out into the workforce. And, yes, we are also the hyper-alienated and lazy ones, avoiding work as we can and attempting to build our lives outside of monetized capitalist relations and the boredom and alienation inherent in the capitalist workplace.

The Meaning of “Crisis”

As Asimakopoulos explains in this collection, capitalism is prone to periodic “crises.” This isn’t necessarily a new insight—a system based on capital investments creates “bubbles” in expanding industries (i.e., housing, the “dot com boom,” etc.) that cannot last, but that investors want to make a quick buck off (or a few million, for that matter). When these bubbles “burst” (when they are no longer profitable), investors stop raking in profits and this can lead to economic downturns—to recessions or, in the case of the current crisis, depressions.

But what do we mean with this discourse of “crisis?” A quick look at the ultra-rich doesn’t show a drastic reduction in comfort and lifestyle. And while unemployment, poverty, precarity, and privation are affecting larger sections of the world’s population, those problems are business as usual for a significant portion of the world. And yet we declare capitalism in “crisis” now. For children working in sweatshops, for entire countries struggling with food insecurity and hunger, for continents grappling with an AIDS crisis that disproportionately affects our most marginalized populations, for trafficked women and children, for queer youth struggling to obtain basic resources and kicked out of their homes by fundamentalist parents, for those people living with the legacy of colonization and slavery—for the majority of the world’s inhabitants—capitalism IS the crisis. But the discourse of “crisis” isn’t employed until it starts hurting the collective bottom line of the wealthy.

This, in and of itself, can be used as an opportunity to discuss the need for socialist alternatives. And the truth is that capitalism requires these “crises” to function. People talk about events like the 1987 stock market crash, the Asian financial crisis of 1997, and the dot-com and housing bubbles and bursts as though they are anomalies. These things are regular features of capitalism. And those not at the top tiers of our global class system (about 95 percent of the world) are experiencing crisis every single day—a constant crisis of sorts. So the discourse surrounding crises themselves seem to uphold that capitalism is more or less functioning the rest of the time. More and more people are coming to the realization that this is not the case—and we need to be pressing this point as we battle against austerity. If we want to avoid “austerity,” we need to smash capitalism to pieces. No amount of good-hearted reform or Keynesian policy is going to substantively address the social crisis that is capitalism.

The Feminization of Poverty

A useful concept coined by feminists in recent years is the “feminization of poverty.” “Feminize” is a verb; it is a process by which something becomes more “feminine.” The “feminization of poverty” refers to the fact that poverty is becoming more prevalent among women. This is a clear example of hierarchies intersecting and becoming more than a sum of their parts and shows us that feminist concerns must be linked to an anti-capitalist practice. This concept also highlights how contemporary capitalism affects those most marginalized—particularly if we move those margins to the center of our analysis. So we might investigate the experiences of women of color when speaking of the feminization of poverty—or the racial feminization of poverty.

One obvious example would be the maquiladora workers in Mexico along the US border. Under globalization from above, the labor of women of color guarantees maximum profitability—many of these women are working in either the informal sector or in unregulated assembly plants in export processing zones where the words “workers’ rights” are nonexistent. As well, “while women have always been an important source of labor power, their active recruitment in low-paid labor, mainly in the service industry, is a new feature of globalization.”[88] This recruitment is largely based on companies seeing women of color in these precarious circumstances as a pliable and easily controllable workforce—one that is in no danger of forming unions or otherwise acting collectively to improve their condition. Any study of anarchist economics needs to take into account how different hierarchies interact with each other—in this case how colonization, white racism, patriarchy, and capitalism act together.

A distinctly feminist anarchism allows us to account for these changes in capitalism and, likewise, to build on feminist analyzes of reproductive labor—the labor that goes into day-to-day tasks like cooking, cleaning, child-rearing, and so on and is still commonly the domain of women. Often this labor is unpaid, un(der)valued, and invisible in capitalist society, yet it is necessary to keep the system going. And part and parcel of the ways that the patriarchal family inscribes women as caretakers and mothers, we see huge economic imbalances between single female-headed households and single male-headed households (by “household” we are referring here to families with children, but we want to point out that “family” is a loaded term and that folks should be free to associate in whatever familial way they fancy). Further, poor women (again, mostly women of color), whose precarity is an influencing factor in this part of the labor marker, are hired to perform reproductive labor for rich white women.

Add to all of this the ways that poor women in our society are blamed for an enormous amount of “social ills”—from being too fertile, too “lazy,” “welfare queens,” and the like (yet again, especially women of color) and we get a particularly virulent mixture of marginalization and loathing.[89] When theorizing the struggle against capitalism, anarchists need to make sure we don’t follow in the same steps of capitalists and continue to invisiblize reproductive work and the other issues that women specifically face in this violent and cruel system. For a consistent politics, anarchism needs feminism (and feminism needs anarchism).

An Intersectional Analysis

Global capitalism since 2000 has borne down hardest, as always, on the people existing within the “dangerous intersections” of our institutional arrangements. While this is nothing new, many radicals still think in terms of a reductionist theory that seeks a single source for social domination. Likewise, many argue for the strategic privileging of some forms of hierarchies over others. We think these approaches are wrongheaded and ultimately self-defeating and advocate for anarchists putting the idea of intersectionality that emerged from black feminism to use.

The theory of intersectionality argues that forms of institutionalized domination intersect and are connected into a whole and that they cannot be teased apart theoretically or strategically and one declared the “primary contradiction.”[90] Rather, social life is complex and when thinking strategically, the form(s) of domination that is most salient will depend on context (e.g., geographical, historical, the social locations of the people involved in a given struggle, etc.). This lends itself nicely to anarchist analyzes, as we oppose domination in all of its forms and need not be limited by reductionist theories of domination.

The uses of this kind of analysis should be obvious. It opens up new windows for us to frame our political practice, taking into account complexity and the interactions of various (and unique but interwoven) forms of hierarchy and control. Yet while we advocate for borrowing this analysis from feminism, we also suggest synthesizing it with (and building a critique of it from) anarchism. Too often an intersectional analysis is utilized in terms of identity, but is lacking a commitment to smashing existing hierarchical institutions such as the state and capitalism. Likewise, anarchists can historicize intersectionality to demonstrate how geographically contingent forms of domination have emerged in a given locale—and by extension the best ways that we might struggle against them.

Whether it’s maquiladora workers in Juarez or seed activists in India; poor and homeless queer youth of color all over the world and especially in places with new draconian legislation disciplining non-normative sexual and gender practices, like Uganda; or indigenous populations fighting for autonomy against the imperial project of capital (including capital’s indigenous representatives); anarchists can only strengthen our analysis by recognizing the intersections of the hierarchies we have inherited and the tapestry they weave together to create a totality. By moving the margins to the center of our theory and practice we can struggle against hierarchies in ways that move us all forward rather than benefiting the most privileged among us and leaving others behind. And when developing an anarchist economic analysis we can note the political economy’s connections at the institutional level with other hierarchies and argue for a holistic politics that refuses reduction and demands an end to all forms of oppression.

The Now More-than-Obvious Unsustainability of Capitalism

We’ve tried throughout this chapter to thread together an analysis of capitalism in the 2000s that takes into account the ways that the economy interacts with other forms of domination in our global society. But where we’ve been lacking so far, and where anarchist alternatives might make important interventions in terms of vision, is the economy’s connection to ecology. Eighty percent of the world’s forests are gone.[91] Humans have consumed, in the last fifty years, more resources than the entirety of human history before them.[92] There is near-universal agreement among climatologists that ozone depletion is due to human activities and the consequences of continuing these activities are potentially apocalyptic in scope.[93]

Perhaps one of the most salient contributions to radical theory in recent years by anarchists has been their showing the ways that environmental destruction is part and parcel of capital’s growth economy. Given that resource depletion is one among many parts of this global ecological catastrophe, how can we expect an economic system based on treating the entire nonhuman world as various groupings of commodities to profit from to effectively address the environmental crisis? How can the imperial and expansionist project of capital accommodate concerns about the destruction of our habitats? How can an economic system that buttresses industries like factory farming and nonhuman animal harvesting be consistent with reducing or eliminating our collective ecological footprint?

Of course, we believe that capitalism can in no way be compatible with building an environmentally sustainable future, nor can it be used to fix the problems we have already created. But these are exactly the kinds of attempts that are being made under capitalism in the 2000s. Indeed, rather than try to tackle the ways that capitalism is intimately connected to environmental devastation, our rulers are attempting to create the illusion that we can address the environmental crisis while maintaining (and using) the conditions necessary for (their) capital accumulation. So we are seeing an increased interest in market “solutions” and cynical attempts at “greening” capitalism.

The latest proposed market-based solution being aggressively advanced is creating emissions markets (called “cap and trade”). The idea is that businesses responsible for large amounts of carbon emissions would be given a sort of stock market for those emissions. Those businesses would be given a “cap,” or a limit on how much they can pollute, and the stocks (that represent carbon emissions) will be able to be bought and sold and traded in order to create profitability for being environmentally “conscious.” This is the brilliant scheme of the same market fundamentalists who brought us the dot-com bubble (and burst) and the subprime mortgage bubble (and burst). Guess who stands to profit by the millions from such an arrangement?

