Abstract
Eloquent, witty, and provocative, J.K. Gibson–Graham’s The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy challenged us to interrogate the powerful role of theory-building and knowledge-making in enacting the material worlds in which we live and work. The collaboration of Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson was initially forged at Clark University, in the epicenter of Anglophone Marxist geographical inquiry during its most heady days. Their first book, now a classic of feminist political economy and critical human geography, brilliantly captures and synthesizes the political, epistemological, and theoretical tensions that emerged at the time between theorists of gender and theorists of capitalism. Precisely at the moment that feminist scholars were advancing an understanding of gender as a social relation without an essence and exploring the associated implications for theory and politics, Marxist geographers were busily working to refine theories of causation, build concrete abstractions, and impose order on the overdetermined social totality. The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It) thoroughly responds to this tension and deftly charts a path forward through the theoretical incompatibilities to propose a praxis that became encapsulated by the phrase “community economies.” While their work is arguably more widely known for its praxis-based approach to prefiguring anti-capitalism (see Lee, Leyshon and Gibson-Graham, 2009), in this brief commentary we focus on the significance of their theoretical contributions that make this work a classic.
At the time of Gibson–Graham’s writing, feminist political economy was primarily focused on attention to social reproduction, highlighting the uneven impact of capitalism on women, and building on this work to illustrate the masculinism of economism. If this work sought to extend the project, Gibson–Graham set out to mess with the project (to use Cindi Katz’s turn of phrase). Yet while others issued blistering external critiques of what Gibson–Graham call “capitalocentrism” from a feminist perspective (see Deutsche 1991), The End of Capitalism (as we knew it) firmly situates feminist anti-essentialism as a form of immanent critique. Their recognition of capitalocentrism emerged from their practice of reading for difference. They draw on Louis Althusser, whose “reading” of Marx’s Capital introduced the idea that reading itself is a form of knowledge production (Althusser and Balibar, 1970). Althusser emphasizes that reading is not a simple reflection of the world in a mirror, where meaning is merely registered and recognized. Instead, it is a guilty act that entails responsibility on the part of the reader (also see Gibson-Graham 2020). Gibson–Graham build on this idea to highlight the relationship between reading or theory-building responsibly and possibility-making, illustrating how the way we apprehend the world shapes the possibilities for action within it. However, they show that the very act of reading for dominance can undermine the very possibility of transformation, openings, and prefigurations. As we fixate on the world as it is, we lose the ability to perform other worlds. To counter this, Gibson–Graham advocate for a shift toward reading for difference, a form of sense-making that does not claim to represent reality in any final or authoritative way. Instead, it functions as a provocation: a deliberate conceptual stance that asks what we might learn or create if we proceed as though a certain idea were true.
Gibson–Graham are deeply influenced by Althusser’s notion of overdetermination, as it resonates with their broader political and epistemological project: to undo the dominance of capitalist logic and to see capitalism not as a totalizing system with a unified identity or logic but as one contingent element within a plural and shifting field of social relations. Understood as such, they identify concepts such as “economy” or “capitalism” instruments that meaningfully shape the reality they purport to explain. What is taken to be real or given, they argue, is always mediated through conceptual frameworks, theoretical lenses, and choices of attention.
Gibson–Graham’s work compels a reconsideration of how we think about “the crisis” (or reality itself), highlighting the creative and performative role of theory in shaping world. They treat overdetermination as a provisional ontological starting point. For Althusser (1972), overdetermination can be understood as signaling the irreducible specificity of every determination; the essential complexity—rather than the root simplicity—of every form of existence; the openness or incompleteness of every identity; the ultimate unfixity of every meaning; and the correlate possibility of conceiving an acentric. Althusser uses the term decentered social totality that is not structured by the primacy of any social element or location. This acentric model opens up space for imagining non-hierarchical and non-deterministic ways of understanding society. Every identity, every process, reverberates through the rest, opening a vast field of contingent possibilities.
Crucially, Gibson–Graham argue that this conception of overdetermination also demands a self-conscious choice of entry point—a form of strategic essentialism, in Spivak’s (1988) terms—among an infinity of world-constituting forces. This choice is not dictated by any obvious reality, such as capitalism or neoliberalism, nor by the immediate visibility of events “out there.” It is a political and strategic act: directing attention in ways that produce and elevate some effects while analytically subsuming others and, in so doing, subsuming their actually existing constitutive role in shaping the social totality. From this perspective, capitalism is not a monolithic force governing social life in the famed “last instance.” Instead, it appears as Gibson–Graham insist—an overdetermined network of sites, practices, and contingencies, punctuated and constituted by myriad outsides.
