How Far Does the Diverse Economies Approach Take Us?

Abstract

Julie and Katherine Gibson-Graham and Kelly Dombroski (eds), The Handbook of Diverse Economies. Cheltenham and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2020. 546 pp. Hardback £ 199.80. There is a long-standing tradition of thought on human-centred and communitarian economies. It connects to a search for utopias (no lands) and udetopias (neverlands) which has accelerated with the advent of capitalism and the obsession with capital accumulation that gave the latter system its name. Intellectuals like Charles Fourier, Silvio Gesell, François Marie, Karl Marx, Robert Owen and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon were pioneers in developing social, economic and political alternatives to capitalism. They engaged with the original 16th century collectivist and utopian socialism of Sir Thomas More, which, as French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1998: 125) observed, was ‘often discredited, dismissed and ridiculed in the name of economic realism’. Drawing on this tradition, the scholarly couple Katherine Gibson and Julie Graham added the diverse economies (DE) approach three decades ago.1 Since then, it has developed into a fully-fledged research programme among scholars and a vision of social transformation among activists. The latest arrival in their scientific production The Handbook of Diverse Economies, is edited by J.K. Gibson-Graham and Kelly Dombroski, and the subject of this critical review. Through capturing and valorizing the variety of economic, social and political spaces that currently proliferate in the interstices of the capitalist system, the diverse economies approach has gained considerable traction. These spaces, DE authors and followers would emphasize, are not an exercise of the imagination occurring in the no lands and neverlands of utopianism, but tangible and true sources of global hope. They are existing spaces which evade capitalism or shape resistance to it, and mobilize collectives. Underlining that building alternatives to capitalism is feasible as it is ongoing, The Handbook of Diverse Economies adds cases, findings and reflections, and invites analysis of the way scholars understand and write about economic alternatives. However, as in previous works (see Gibson-Graham, 1996, 2008), engagement with academics outside feminist, post-structural and post-development circles remains pending in this last book. While this new volume refines the contrast with neoliberal politics and the ‘crushing uniformity of mainstream circuits of value’ (Fuller et al., 2016: xxiv), it does not meet the need to engage with other ways of theorizing alternatives to overcome the relatively marginal position of diverse economies within the dominant capitalist system. Some of the older critiques of the DE approach are explicitly addressed, but the general lack of receptiveness to criticism limits the influence of the research programme beyond the circles of supporters and partisan advocates of a post-capitalist future. This essay begins by introducing the notion of alterity and the trajectory of utopianism, and how the diverse economies approach is situated within this tradition. It subsequently presents a critique of previous research, which is followed by a review of the new book (hereafter referred to as the handbook) and its contribution to this body of scholarly work. The essay delves into the details of what has and what has not been covered by this new addition, and its relevance to the field of development studies. A key achievement of the diverse economies framework is that it has rekindled the debate on the notions of alternatives and alterity (Fickey, 2011; Lee et al., 2004). It is not a new debate, considering that the intellectual production of alternatives to capitalism has inspired humankind since the origins of capitalism itself. In line with this, contending conceptions invariably reject surplus extraction based on private property and its resulting waged employment, but they differ in their interpretation and focus of the meaning of alternative. Gritzas and Kavoulakos (2016) have clustered scholarly work on alternatives to capitalism in two broad groups. The ‘utopians’ favoured the organization of a cooperative or community economy; Proudhon was among them, and to some extent, Polanyi and Gesell later followed. The sceptic camp, of which Marx and Engels are representatives, were particularly dismissive of utopian projects and their lack of ‘scientific’ reflection; they were convinced that such utopian initiatives were bound to fail (Engels, 1968). Marx and Engels reasoned that individuals cannot change society from below because they do not have the resources to afford a life outside a waged relationship. As workers do not own or control the means of production, they are not able to access the