In any case, the problems that got us into this in the first place (the market expansionism inherent in capitalism, the resource depletion in a system based on profit, etc.) are being offered back to us as possible “solutions.” And this is just the tip of the iceberg of new schemes of supposed “conscious consumption”—these attempts at trying to make people believe that we can consume away the problems that are endemic in a consumer-oriented society in a consumption-oriented system. Anarchist visions of a decentralized future, of an economy based on popular participation rather than profit, and of a social order free of institutionalized domination give us responses to these kinds of popular mystifications. When analyzing capitalism in the 2000s, we can and should critique the creation of this new bubble, point out whose interests it serves, and be willing to provide possible alternatives to the system of profit, ownership, and markets that got us into this position in the first place.

Toward a Post-Capitalist 2000s

We’ve tried here to examine some major facets of capitalism in the 2000s that we think are important to the development of a contemporary anarchist critique of political economy, as well as some concepts that we believe can help along the way. There’s likely much missing here—for example, an analysis of the origins of this current crisis, the effects of increased digitization on capital mobility and investment, the ways that permanent precarity might structure contemporary class struggle, and so on. However, in the context of a chapter-length piece (and the small amount of space for developing these ideas), we thought that these seven were the best that we could offer in terms of space, knowledge, and interest.

The relevance of anarchist economic analyzes can be measured inasmuch as they can be used to create tangible resistance to domination. It is our hope that this particular piece can further struggles against capitalism and hierarchies of all kinds. It is this post-capitalist future that motivates us to write, study, and struggle. It is the power of possibility that often gives us the desire to even get out of bed in the morning in a world like ours where possibilities are so often pushed to the margins in favor of a boring, violent, and fundamentalist belief in the necessity and superiority of the status quo. It is our hope that we can add to our resistance strategies against capital, but more so that we can aid in toppling capitalism altogether and creating a livable future for ourselves, each other, and the many inhabitants that we share this world with. Anarchist economics, to be worthy of the name, should be a part of that larger project.

Fight to Win! Tools for Confronting Capital

D. T. Cochrane and Jeff Monaghan

Context: How to Assess Success or Failure?

Social change does not just happen, it must be created, provoked, necessitated. Transforming systems that perpetrate injustice cannot depend upon determined forces, but rather requires the forces that we create. There is a long history of grassroots movements undertaking campaigns to challenge the political and corporate elite. Operating according to Utah Phillips’ dictum—“You’ve got to mess with people day and night”—diverse tactics have been employed against diverse opponents, with a wide range of successes and failures.

Even when campaigns or movements are not explicitly organized under an anarchist banner, there are anarchistic influences wherever people collectively confront power in an effort to leverage control of their communities. Despite the well-known antagonism between anarchists and Marxist theory, ideology, and ideals, many anarchists nonetheless retain an adherence (often unintentional) to Marx’s political economy. Yet much of what anarchists find objectionable in Marxist theory—the determinism, the misinterpretation of state power, the vanguardism—was, for both the great thinker and his followers, a direct consequence of his economic theory. The labor theory of value is the vital component of Marx’s scientific socialism that foresees the necessary collapse of capitalism. Of course, Marx asserted that “men [sic] make their own history” but he followed that up with “they do not make it as they please.”[94] He sought to discover the laws of historical motion, and no matter how he wished to empower individuals, he believed they remained ultimately constrained by the material realities of being. All of this, of course, is deeply contrary to anarchists who generally respond to existing conditions in an ad hoc and amalgamationist fashion rather than based on theoretical prescriptions. This means an antinomy exists between a general anarchistic adherence to Marxist political economy and their adoption of strategies and tactics on the fly. For anarchists, as long as there is oppression, the only necessity is struggle. The forms of that struggle, the short-term aims and even the longer term goals, are not rigid or predetermined. Anarchists have generally rejected the idea that there is or ought to be a pure or inherently revolutionary strategy or tactic. This is one of the reasons self-identified anarchists, or those who adhere to principles that would be considered anarchistic—autonomy, egalitarianism, solidarity, and so on—can be found in diverse social justice organizations and movements. In this chapter we make use of a non-Marxist theory of value and capital in a way that informs and supports the ad hoc perspective on struggle and fighting to win. However, our primary purpose is to propose a method based on this theory as a means for social justice activists to assess their particular campaigns. Such assessment is, we believe, important if people in particular campaigns are to understand their own efficacy and if they are to be part of a larger movement in pursuit of a humane post-capitalist world.

Further, we argue, such an analysis is a needed component of an anarchist economics. Although economics, as a science, is typically centered on production, distribution, and exchange, anarchists have long rejected the disciplinary reduction that tries to separate economics from politics. Production, culture, distribution, sexuality, communication, exchange, gender, and race—as just a few social institutions—are irreducibly intermixed. Our analysis attempts to deal with this reality. In this way, we seek to theoretically catch up to practices on the ground, where anarchists are attempting to change our social worlds and take control of our lives through a praxis that does not isolate economics. Anarchists engage with production, distribution, and exchange as inalienable facets of life, and therefore subject to demands of equal access for all, with neither privilege nor exclusion.

Political-economic disruption campaigns (PEDCs) are among the most commonly adopted strategies that organizers within social justice movements use to confront dominant institutions, particularly corporations. These campaigns are incredibly diverse. Some have explicitly radical goals. Others have concrete and immediate aims. Some align themselves with broader justice movements, while others are narrowly focused on local issues. Some make use of old and familiar tactics. Others are tactically unpredictable and creative. Some espouse an absolute commitment to nonviolence. Others engage in property destruction, kidnapping, and assassination.

Whether employing boycotts or marches, coordinated public actions or autonomous clandestine disruptions, public outreach or direct action, these struggles have shaped the politics, imagination, and participants of the global justice movement. Whether these campaigns aim to reform or negotiate certain corporate activities, evict them from particular spaces, or aim to explicitly shut down their operations, they all target the political-economic body of corporate power: capital.

However questions emerge: Have these campaigns had an impact? If so, what kind of impact? How can the success or failure of particular campaigns and tactics be assessed? Can these disparate campaigns be drawn together to inform and inspire anti-capitalist struggles?

A challenge posed to any movement that confronts dominant political economic entities is the difficulty of evaluating the actual effects of a campaign. We argue that organizers can rely upon a readily available tool for “empiricizing” political-economic disruption campaigns: the capitalists’ own quantitative references. Employing the concept of “differential accumulation” developed by political economists Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, we examine the financial fortunes of corporations targeted by these diverse campaigns.[95] As we detail later in this chapter, differential accumulation is a framework for evaluating the financial position of a corporation—or corporate coalition, against various benchmarks. Although there are many tools for evaluating financial positions, we argue that this model is useful because it allows us to evaluate campaigns from the vantage point of capitalists. In this sense, it provides us with an idea of what these corporations feel and fear. To demonstrate this method, we will use differential accumulation to “empiricize” three different campaigns: the anti-sweatshop movement, the Take Down SNC-Lavalin! campaign, and the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) campaign. We will consider the diverse organizing strategies employed by these groups/movements within the differential accumulatory contexts of their targets. We suggest that among the advantages of this perspective for PEDCs are that it: a) provides a means of before-the-fact assessing actions and tactics employed by similar campaigns; b) allows for an after-the-fact assessment of chosen actions and tactics; c) makes organizers cognizant of the actual processes underlying capitalist accumulation, improving their ability to disrupt “business as usual.”

These cases, like any other parts of the global justice movement, are complex and we are not interested in casting judgment on “successes” or “failures” in general. The model and opinions that we present are not definitive and are, by design, offered to illustrate only the economic damages from the perspective of the targeted capitalists. We readily acknowledge that there are many perspectives from which to view victories or defeats. What our analysis offers is a preliminary quantitative perspective on diverse tactics of strategically organized campaigns as a means of judging their impact on the targets. This allows us to assess the contexts in which different strategies and actions have challenged the ability of corporations to accumulate. The campaigns discussed below also display ways that organizers can create spaces and possibilities for themselves and broader global justice movements.

“Differential Accumulation” as an Analytical Tool

The concept of differential accumulation has been developed by Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler over the last decade and was applied most fully in their book The Global Political Economy of Israel. In developing what they call the “power theory of capital,” Nitzan and Bichler argue that capital is a strategic power institution.[96] Their theory stands in contrast with both the neoclassicist “utility theory of value” and Marxist “labor theory of value.” Profit and its transformation into capital cannot be understood on the basis of either neoclassical “factors of production” or Marxist accounts of surplus value. Both theories employ reductionism based on “impossible entities”—“utils” and socially necessary, simple, abstract labor, respectively. Contrary to the bottom-up conceptions of capital and accumulation, Nitzan and Bichler hold that capital is “finance, and only finance.”[97] Understood as an institution of power, capital represents the complex assemblages of assets under the control of particular capitalist entities, including the means of production. Capitalists are able to manipulate these assemblages in order to increase, or—more importantly, as Nitzan and Bichler argue—to sabotage production in an effort to accumulate. This process includes much more than ongoing immiseration of the worker, or the development of new, more efficient methods of production. Specific activities such as lobbying or marketing, but also broader social realities such as racism or nationalism, can become part of capital as they play a role in processes of accumulation.

