Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities

248 Pages·2013·28.47 MB·English

by  J. K. Gibson-Graham, Jenny Cameron, Stephen Healy

Take Back The economy
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Take Back the Economy
an ethical Guide for
Transforming our communities

J. k. Gibson-Graham
Jenny cameron
and Stephen healy
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis • London
Illustrations throughout book created by Adam Turnbull.
Copyright 2013 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by
any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,
or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Tird Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gibson-Graham, J. K.
Take back the economy : an ethical guide for transforming our communities /
J. K. Gibson-Graham, Jenny Cameron, and Stephen Healy.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8166-7606-4 (hc : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8166-7607-1 (pb : alk. paper)
1. Community development—Australia. 2. Community development—
Moral and ethical aspects. I. Cameron, Jenny. II. Healy, Stephen. III. Title.
HN850.Z9C638 2013
307.1'40994—dc23 2013000919
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
Te University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Julie and in her memory
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contents
Acknowledgments ix
Take Back the economy xiii
Why Now?
1. Reframing the economy,
Reframing ourselves 1
2. Take Back Work 17
Surviving Well
3. Take Back Business 49
Distributing Surplus
4. Take Back the market 85
Encountering Others
5. Take Back Property 125
Commoning
6. Take Back Finance 159
Investing in Futures
any Time, any Place . . . 189
Notes 199
Index 215
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acknowledgments
Taking back the economy is not a task for a loner. Te job calls for
concerted action by many. Tankfully we know that there are already
many on the job. Tis book could not have been written without them.
In the late 1990s Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson, writing as the
authorial voice J. K. Gibson-Graham, suggested, in Te End of Capital-
ism (As We Knew It), that we didn’t need to wait for the revolution; we
could smash capitalism by working at home in our spare time. It wasn’t
till a decade later, with diverse movements across the globe chanting
cries of “Other Economies Are Possible!” and “Life afer Capitalism,”
that our cheeky feminist proposition was fnally old news.
In A Postcapitalist Politics, J. K. laid out a vision of a commu-
nity economy as a space of ethical negotiation and decision making.
Much of the thinking for this book was generated in the context of
community-based action research projects conducted with Jenny Cam-
eron in Australia and Stephen Healy in the United States. Over the de-
cades the four of us have been connecting and plotting around kitchen
tables, at community meetings, in university lecture halls, and via the
Internet to take back the economy any way we could. In 2008, with the
encouragement of Jason Weidemann from the University of Minnesota
Press, we decided to write a manual that would help connect a broad
range of economic experimenters, activists, students, and researchers.
Working now as an expanded authorial collective, we launched into
what we thought was a project of popularizing these ideas. We had no
idea that our journey would take us far away from our familiar starting
point, out into uncharted territory.
During the four years it has taken this book to emerge, it has de-
veloped a life of its own under the direction of infuences and forces
we can only just make out. Multiple collectivities have sustained us
ix