ABSTRACT
Chapter map In this chapter we explore the development of alternative economic practices. After introducing the contexts and purpose of the chapter, we discuss the history of alternative movements to capitalism. This is followed by an exploration of the alternative and diverse forms of economic practice that continue to exist within
such a reading over-simplifies a more complex set of economic and geographical realities. Crucially, as demonstrated by Gibson-Graham (2006), not all economic relations are capitalist, despite the prominence of capitalism. Think, for example, of your own economic activities during a typical day or week, involving things such as working, shopping, paying rent and going for a night out. In what sense are such activities capitalist? They will almost certainly require participation in the formal economy of wage labour and commodity exchange, but is the drive or motivation for this activity economic (maximizing your income and/or reducing your expenditure) or social (for example, building or maintaining relationships or studying for enjoyment or to increase your knowledge)? While it is easy to take capitalism for granted, given its dominance following the collapse of state socialism in the late 1980s and early 1990s and the apparent naturalness of features such as competition and the pursuit of self-interest (often buttressed by rather crude analogies with biology and Darwin), our starting point in this chapter is the recognition that capitalism is actually a social construction developed by people and institutions at a particular time and in a particular place. Capitalism is a historically-specific mode of production that was invented in western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries before spreading to span most of the globe (section 1.3.1). As a human construction, capitalism is open to transformation and change. Indeed, the current dominance of capitalism reflects its periodic success in reinventing itself – often at great social cost – in response to periodic crises and challenges, from the Great Depression of the 1930s to the ‘stagflation’ of the 1970s. Such crises often create openings or windows for the reconstruction of economic relations. The financial crisis of 2007-08, for instance, prompted debate on the need for the re-regulation and ‘rebalancing’ of the economy in the US and UK, although by 2010 this seemed to have given way to a kind of reinforced neoliberalism, in the European context at least, through the introduction of austerity programmes to cut public expenditure.