According to Nitzan and Bichler, “the accumulation of capital represents neither material wealth, nor a productive amalgamate of ‘dead labor’, but rather the commodification of power.” In this sense, “capitalized profit represents a claim not for a share of the output, but for a share of control over the social process.”[98] Capital is the translation of control over the diverse social processes—including labor and production—into a divisible, vendible quantitative representation while accumulation is the augmentation of that control. Given that power can only be understood as a relation between two entities, capitalists judge their accumulatory success in relative terms. In other words, they think differentially. The model of differential accumulation was developed to compare how capitalist actors fare in relation to each other.

In contrast to absolute accumulation, which has no meaning once we reject the transcendent entities of neoclassical or Marxist value theory, the guiding logic of capital is to “beat the average [and] their (capitalists’) yardstick is the ‘normal rate of return’, their goal—to exceed it.”[99] Differential accumulation can be calculated by the rate of growth of capitalization of one capitalist entity (or capitalist coalition) less the rate of growth of the average capitalization. In other words, it is a calculation of how corporations have compared against an average (whether it is their industry, or the particular market, or the market as a whole). For example, if a firm accumulates at a rate of 10 percent during a boom when their competition averaged 15 percent growth, that firm’s differential accumulation—despite its growth—has been negative. In other words, they have experienced relative deccumulation and their share of total social profits has decreased. On the other hand, if that same firm shrinks by 5 percent during a recession while their peers have lost 10 percent, the differential accumulation—despite an absolute loss—is positive. They have increased their share of capitalization and, despite the appearance of losses, have grown in relation to their peers-competitors. To increase your relative financial magnitudes is “to increase your relative power to shape the process of social change.”[100] This means that both growth and loss can serve the interests of particular firms and moments of crisis or depression are not inherently contrary to the interests of capital. Nitzan and Bichler stress that capital income does not depend on the growth of industry, but “on the strategic control of industry.”[101]

The business press is suffused with language of “beating the average.” Beating the average means growing more powerful. It is to this end that capitalists function, undertaking exercises of massive social upheaval, in an effort to outperform their rivals. This means the primary struggle of capitalism is the intra-capitalist struggle. As Nitzan and Bichler note, “The very essence of differential accumulation is an intra-capitalist struggle simultaneously to restructure the pattern of social reproduction as well as the grid of power.”[102] Every other facet of society becomes collateral damage, rewarded or punished as part of diverse accumulatory endeavors.

As an example of how differential accumulation works as an analytical tool, we offer a demonstration concerning the pharmaceutical industry.

Figure 1. Big Pharma Accumulation: Differential or Absolute?

Figure 1 displays two series, one absolute—the average capitalization of US pharmaceutical firms that are among the largest 500 firms, the other differential—the ratio of pharma’s average capitalization to that of the 500 largest firms.[103] The chosen basis of comparison is based on another concept of Nitzan and Bichler’s—dominant capital. Their perspective means capital should not be treated as a singular entity with universally shared interests. Rather, each corporation or corporate coalition will have particular interests depending upon what sorts of assets they control and what means are available in their efforts to augment their control. Within capital, they identify dominant capital as “the largest and most profitable corporate coalitions at the core of the social process.”[104] Our aggregate of the 500 largest US firms, as measured by market capitalization, is a proxy for dominant capital.

The absolute series, measured in millions of dollars, on the right hand axis, shows incredible growth from 1952 until 1999. From 1999 on, it appears to stagnate at its high level of capitalization. The differential series gives a different picture of what happened to Big Pharma after 1998. Instead of simply stagnating, we can see that pharma lost ground to other dominant firms in the accumulatory struggle. In 1952, the average member of Big Pharma was smaller than the average member of dominant capital (the ratio is less than one), while by 1998, the average pharma firm is three times larger. Their rate of differential accumulation was 2.5 percent per year, a stunning performance against the largest, most powerful firms. By 2007, however, they had fallen to less than twice as large, differentially deccumulating 5 percent per year. The differential perspective motivates different questions than the absolute. In fact, once we dismiss as ridiculous and/or unworkable the transcendent entities of absolute accumulation, the absolute can provoke no questions. In order to answer the questions that emerge from the differential picture, we need to look at the entire field of social processes that bear on accumulation, and not solely to labor and production. The pharmaceutical industry is heavily dependent upon intellectual property rights and marketing. It works to forge personal relationships with physicians. Much of the research that goes into its most profitable drugs emerges from government or university labs. A lot of money is spent developing “copycat drugs.” All of this and much more needs to be considered in trying to explain how Big Pharma grew, and why it has fallen. For those involved in PEDCs, this dependence of capital upon complex social processes means disruption of production is not strictly necessary to disrupt accumulation. Rather, targeting any of the processes upon which the firm depends may have an impact. This confirms the street-level adoption of strategies and tactics that have always been anarchists’ modus operandi, over the attempt by Marxists to adhere to strategies informed by their pet theory.

Given the importance of capital accumulation for the capitalists’ understanding of their own success, it provides us with a means of judging the success of PEDCs that target individual corporations. Although the differential perspective is not the only means to judge success, it does allow an assessment from the capitalists’ own perspective: did the PEDC hurt its targets? If a campaign’s actions are associated with particular moments of differential deccumulation, or, more importantly, an entire campaign is associated with a trend of differential decumulation, then it seems, all else equal, fair to judge the campaign a success, even if specific goals and outcomes have not been achieved. Of course, caution is always required when trying to tie accumulatory movements to a specific cause, given the complex multitude of forces acting upon and being enacted by any given corporation. Nonetheless, if due caution is taken, campaigns should not hesitate to declare victory when such decumulatory trends are associated with the campaign. In the context of the global justice movement, where confrontational action is a permanent practice of addressing diverse injustices, we can use this model as a method to evaluate campaigns that challenge capitalists, large and small.

Using case studies of three disparate campaigns, all of which included participants who expressly identified as anarchists, we hope to draw some examples and lessons about what actions have worked against what sorts of corporations. Specifically, we will first consider the anti-sweatshop movement’s targeting of Nike. A widespread campaign that included a range of political perspectives, from liberal to anti-capitalist, the campaign was one of the precursors to the Northern anti-globalization movement. Secondly, we will examine the ‘Take Down SNC-Lavalin!’ campaign. Undoubtedly unfamiliar to most, it was a small, short-lived campaign that took place in eastern Canada and Quebec. Despite its local character, it nonetheless managed to exact a toll on its target, a leading global engineering corporation. Finally, we will analyze the SHAC campaign that has recently been the subject of an intense governmental crackdown on so-called “eco-terrorism,” precisely because of the huge impact it was having on its target. The conclusions we draw are tentative but we hope they encourage discussion about possibilities and strategies/tactics for fighting (and beating) capitalists. We especially hope to show that if campaigns are knowledgeable about their targets and willing to be flexible in terms of tactics, they can exact a sizable toll on the financial fortunes of targeted corporations. This is true both for well-organized, broad-scale campaigns as well as those that consist of just small groups of disciplined and dedicated organizers.

Case Study 1: Anti-Sweatshop Targeting of Nike

In the mid-1990s, Nike became the paragon of corporate exploitation. The sweatshop emerged as the symbol of global corporations’ valuation of profits over workers, the environment, and human dignity. Although, the charge had been leveled against the company since the late 1980s, it was only in 1996 that it began to stick. The close association between the shoe designer-marketer—it can hardly be called a shoemaker—and sweatshops emerged from a more general campaign against the use of child labor by American corporations that began to build momentum during the early 1990s. In 1996, the Apparel Industry Partnership, a presidential taskforce with both industry and non-industry participants, convened to draft an agreement on job conditions. In April 1997, the group reached an agreement that, among other things, set minimum age and maximum hour requirements. However, it was too late for Nike, as the “swoosh” emerged from tight competition with Kathy Lee Gifford as the face of sweatshops.

Nike had been a corporate wonderkind. Just one of many shoe companies of the 1980s, its innovative branding allowed it to rise above the pack. It hitched its wagon to Michael Jordan, whom it then marketed as no other athlete had ever been before. Air Jordans became a must-have item, particularly for inner-city youth. In the process, following the logic of accumulation, it sought to boost earnings by pushing down costs. To this end, it began to ship jobs to low-wage zones in Asia. It was hardly unique in this. However, its own success would bring blowback as its high profile led anti-sweatshop activists to focus their attention on the sportswear company that claimed to be about more than shoes.