The dialectic of theory and praxis that Gibson–Graham develop flows from their ability to apprehend capitalism as structural, global, and consequential, while simultaneously recognizing it as a phenomenon whose understanding is a precondition for its transformation. Representations of capitalism, they argue, are themselves “a potent constituent of the anti-capitalist imagination” (p. 3). This is not a mere inversion of economic determinism, but a refusal of determinism itself, and a commitment to a vision of the world as fundamentally plural, open-ended, and filled with possibility. Indeterminacy, often dismissed as vagueness, contains political potential: it challenges the mythic authority of determinist explanatory frameworks, inviting us to imagine and enact worlds in which ethical, contingent, and creative action becomes both possible and necessary (see Christopherson 1989). Capitalist dominance continues to be (re)performed in economic geography, and the “end” of that dominance must itself be continually (re)performed.
At the time of publication, this work chaffed against the resolutely materialist ambitions of Marxist geography and represented, to some, a hopelessly optimistic and politically toothless capitulation to the antipolitics of postmodernism’s excesses. Gender may not have an essence, but that has nothing to do with capitalism, they argued (see Sayer 2000). Cast, in their own words, as the “Pollyannas of the profession” by senior male Marxists, even they, at times, were sobered by the “realism” of capitalism’s enduring power and reach (Gibson-Graham 2002). Ever attentive to the power of discourse and framing, they turn this reaction back onto itself to ask: what explains the attachment to asserting capitalism’s global and unyielding power, and perhaps more to the point, the attachment to deriding the ambitions, politics, and possibilities of local interventions.
What positions this work as a classic, in our view, is not its contribution to the field of community geographies, as previous commentators in this journal asserted in reflecting on the book’s reach a decade and a half ago. The book provides a touchstone for the possibility of feminist political economy to not merely leave the project of Marxism intact by extending it to previously unconsidered realms, but fundamentally mess with it (see Katz 2018) through immanent critique while holding it accountable to its revolutionary ambitions and its material effects. Through successive rounds of political economic inquiry in geography, from theorizing post-Fordism and neoliberalism, to querying the scale of urbanization, and now to the emergence of a conjunctural conjuncture in the discipline, The End of Capitalism (as we knew it) insists that we consider theory building and knowledge making as generative, but perhaps not always, or inherently generating what we think. As Felicity Callard (2018) has astutely observed, geography has often conflated the object of analysis with the politics of the work, often in ways that elide the projects that are being advanced. Theorizing capitalism and its global reach, Gibson–Graham show, is not inherently anti-capitalist and may in fact fuel capitalism’s power.
Though the book itself is best understood when its origin is situated in a particular moment in time, its insights and contributions remain freshly relevant as political economy in geography turns its attention to diagnosing the emerging conjuncture. Their work is both a lasting provocation to consider the entry points, social locations, and processes that provide a way in to analyze a conjuncture, and a reminder that there is no innocent location from which to know, even—or especially—if that knowledge project has liberatory, anti-capitalist aspirations. As critical geography is struggling to get its bearings in this interregnum, responding to the rise and resurgence of a toxic brew of white supremacy, blood and soil nationalism, and a chaotic mix of techno-anarcho capitalism with a whiff of populism, it has turned to conjunctural analysis as an analytical tool.
Gibson–Graham’s provocations in The End of Capitalism offer some orientations for how this turn to conjunctural analysis can learn from the insights of feminist political economy, particularly around the relationship between critical inquiry and social change. As Marx exhorted, the point of radical inquiry is not to interpret social relations but to change them. Thinking with Gibson–Graham reminds us that conjunctures are made—and potentially changed—not by diagnosing coherent political economic conditions, or through close readings of canonical texts, but at least in part through rigorous curiosity about—and accountability to—the relationship between our modes of inquiry, habits of thought, and how they interact with the world as it is, and as it might be. Moreover, Gibson–Graham’s text troubles the primacy of the general over the particular in critical inquiry. This builds on and extends the feminist tendency toward attention to the everyday, the local, and lived experience as generative sites of political action, and attention to the way unmoored abstractions can not only reify the power of some processes and relations, but also prefigure the failure of local, aspirational, or experimental forms of enacting alternatives. Geographers turning to conjunctural analysis to orient us in disorienting interregnum would do well to revisit Gibson–Graham’s classic, as it refuses the consolatory innocence of the diagnostician of capitalism and its associated vagaries. Accordingly, feminist conjunctural analysis might be less concerned with the conjuncture and its origin, and instead more response-able to (in the Donna Haraway sense of the word)—and generative of—the infinite, experimental conjunctures struggling to be born.