The campaign against Nike was almost entirely focused on public education, although participants also sought to shame both CEO Phil Knight and Jordan personally. Actions were usually little more than public spectacles, picketing and flyering. At the time of publishing No Logo, Naomi Klein could find only one incidence of vandalism against a Nike Town outlet.[105]

Figure 2. Anti-sweatshop Campaign: Taking a Toll on Nike

Yet, as can be seen in Figure 2, between 1996 and 1997 the actions taken against Nike had a huge impact on its accumulation. The company differentially accumulated 13.5 percent per year from 1981 to 1996, then from 1996 to 1999 it differentially deccumulated at a stunning 28 percent per year. Similar to the graph for Big Pharma, this graph charts Nike against dominant capital. In 1986, Nike was barely 10 percent the size of an average member of this group. By 1996, it was 21 percent larger than the average member. Then, in 1999, it’s just half the size. Since 1999, despite the continued pressure on the company, accumulation has resumed. Nike may have, paradoxically, benefited from the growth of the “anti-globalization” movement as it moved from a criticism of specific companies to corporations and capitalism more generally. Nike became just another corporate miscreant among many.

Nike was susceptible to the tactics adopted by the anti-sweatshop movement because of its dependence on public image. It was a pioneer of advertising that did not directly pitch its product. Instead, it touted a “lifestyle” and then associated itself with that lifestyle. It championed women’s right to participate equally in sports. It had ads with Tiger Woods observing that there are still some courses from which he is banned because of the color of his skin. Its philanthropic endeavors provided sports equipment to impoverished children. This carefully constructed image was so thoroughly at odds with the realities of sweatshops that simply exposing their involvement tarnished it. As one of the world’s best-known brands, they were also susceptible to “culture jamming”: defacing billboards, using corporate logos and slogans in sarcastic and subversive counterattacks. Once Nike’s use of overseas sweatshops became general knowledge, any defaced billboard or advertisement served as an instant reminder. Although Nike had positioned itself head and shoulders above its competition in terms of the social appeal of its shoes, it nonetheless faced intense competition. It was not difficult for consumers to switch to another brand. Culture jamming has been rightly criticized as a limited and non-revolutionary tactic. However, as we noted above, there is no pure or revolutionary tactic. Although tactics must accord with the principles of the organizers, their only other criterion is effectiveness and for this campaign, it appears to have been effective. Of course culture jamming will not, in and of itself, foment revolution, but neither will any other tactic. The effectiveness of culture jamming is limited to corporations dependent upon their image. The campaign against Nike was so effective that it even warranted a mention in its annual report to investors. Forced to explain Nike’s poor performance in 1997, Knight cited “labor practices” and the “alarmed” consumer. Although Knight promised that both media and consumers were being “informed,” we can see that the message took a few years to get through. In fact, although Nike began to recover in 1999, it wasn’t until 2001—the year resistant movements refocused on antiwar efforts and away from corporate misdeeds—that it resumed its early growth levels.

Although Nike managed to escape the accumulatory purgatory into which it was relegated, the anti-sweatshop campaign managed to inflict significant damage. Klein demonstrates how common the differential perspective is, although lacking any theoretical component, when she compares Nike’s performance to that of Adidas.[106] During the campaign against Nike, Adidas managed to overtake them and has remained larger, if only just, ever since. This highlights one of the consequences of PEDCs: they may benefit others. Adidas is just as implicated in the use of sweatshop labor as Nike, yet it avoided the same sort of scrutiny and has been the differential benefactor of Nike’s decline. However, as long as capitalism remains, there will necessarily be those who benefit from one corporation’s differential decline. As with the particular tactics of political economic disruption, PEDCs themselves are not inherently anti-capitalist. Rather, their purpose is to insert us into the accumulatory process, to become risk factors that must be accounted for.

Case Study 2: Take Down SNC-Lavalin!

Organized under the explicitly anti-capitalist hallmarks of the People’s Global Action, the Take Down SNC-Lavalin! campaign was a collaboration between Ottawa’s Catapult! Collective, June 30^th in Toronto, and Block the Empire in Montreal. The target, SNC-Lavalin, was a provider—through subsidiary SNC TEC—of ammunition to the US occupation in Iraq. The campaign featured various tactics, including public education, confrontational marches, covert information gathering from SNC workers, public spectacles and symbolic actions, and calls for autonomous direct actions.

In Ottawa, several marches targeted the SNC office building as part of a campaign that highlighted war profiteering in general. The high-profile “snake marches” took place in the downtown core, and disrupted traffic and business around the buildings housing US defense corporations, including Raytheon and General Dynamics. On the international day of solidarity with Iraq in 2005, Catapult! members scaled the façade of SNC’s Ottawa office building to call attention to all manner of exploitive practices, including the production of munitions, the degradation of the environment, and their destructive mining and biotech projects around the world. In Montreal, members of Block the Empire tried to install a photo exhibit featuring images of occupied Iraq entitled “Your Bullets, Iraqi Lives,” in the lobby of SNC’s corporate headquarters, a building that the company shares with the US consulate. In Toronto, organizers crashed a banquet hosted by SNC-Lavalin. A diverse collection of activist organizations participated in a protest outside SNC’s 2005 Annual General Meeting, which drew national media attention. As news stories noted, the protest overshadowed the company’s otherwise “promising outlook.”

We have charted the differential status of SNC relative to the S&P 500[107]—as a proxy for dominant capital—from 2002 until 2006. The campaign lasted from early 2005 until early 2006. Our data indicates that SNC experienced a significant change in its accumulatory trend over this period.

Figure 3. Take Down SNC-Lavalin!: Relative to the S&P 500

As can be seen in Figure 3, SNC enjoyed significant accumulation in the period before the campaign began. In the year prior to the first week of April 2005, SNC gained 53.5 percent relative to the S&P 500. Over the course of the campaign their accumulation stagnated. Eventually the campaign lost its momentum and stopped mobilizing when it realized one of its goals: SNC’s divestment from its arms-producing entity SNC TEC. At that point SNC resumed its upward accumulatory trend. As noted above, there is no absolute “average” against which capitalists judge their success, this too is contingent. As such, we also charted SNC’s performance against an index composed of two of its sectoral competitors—fellow Canadian engineering firm Aecon and a US firm of roughly the same size, Jacobs Engineering.

Figure 4. Take Down SNC-Lavaline!: Relative to Competitors

This shows even more clearly SNC’s differential fate over the duration of the campaign. From its apex, the week of April 25, 2005, to its nadir, the week of January 23, 2006, SNC-Lavalin differentially decumulated 34 percent. In the context of SNC’s global reach, its engagement in several sectors, and its political connections, this frozen (or declining) period is of significant interest. Why did SNC-Lavalin’s trend of accumulation stall? Were investors frightened by public associations with war profiteering? Did they prefer the relative anonymity of other potential investment opportunities? Did they fear the confrontational style of the Take Down SNC organizers? Did they worry that more disruptive direct actions were to come? These are all possibilities that require further consideration.

Both graphs demonstrate that accumulation continued beyond the start of the campaign, and resumed before what we’ve identified as the end—the aforementioned sale of SNC TEC. The continuation of accumulation beyond the start of the campaign is not surprising. A single march criticizing SNC-Lavalin was unlikely to be considered a threat to accumulation. However, the beginning of the campaign was particularly intense. With actions in the three aforementioned cities the campaign appeared to be widespread. Activists in Halifax and Vancouver also incorporated criticism of SNC into their antiwar efforts. The resumption of accumulation before what we’ve identified as the end of the campaign is also unsurprising. For various reasons, the campaign lost steam and began to peter out. The resumption of accumulation shows that market participants felt the PEDC against SNC was no longer a threat. Perhaps this occurred because a forthcoming sale of SNC TEC was suspected which would defuze criticism of SNC-Lavalin as a “war profiteer.” The market let the campaign know it was over. Nonetheless, we conclude that the campaign had an impact and managed to hit SNC-Lavalin where it hurt and should be considered a factor in the company’s decision to sell its munitions production.

Two features of SNC-Lavalin allowed the chosen tactics of the Take Down campaign to be successful. First, SNC TEC was a relatively minor production segment as a percentage of SNC’s earnings. SNC’s primary business is engineering-related. Although its engineering and other activities also provide grounds for criticism, they are not directly implicated in war. Second, although SNC-Lavalin is one of Canada’s largest corporations, with operations and political connections all over the world, the corporation is little known. This made them susceptible to a public education campaign that brought both the public and media spotlight to bear upon them, particularly when it focused on the company as a “war profiteer.” The relative unimportance of SNC TEC for earnings made it more likely SNC-Lavalin would judge the gains of diverting the public glare to outweigh any decline due to the loss of SNC TEC’s profits.

SNC TEC was sold to General Dynamics, whose business is almost entirely military-related. Notably, we do not believe a similar naming and shaming campaign aimed at them is likely to succeed in the same way. While SNC-Lavalin and its investors were not prepared to be decried as “war profiteers,” General Dynamics undoubtedly is. Any investors with moral or practical objections to “war profiteering” have already placed their capital elsewhere. This does not mean a campaign against General Dynamics is impossible, just that it could not rely on the same tactics. The fact that SNC TEC was sold to General Dynamics and continues to produce bullets sold to the US military means that the success of the Take Down! PEDC was certainly limited. Nonetheless, it is significant that a short campaign organized by a couple dozen people spread throughout three cities managed to have this impact on a multi-billion-dollar corporation. Take Down SNC-Lavalin! succeeded in injecting itself into the accumulatory efforts of SNC-Lavalin and its success required their capitulation, however limited.

Case Study 3: Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC)

The SHAC campaign officially began in 1999 and has developed into an international campaign, comprised of several dozen active groups. Although many organizers are associated with other elements of the animal rights and animal liberation movements, the SHAC campaign is organized with the exclusive objective of shutting down the vivisection firm Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS).

Since the beginnings of the SHAC campaign, organizers have scored numerous victories against HLS. Through their relentless antagonism they provoked several banks and financiers to pull loans and scared hundreds of business partners into terminating contracts and severing business relations. In the words of HLS Chairman Andrew Baker they engendered a widespread view of HLS as “a pariah” of the business world. Strategically, SHAC has identified secondary and tertiary targets and taken direct action against them as well. Secondary targets include the banks that have given financial support to HLS, while tertiary targets include the customers of secondary targets. The intention has been to provoke a decumulatory fear in the financiers so they would sever ties with HLS, rather than risk losing other customers. SHAC stresses that their efforts focus on publishing material about animal abuse and issuing action alerts through their websites and mail lists. Their websites and publications publicize this material and participating groups, to varying degrees, encourage individuals to undertake a broad array of tactics to confront these targets. These have included business disruptions, encouragement of autonomous actions, large and small rally demonstrations, property destruction, letter-writing campaigns, ethical investment strategies, boycott organizing, and so on.

The most well-known tactic associated with SHAC is the “home demonstration.” These involve activists confronting vivisectors, financiers, and corporate executives at their residences. These nonviolent but highly confrontational tactics are meant to bring attention and shame upon their targets (and their families) in an attempt to undo the privacy and secrecy that are important components of the political economy of the vivisection industry. The wide range of direct action targets was a central motive underlying the corporate-state suppression campaign against SHAC. In fact, our research indicates that it was precisely the success of their tactic that provoked the government’s heavy-handed suppression.

The public visibility of organizers involved in SHAC made them a scapegoat upon which the government could hang every direct action committed by environmental and animal liberation groups and autonomous cells. Politicians, media, and prosecutors in the United States and United Kingdom have frequently made the association between groups affiliated under SHAC and actions undertaken (and claimed) by autonomous individuals and groups, such as the Animal Liberation Front (ALF). The government has claimed that because SHAC affiliated groups provide information about animal abusers, they are facilitating or even interchangeable with the ALF.

Citing “eco-terrorism,” the corporate-state suppression campaign against SHAC developed over several years. Our graph depicting the differential accumulation of HLS has marked four notable moments in the state-corporate suppression campaign targeting SHAC. These dates are: “A”—the indictment of the US SHAC 7; “B”—the conviction of the US SHAC 7; “C”—the signing of the enhanced US Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA), an amplified version of the Animal Enterprise Protection Act under which the SHAC 7 were charged; and “D”—Operation Achilles that targeted organizers of SHAC and the general animal liberation movement in the United Kingdom and other Western European countries.

Our graph begins in 2002 after HLS moved their headquarters to the United States under the shell company Life Science Research. After SHAC UK successfully prevented HLS from accessing capital markets in the United Kingdom, by targeting both the banks that provided loans and the “market makers” needed to participate in equity markets, the corporation moved to the United States in an attempt to access new pools of investors and capital. HLS also hoped to benefit from stronger privacy protections accorded to US investors compared to their UK counterparts to prevent SHAC from targeting their capital sources.

Figure 5 SHAC Crackdown: ‘Eco-terrorism’ and Accumulation

As seen in Figure 5, from 2002 to 2003, HLS accumulation was stagnant. This suggests that following the HLS move to the United States, the SHAC campaign was successful in halting the corporation’s differential growth. However, in late 2003, coincident with the US government’s increasing criminalization of the activities of SHAC USA organizers, HLS began to accumulate. With the indictment of the SHAC 7, HLS experienced a sharp rise in differential accumulation. This accumulatory trend became more turbulent in early 2005, perhaps over uncertainty concerning the verdict in the SHAC 7 trial, although SHAC UK was also still active. A renewal of accumulatory growth was associated with the SHAC 7’s conviction. After the conviction, HLS’s accumulation was upward, but still turbulent. Undoubtedly this was because SHAC’s international presence meant the US government’s legal maneuvers had not completely neutralized SHAC. The passage of the AETA marks an intensification of the upward trend, indicating an expectation that this was another nail in the coffin of SHAC. With the initiation of Operation Achilles, the United Kingdom aligned its criminalization of environmental and animal liberation with the United States. This released HLS from most of the perceived risk of SHAC’s direct action and the corporation’s differential accumulation skyrocketed.

Aside from the debate about whether or not these criminal proceedings had a neutralizing effect on the campaign, our data suggests that the corporate-state campaign against SHAC and the imprisonment of activists was perceived as a victory for HLS by market participants. The accumulatory trend illustrates the logic behind the corporate-state counter-campaign targeting SHAC. In contrast to the early period of the graph—where SHAC was inflicting significant disruption against HLS and its allies, preventing any differential accumulation—the final portion of the graph indicates that the surge in capital accumulation coincided with the corporate-state suppression campaign of so-called “eco-terrorists.” Freed from the threat of disruption, HLS achieved significant differential success following the state’s efforts to neutralize and demobilize the SHAC campaign. This evidences the earlier success of the SHAC campaign to seriously impact the accumulatory efforts of its target. Further, it indicates how far capital can and will go to remove a threat that is truly hitting it where it hurts.

The success of SHAC’s PEDC seriously threatened the future of HLS. The UK government had to intervene with loans and special dispensations when banks and other business service firms refused to do business with the vivisection firm. This special consideration was vital for HLS’s continued viability and should be considered as an important and valued part of HLS’s capital. These interventions are evidence of SHAC’s determination, combativeness, and innovative tactics.

SHAC has provided organizers with important lessons on how PEDCs provoke the anxieties of capital. Investors have a twofold fear: 1) fear of being personally targeted; 2) fear that the fear of others will drive down the value of the stock. With their success in isolating HLS within the business “community,” SHAC demonstrated how activists can leverage the naked commitment of capital to accumulation. Although the banks’ managers who swore not to do business with HLS almost certainly personally despised being forced to capitulate, that was of no consequence; one segment of capital will not make a principled stance in defense of other segments. Short of a threat to capitalism itself, the accumulatory process means capitalists are more than willing to sacrifice their compatriots if doing otherwise risks their own accumulation.

Conclusions

Aside from damaging that which capitalists covet most—profits!—PEDCs are also integral to movement building. Whether we succeed in closing sweatshops, put a stop to the manufacturing of weapons, or halt the destruction of nonhuman life, we are actively challenging those accumulating rewards at the expense of others’ suffering. While confronting our enemies, anarchist organizers must also consider the forms, structures, and practices that we undertake to prefigure a radically different society. Neither concrete PEDC goals nor prefigurative practices can take precedence, and fighting to win is about both.

Marxists and the traditional left have for too long fixated on sectarian identities and dogmatic programs at the expense of challenging dominant forces that, especially for those of us from privileged backgrounds, live next door. We must acknowledge that resistance to corporate globalization takes infinite forms and struggles, and not all anti-corporate campaigns are anti-capitalist. One of the leading organizations in the movement against Nike, and sweatshops in general, was United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS). Not only were they not anti-capitalist—although active members certainly were—they intentionally mimicked the hierarchical structure of the corporations they targeted. This resulted in a leadership structure that privileged the type of male-dominated, competitive, and non-participatory environments that anarchists are committed to eliminating. Similarly, animal rights activism, including SHAC, has been criticized for not making connections with other forms of violence and oppression. Despite such legitimate critiques, are committed anarchist organizers to forsake these (and similar) movements?

We think not. Capitalism has evidenced a remarkable resilience. The differential process results in plasticity that demands anti-capitalists work with (or at least support) allies who may not share our organizing principles or prefigurative ideals. This does not require compromising our principles. It is possible to balance vigilance towards centralizing tendencies that reproduce hierarchical and non-participatory power structures, avoid the exclusionary and reactionary divisiveness that limits movement building, and work short-term with allies who share the limited goals of a PEDC. Anarchists, not hampered by excessive theoretical prescription, can work toward short-term outcomes that will have real and desirable consequences, even if just to set capital back on its heels for a moment. Fighting to win is a twofold process of both damaging the existing power structure and prefiguring a humane post-capitalist society.

Participants in PEDCs need to recognize the limitations of such endeavors in terms of challenging capitalism itself. Given the differential nature of accumulation, there will always be capitalist beneficiaries of PEDCs. Capital always flees to another, who welcomes its arrival. We believe Nitzan and Bichler’s theory of differential accumulation offers the best means of understanding precisely how anti-capitalists can effect change within capitalism through the confrontation of capital. The theory draws attention to the qualitatively complex structures and processes that constitute accumulation. It also makes us aware of how far our interjections into the accumulatory process can go. Any victory that fails to topple the ethical justification and juridical apparatus of private property that make possible capital and accumulation will always be a partial victory. That means no particular campaign need be criticized as such, for we are always aware that it is.

If we understand capital as the quantification of claims over qualitatively complex social processes, we cannot treat all corporations as the same. The high diversity of social assets that are drawn upon to make profits means each corporation will have different vulnerabilities. The same tactics cannot be reflexively used against different targets. Diversity of tactics becomes not an ethical position, but a tactical necessity. While public awareness may be sufficient against some targets, others may require direct action.

Part of any transition will be a transformation of the political economic hierarchy. The vested interests will not simply disappear under the weight of their own contradictions. We can mess with them all we want, but if we cannot affect their ability to accumulate and augment control over social processes, then we have no hope of moving beyond the capitalist status quo.

Escaping Capitalist Hegemony: Rereading Western Economies

Richard J. White and Colin C. Williams

“[O]n the left, we get up in the morning opposing capitalism, not imagining practical alternatives. In this sense, it is partly our own subjection—successful or failed, accommodating or oppositional—that constructs a ‘capitalist society.’”[108]—J.K. Gibson-Graham

“To re-read a landscape we have always read as capitalist, to read it as a landscape of difference, populated by various capitalist and noncapitalist economic practices and institutions—that is a difficult task. It requires us to contend not only with our colonized imaginations, but with our beliefs about politics, understandings of power, conceptions of economy, and structures of desire.”[109]—C.C. Williams

Introduction

This chapter contests the widely held belief that we exist in a “capitalist” world, one in which goods and services are produced, distributed, and organized around the unadulterated pursuit of profit in the marketplace. That this belief is both misguided and mistaken is testament to the powerful economic discourse which colonizes the mind and imagination into believing that capitalism is omnipresent, particularly so in the Western economies. In 1898, Kropotkin observed:

[I]t is certain that in proportion as the human mind frees itself from ideas inculcated by minorities of priests, military chiefs and judges, all striving to establish their domination, and of scientists paid to perpetuate it, a conception of society arises, in which conception there is no longer room for those dominating minorities.[110]

It is the desire to free the mind from the ideas inculcated by a dominant minority within economics that informs the particular focus of this chapter. To this end the chapter will develop a critical challenge to a central economic discourse—the commodification thesis—on two important grounds. The first is related to questioning the empirical data that claims to offer support to such a dominant thesis. The second involves critically unpacking the regime of representation and discursive construction that effectively serves to legitimate the vested interests of capital and constrain the actions of anarchist (and other) economic agents and policy makers who desire to engage with and harness meaningful alternative economic practices.

From a critical perspective, rethinking “the economic” is to engage in a process that is highly subversive and long overdue. As this chapter argues, such a commitment allows greater focus and clarity to emerge on a heterodox range of alternative/post-capitalist economic practices, practices that are firmly embedded in the economic fabric of the contemporary world, and particularly so in the “advanced” economies of the West. Importantly, the very act of identifying dynamic, routine, non-capitalist practices as existing in the here and now offers a practical and tangible opportunity to abandon the market without the need to envisage, design, or agitate for a completely new alternative economic system to capitalism. The chapter concludes by drawing on some key implications that a rereading of economic practices has for transforming the way in which we should think about our economic futures.

A Capitalist Hegemony?

One mode of work, that in which “goods and services are produced by capitalist firms for a profit under conditions of market exchange”[111] can claim to have hegemonic status within the popular imaginary of “the economic.” In contemporary economics, capitalism alone, as Gibson and Graham argue, has been constituted as:

large, powerful, persistent, active, expansive, progressive, dynamic, transformative; embracing, penetrating, disciplining, colonizing, constraining; systemic, self-reproducing, rational, playful, self-rectifying,; organized and organizing, centered and centering; originating, creative, protean; victorious and ascendant; self-identical, self-expressive, full, definitive, real, positive, and capable of conferring identity and meaning.[112]

This narrow economic discourse is maintained still further by the popular representation of this capitalist sphere that perceives the market as increasing its dominant status within the economy. The market, it is argued, is expanding inexorably at the expense of the other two principal modes of producing and delivering services and goods in society, namely the “community” and the “state.” As Castree et al. argue: “that this is a predominantly capitalist world seems to us indisputable…there’s scarcely a place on the planet where this mode of production does not have some purchase…this system of production arguably now has few, if any, serious economic rivals.”[113] Significantly, such a reading is not only widely held by those of a neoliberal bent, and who would openly welcome such economic totalitarianism, but it is also evident in the very language of those who actively resist it.[114] For one illustration of this, consider Buck’s reading of “the economic” when he argues that:

The neo-liberal economic system in which life (anarchic or otherwise) takes place, has much to do with the setting of life. It is with and in this system that anarchists must vie for living room. Hence, the need for economic thought among anarchists.[115]

To begin to address this economic scenario critically, it is constructive to visualize this capitalist hegemony in context with “alternative” spheres of work (those “alternative” spheres which are believed to be washed over and increasingly eroded away by a relentless sea of capitalism).

In Figure 1, the shaded area represents those goods and services that contain two intrinsic qualities, namely that they are (1) produced for exchange, and (2) that this exchange is monetized and imbued with the profit motive (i.e. to make or to save money). It is this form of exchange that is interpreted by a capitalist hegemony thesis to be continually expanding at the expense of other forms of work and exchange. The alternative spheres of work are defined by the qualities that they lack in comparison to the capitalist form of exchange. So alternative forms of work would be seen where the work is non-exchanged, non-monetized, and/or where the work is monetized and not undertaken primarily for profit-motivated rationales.

Such a dominant reading of the economy through this capitalist lens has troubling implications on many levels. Arguably the most significant of these is that this reading is so powerful that it effectively channels thought and visions of possible forms and modes of economic organization as taking place within and not beyond, or outside of, a capitalist framework of economic management and organization. Thus any critical project which seeks to envision the very possibility of harnessing truly alternative non-capitalist futures of work and exchange to displace this capitalist sphere are dismissed out of hand as naive, implausible (not to say impossible), misguided, yet another example of puerile utopia. Though there may be alternative approaches that rearrange the economic deck chairs on the capitalist ship, there are no real alternatives to capitalism itself. The sobering outcome of this is that, as Frederic Jameson writes,

[i]t seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations.[116]

A Call to Unleash Our Economic Imaginations

To imagine capitalism’s supersession is neither utopian nor impractical. An increasing global body of anarchist, critical, post-capitalist, and post-development academics and activists have successfully begun to problematize the meta-narrative of capitalist hegemony and exposed the spurious empirical grounds that this hegemonic status is embedded in. Regarding the latter, Williams observed:

Given the overwhelming dominance of this belief that a commodification of the advanced economies is taking place, one might think that there would be mountains of evidence to support such a stance. Yet one of the most worrying and disturbing findings once one starts to research musings on this subject is that hardly any evidence is ever brought to the fore by its adherents either to show that a process of commodification is taking place or even to display the extent, pace or unevenness of its penetration.[117]

While appreciating the difference and diversity within and between these approaches, collectively many have also sought to recognize, value, and harness heterodox economic practices that are already part of contemporary society. This has been crucial in allowing a meaningful space for thinking critically about how to better imagine, create, and construct these non-capitalist forms of work and organization in the future.[118]

Two key strategies have been employed to upset the theoretical and symbolic signs that construct capitalist hegemony as both “natural” and “inevitable.” The use of discourse analysis has been employed to critique the notions that objects/identities are inherently stable and fixed.[119] Such a subversive and radical focus has been employed to destabilize the binary opposition which is employed by modern societies to establish and differentiate “order” (i.e., capitalist work practices) and “disorder” (i.e. non-capitalist work practices). The binary opposition works to effectively continually suppress the latter category (non-capitalist) and promote the former (capitalist). However, to attempt to challenge this binary opposition on its own terms (promote non-capitalist work practices by attaching monetary value to domestic work, for example) is extremely problematic given the powerful organizational complexity within this binary hierarchy. This is apparent when a wider framework of understanding is sought, where one can perceive, for example, the multiple ways that the binary opposition links formal work with the masculine, the rational, the objective, the productive, and informal work to the “other” (including, but not limited to, the feminine, the emotional, the subjective, the nonproductive).

Another strategy harnessed to expose the unstable and fuzzy nature of economic exchange has been to indicate ways in which formal and informal economic spaces are not mutually exclusive or necessarily oppositional in nature. Gibson and Graham, for example, argue that the household can be interpreted as a place where goods and services can be produced, just as a factory setting can also act as a reproductive space.[120] A further related significant approach has been to show how formal and informal economic spaces are intimately connected. For example, research has shown how non-commodified work is often undertaken in a more creative, empowering, and non-routine nature within households that are relatively market-orientated. To recap, some of the more searing critiques that have challenged and subverted the hierarchical economic binaries in modern thought have emerged from attempts to (a) revalue the subordinate category, (b) reinterpreted the sites of production/consumption/reproduction, and (c) highlight the interconnectedness of the binary opposition.

Academics looking to promote non-capitalist economic futures have also embraced a more Foucauldian approach to challenging and deconstructing commodification ideology. This is evidenced in two ways, firstly by those who adopt a genealogical analysis of the processes and (dis)continuities by which a particular discourse is constructed, and secondly by critically analyzing the way theories, systems of meanings, and unwritten rules effectively exclude, censor, and restrict, and thereby can be used effectively to perpetuate injustice and violence.[121] To offer a more detailed look at this, in his provocative post-structualist work Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, Escobar embraces such a Foucauldian approach when focusing on (deconstructing) the postwar discourse on development.[122] In his own words:

To speak development, one must adhere to certain rules of statement that go back to the basic system of categories and relations. This system defines the hegemonic worldview of development, a worldview that increasingly permeates and transforms the economic, social, and cultural fabric of Third World cities and villages, even if the languages of development are always adapted and reworked significantly at the local level.[123]

Through harnessing a historical narrative, he demonstrated how post–World War II societies in Asia, Africa and Latin America became synonymous with terms such as “backward,” “poor,” “illiterate,” “under-nourished,” and “under-employed,” and thus became seen to be in need of Western assistance. The problems of the Third World under such a Western diagnosis, it is argued, could only be remedied by a dose of industrialized First World economic development. Thus the development policies that became powerful and effective postcolonial mechanisms of control were, from the very beginning, created and enforced principally to serve the interests of the industrialized nations of North America and Europe. Importantly, those disadvantaged the most by this Western hegemonic discourse (e.g., peasants, women) were also—on the face of it—arguably the least able to transcend and think beyond the grand narratives and structures produced by this discourse. However, encouragingly, Escobar draws on examples of individuals and “hybrid cultures” that have transformed the development regime of representation. These individuals and cultures have effectively repositioned themselves as active agents (of resistance) in the face of this professionalization of development, and have successfully created alternatives in the face of modernity’s crisis. One of the central conclusions he makes is about how best to move beyond this apparently hegemonic discourse:

instead of searching for grand alternative models or strategies, what is needed is the investigation of alternative representations and practices in concrete local settings, particularly as they exist in context of hybridization, collective action and political mobilization.[124]

A powerful call to move away from capitalocentric readings of the economic and envisage a rich and dynamic alternative economic spectrum comes through the work of joint authors Gibson and Graham.[125] Adopting a similar approach to Escobar by harnessing a Foucauldian critique, Gibson-Graham’s work has also consistently harnessed a Derridan framework of deconstruction. This has made a deep and powerful impact on rethinking (and encouraging others to rethink) conventional representations of capitalism as the naturally dominant form of economy and thus contributes to an anti-capitalist politics of economic invention. The author(s) engage with a process of “unearthing,” “of bringing to light images and habits of understanding that constitute “hegemonic capitalism” at the intersection of a set of representations.”[126] One only has to think, for example, of how people and nations are categorized and positioned within linear representations of Western capitalism to see the (imposed) configurations of power in the world. This established configuration interprets the most formalized economies as being the most “advanced and progressive,” and the most informal/non-capitalist economies as those that are by reference “backward, under-developed.”

To reimagine and rethink the capitalocentric economic landscapes of the Western countries through a pluralistic economic lens that allows for the recognition of diversity and difference in commodified and non-commodified spheres of work, for example, has two key implications. In the first instance it openly allows for the possibility of future alternative economic work practices. Secondly, it openly suggests that alternative economic work practices are very much situated in the present and thus represents alternative non-capitalist economic spaces as both existing and emerging.

The pedagogical-inspired economic “iceberg model” (figure 2) that they employ is particularly effective in demonstrating the plurality of economic activities that are situated within society. The model makes visible those rich and diverse economic activities that, within the capitalist hegemony thesis are effectively “[r]educed to…another shadowy zone, often hard to see for lack of adequate historical documents, lying underneath the market economy; this…elementary basic activity which went on everywhere and the volume of which is truly fantastic…a layer covering the earth.”[127]

The effectiveness of this model can be discerned on many levels, not least as Gibson and Graham themselves argue, in that the model

opens up conceptions of economy and places the reputation of economics as a comprehensive and scientific body of knowledge under critical suspicion for its narrow and mystifying effects.[128]

The prevalence of alternatives to capitalism in contemporary society certainly illustrates an impressive range of possibilities to exit and abandon the market: alternative models are being practiced and enabled within the current economic framework. Moreover, as we will argue later, these alternative work practices are expanding in the Western world relative to exchanged and monetized work.

A criticism of this argument may be that it is too idealistic—how can these disparate economic practices form a coherent and robust challenge to capitalism? To take one example: how can regular, routine, household work provide us with the tools to take on the grand façade of capitalism? Byrne et al. make a strong case for arguing in the affirmative:

We can view the household as hopelessly local, atomized, a set of disarticulated and isolated units, entwined and ensnared in capitalism’s global order, incapable of serving as a site of class politics and radical social transformation. Or we can avoid conflating the micro logical with the merely local and recognize that the household is everywhere; and while it is related in various ways to capitalist exploitation, it is not simply consumed or negated by it. Understanding the household as a site of economic activity, one in which people negotiate and change their relations of exploitation and distribution in response to a wide variety of influences, may help to free us from the gloom that descends when a vision of socialist innovation is consigned to the wholesale transformation of the “capitalist” totality.[129]

When one is encouraged to perceive the market from this perspective, which removes capitalism from its core position at the center of the Western imaginary, then this re-signification brings to the foreground the possibility of post-capitalist futures. The market as conceived by Byrne and represented so effectively in Gibson-Graham’s economic iceberg model becomes one of many types of economic practice. It is divested of its “inherent” and naturalized dominant status that it has enjoyed. Importantly, such a rereading of capitalism hegemony is also firmly supported by the empirical work that has focused on the emerging diversity of economic trajectories. This discussion becomes the focus of the next section.

Understanding Dominant Economic Trajectory: One of Plurality and Difference

Two central arguments can be discerned within the capitalist hegemony thesis: first, that non-exchanged work is contracting relative to monetized exchanges and second that, monetized exchanges are becoming increasingly commodified: i.e., undertaken for profit-motivated purposes. Any critical investigation of this thesis then should rightly be expected to find robust evidence in support of these two arguments.

A Critical Focus on Non-Exchanged Work in Western Economies

Time-budget studies have become an important way of making detailed records of how people allocated their time. From this it is possible to highlight the comparative proportion of time individuals allocate to paid work and non-exchanged work. Given the claims of the capitalist hegemonic thesis, one could rightfully expect paid work to take up a (significant) majority of time in the Western “advanced” economies.

Table 1 however illustrates a very different scenario. When focusing on the allocation of working time across twenty different Western countries, time spent in unpaid domestic work (i.e. non-exchanged work) accounts for 43.6 percent. Indeed, the proportion of time spent on non-exchanged work exceeds this figure in France (45.3 percent), Norway (46.7 percent), and Finland (44.6 percent). What to conclude from this: it appears that limits of the market to a claim on time are far more restricted and uneven than allowed for by market advocates or those who have opposed its encroachment but still see the commodification process as inevitable and unstoppable. In light of this evidence, how can we reconcile such a statement as “the pervasive reach of exchange-value society makes it ever more difficult to imagine and legitimate non-market forms of organization and provision”?[130] Or, equally, the pronouncement by Castree et al.

that this is a predominantly capitalist world seems to us indisputable…there’s scarcely a place on the planet where this mode of production does not have some purchase…this system of production arguably now has few, if, any, serious economic rivals.[131]

This finding, though, is not unexpected. For example, consider Polanyi when he spoke of the “great transformation,”[132] one which had seen economic life becoming “progressively disembedded from its societal and cultural matrix.”[133] Polanyi was quite careful—and well justified—not to exaggerate the extent of the shift in balance from economic activity taking place in the non-market sphere and the market.[134]

However, when the other powerful meta-narrative of capitalist expansion—that of becoming ever more expansive, totalizing, and hegemonic—is considered in reference to the evidence, then even such notions of a “great transformation” seem to be exaggerated. Again drawing on longitudinal data produced based on the time-use survey, there appears to be little evidence that economic activity has moved from non-waged work and into paid work. In Western countries such as the United Kingdom, the United States, France, Finland, and Denmark, paid work now occupies a lower share of people’s total working time than it did forty years ago (see Table 2).

Non-monetized Exchange

Further suspicion about the legitimacy of the capitalist hegemony thesis can be found in the problematic fact that non-exchanged work is extremely prevalent in the Western world. The belief that non-monetized exchange is being systematically overcome by market-based transactions embodied in Harvey’s statement that “[m]onetary relations have penetrated into every nook and cranny of the world and into almost every aspect of social, even private life”[135] again begs the obvious question: where is the evidence?

When a concerted attempt is made to gather robust empirical data to support such a central tenet this proves extremely difficult. In many Western countries there is a significant amount of work that takes place on an unpaid basis, whether through more formal, voluntary-based groups or organizations, or through informal networks of reciprocal support, such as mutual aid or unpaid community exchange. In 2001, for example, the Home Office Active Citizenship Survey identified that within the previous twelve months around 3.7 billion hours of volunteering had taken place. Given that twenty-seven million people work full-time for an average of thirty-five hours per week, this 3.7 billion hours of volunteering equates to just over two million people being in work on a full-time basis. Alternatively, it indicates that in the UK up to one hour is spent working on a non-monetized basis for every fourteen hours spent working in formal employment.

These statistics quite clearly indicate that the capitalist hegemonic belief that argues that these economic spaces are marginal, residual, and disappearing is at best grossly exaggerated. The reality is that non-monetized exchange (that is to say unpaid community work, mutual aid, or more formal voluntary work) continues to occupy prevalent and important spaces within the contemporary economic landscapes in Western society.

Not-For-Profit Monetary Transactions

Zelizer observed that “a powerful ideology of our time [is] that money is a single, interchangeable, absolutely impersonal instrument—the very essence of our rationalizing modern civilization.”[136] Certainly, the assumption that monetary exchange is principally profit-motivated cuts deep across economic discourses ranging from anarchism to neo-classicalism.

This crude view of monetized exchange is often promoted across this range too, and is common to those who welcome such a (natural) development, and those who cite this as another reason to resist and push against any further capitalist advances being made in society. Yet there are many “alternative economic spaces” that exist as sites where not-for-profit monetary transactions are commonplace including, but not limited to, garage sales,[137] car boot sales,[138] charity shops,[139] and local currency experiments such as Local Exchange and Trading Scheme.[140] What quickly becomes apparent when looking at the complexity of monetized exchange in contemporary society is that “money is neither culturally neutral nor socially anonymous”[141] and thus as Zelizer writes,

The classical economic inventory of money’s functions’ and attributes, based on the assumption of a single general-purpose type of money, is unsuitably narrow. By focusing exclusively on money as a market phenomenon, it fails to capture the very complex range of characteristics of money as a social medium…certain monies can be indivisible (or divisible but not in mathematically predictable proportions), nonfungible, nonportable, deeply subjective and qualitatively heterogeneous.[142]

It is also worthwhile reflecting on the public sector, a sector which is not oriented towards profit and still accounts for about 30–50 percent of GDP in Western economies.[143] Even if the public sector is no longer as significant as it has been in terms of being a provider of goods and services, it is important not to make the mistake of assuming that the provisions for these goods and services have been taken up by the capitalist sector. The growth of the not-for-profit sector has been seen in many Western economies, which represents around five percent GDP. Drawing on data gathered by the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project (CNP), Salamon and Sokolowski examined the not-for-profit sector in twenty-four countries.[144] In terms of economic impact this is a “$1.1 trillion industry that employs 19.5 million full-time equivalent (FTE) paid workers in the twenty-four countries on which data are so far available.”[145] As Table 3 shows, on average the nonprofit sector grew by 24 percent between 1990–1995, compared to just an 8 percent rise in employment. In the United States, the growth in employment stood at 8 percent during this time, whereas the growth in employment in the nonprofit sector was 20 percent. In Europe (UK, Netherlands, Germany, France), whereas growth in the total economy grew by 3 percent, the nonprofit sector increased by 24 percent. Given such trends—far from reinforcing the link between the profit-motivated and monetary exchange—it could be more properly suggested that this relationship is diminishing.

Within the private sector, it is unquestioningly assumed by the supreme representation of enterprises (themselves assumed to be coherent, predictable, ordered, organized sites) that any monetary transactions are always and necessarily market-like, and therefore driven principally by profit-motive rationales. Yet this relationship has also come under the critical spotlight, with studies demonstrating that such an assumption is not entirely robust, and there are examples of private-sector enterprises that are not always driven by the necessity to make profit and do retain sub-capitalist economic constructions and practices.[146] To take one example, in seeking to open a conversation about what a corporation is, O’Neill and Gibson-Graham analyzed the Australian-based multinational BHP.[147] The research questioned the capitalist notions of “the company” in a way that ultimately “[p]roduce[d] a decentered, ‘disorganized’ representation of the enterprise.” The researchers highlighted the unpredictable, social and open nature of the enterprise—and decoupled the essentialist arguments of these entities, including the logic that they are only driven by profit-motivated concerns. This itself was seen to be significant not only in undermining popular representations of enterprise discourses, but in the act of producing a more nuanced reading that has “the potential to liberate the political and geographical imagination, and to proliferate alternative possibilities for regional futures and corporate-community relationships.”[148]

*) Total nonagricultural employment, updated: January 20, 2000.
**) Excluding sport and recreation, unions, and parts of education.
NOTE: Except for Israel and the Netherlands, all 1990 figures come from Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project, Phase I, and have been adjusted where necessary to make them comparable with the 1995 figures.

The result of this critique is one that argues that it is simply not the case, despite all the popular assumptions to the contrary, to say that we live in a capitalist world. When all the estimates are taken into account, significantly less than half of the Western economies can be properly said to be aligned with commodity production driven by capitalist profit-motivated monetary rationales and relationships (see Figure 3).

1. Non-monitized exchange

2. Commodity Production

3. Non-exchanged Activity

4. Nonprofit motivated monetary exchange

Figure 3: Distribution of Work in Western Societies

Explaining the Persistence of Alternative Economic Practices

There are several approaches which have been adopted to explain the persistence of alternative economic practices in Western economies. One view argues that the growth of these non-capitalist practices is a result of a new emergent stage of capitalism, which discards social reproduction functions back into the non-capitalist realm.[149] De-commodification, in this approach, is the result of the flexibilization and deregulation of production, a trend that has resulted in the breakdown of the postwar welfare states and economic regulations.

But to explain the presence of alternative economic practices in such stark structural economic terms is, we argue, extremely problematic. Once the extent of the non-capitalist sphere has been identified, and the heterogeneous rationales that underpin it have been explored, then such an explanation is found inadequate. For example, UK-based research using Household Work Practice surveys has shown that although higher-income households lead more marketized lives, they engage in a higher level of alternative economic practices.[150] In contrast to lower-income households, the type of informal work practices that they engage in are more creative, rewarding, fulfilling, and non-routine. Moreover, another principal finding is that the majority of higher-income populations choose to engage in such work, compared to lower-income populations, which undertake such work out of economic necessity. Such findings suggest the need for any explanations of the persistence of alternative economic practices to incorporate agency-orientated narratives in addition to economistic discourses, if more accurate and robust readings are to be forthcoming.

For Cahill, “the anarchist looks about him or her and sees protest and resistance against the dominant economic system.”[151] A more agency-orientated reading of the continued presence/relevance of alternative economic practices would focus on them as being preserved by successful cultures of resistance in the face of increasing disillusionment and dissatisfaction with capitalism and its hegemony.[152]

From this reading, non-capitalist economic practices have been interpreted as “spaces of hope”[153] that contain intrinsic values such as pleasure and satisfaction that are absent from commodified formal spaces.[154] Certainly, it must be said that not only is capitalism far from complete, but it is struggling to defend its ground in what is, and continues to be, a deeply contested process.

Conclusion

The American anarchist Howard Ehrlich argued, “We must act as if the future is today.”[155] What we have hoped to demonstrate here is that non-capitalist spaces are present and evident in contemporary societies. We do not need to imagine and create from scratch new economic alternatives that will successfully confront the capitalist hegemony thesis, or more properly the capitalist hegemony myth. Rather than capitalism being the all powerful, all conquering, economic juggernaut, the greater truth is that the “other” non-capitalist spaces have grown in proportion relative in size to the capitalism realm.

This should give many of us great comfort and hope in moving forward purposefully for, as Chomsky observed: “[a]lternatives have to be constructed within the existing economy, and within the minds of working people and communities.”[156] In this regard, the roots of the heterodox economic futures that we desire do exist in the present. Far from shutting down future economic possibilities, a more accurate reading of “the economic” (which decenters capitalism), coupled with the global crisis that capitalism finds itself in, should give us additional courage and resolve to unleash our economic imaginations, embrace the challenge of creating “fully engaged” economies. These must also take greater account of the disastrous social and environmental costs of capitalism and its inherent ethic of competition. As Kropotkin wrote:

Don’t compete!—competition is always injurious to the species, and you have plenty of resources to avoid it! Therefore combine—practice mutual aid! That is the surest means for giving to each and all to the greatest safety, the best guarantee of existence and progress, bodily, intellectual, and moral….That is what Nature teaches us; and that is what all those animals which have attained the highest position in the respective classes have done. That is also what man [sic]—the most primitive man—has been doing; and that is why man has reached the position upon which we stand now.[157]

A more detailed and considered discussion of the futures of work, however, is beyond the scope of this chapter. What we have hoped to demonstrate is that in reimagining the economic, and recognizing and valuing the non-capitalist economic practices that are already here, we might spark renewed enthusiasm, optimism, insight, and critical discussion within and among anarchist communities. The ambition here is similar to that of Gibson-Graham, in arguing that:

The objective is not to produce a finished and coherent template that maps the economy “as it really is” and presents… a ready made “alternative economy.” Rather, our hope is to disarm and dislocate the naturalized dominance of the capitalist economy and make a space for new economic becomings—ones that we will need to work to produce. If we can recognize a diverse economy, we can begin to imagine and create diverse organizations and practices as powerful constituents of an enlivened noncapitalist policies of place.[158]

If the chapter has succeeded in doing this then it will have achieved its principal objective.