resources needed to afford food, accommodation and meet other basic needs for survival. According to Marx and Engels, forming small networks or communities does not improve utopians’ chances of success in the long run either, because a life outside capitalism requires resources that must come from somewhere. Furthermore, if such a withdrawal from capitalism becomes the life choice of significant numbers of workers, the state would intervene to prevent a mass opt-out from the capitalist economy (North, 2016). Subsequent orthodox Marxist scholars similarly discarded the potential of such initiatives as naïve and instead promoted full-scale radical social change that would terminate the hegemony of capitalism when the system had reached its productivity boundary. Recently, scholars have contested the sterile nature of alternative projects and suggest that in current times, the claim that utopian initiatives from below have no potential needs to be researched empirically (Gómez, 2018; North, 1999, 2016; Pacione, 1997). The scepticism of the Marxist strand eventually dominated the intellectual debate that challenged capitalism during the 20th century, consigning smaller utopian initiatives to the intellectual margins (Fuller et al., 2016). The confrontation between socialism and capitalism resulted in the regulation of capitalist economies which in some countries led to the emergence of welfare states that redistributed economic benefits, further pushing utopian economic and political experiments to the margins (Gritzas and Kavoulakos, 2016). With the decline of radical political economy and the rise of neoliberalism in the late 1980s, the scope for alternative thinking was lost in no lands and neverlands. Ironically, this intensified the search among academics who were not deterred by the apparent implications of small-scale practices (Holloway, 2010). There was a dire need among scholars to find alternative economic and political practices that would bring hope against the background of hegemonic neoliberal capitalism. The search finally made progress towards the mid-1990s, when the retreat of the welfare state was being contested, new social movements such as the Zapatistas in Mexico emerged and anti-globalization protests gained momentum. In 1996, the feminist economic geographers Katherine Gibson and Julie Graham published The End of Capitalism (As We Knew it): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy (Gibson-Graham, 1996). A decade later, they collected their ideas in A Postcapitalist Politics (Gibson-Graham, 2006). The End of Capitalism was a provocative, fresh and ground-breaking attempt to capture the efforts of various communities around the world that were building different spaces of economic and political interaction. The qualification of ‘different spaces’ applies to a varied set of non-capitalist projects as well as alternatives that directly oppose capitalism. The key analytical instrument of the DE approach is a comprehensive canvas based on grounded and weak theory. The framework presents a broad inventory of empirical practices related to enterprises, labour, transactions, property and finance to construct three loose categories or domains of economic activity: non-capitalist, capitalist and alternative to capitalist (see Table 1). In subsequent publications identifying with the approach, more examples have been added. In this way, the DE approach collected studies on a multitude of different practices around the world that facilitate the material survival of communities and the reproduction of their cultural life. The publications led to a group of scholar-activists forming the Community Economies Research Network (CERN), which engages in research, reflection and practical activities around the world.2 At the time of writing,3 The End of Capitalism (Gibson-Graham, 1996) has been cited 5,350 times and Google Scholar lists 10,500 hits for the keyword ‘diverse economies’, which shows how the concept has gained in popularity in some academic and activist circles. ALTERNATIVE PAID Self-employed Reciprocal labour In-kind Work for welfare ALTERNATIVE MARKET Fair trade Alternative Currencies Underground market Barter ALTERNATIVE PRIVATE State-managed assets Customary (clan) land Community land trusts Indigenous knowledge (Intellectual Property ALTERNATIVE CAPITALIST State owned Environmentally responsible Socially responsible Non-profit ALTERNATIVE MARKET Cooperative Banks Credit unions Community-based financial institutions Micro-finance UNPAID Housework Volunteer Self-provisioning Slave labour NON-MARKET Household sharing Gift giving Hunting, fishing, gathering Theft, piracy, poaching OPEN ACCESS Atmosphere International Waters Open-source IP Outer Space NON-CAPITALIST Worker cooperatives Sole proprietorships Community enterprise Feudal Slave NON-MARKET Sweat equity Family lending Donations Interest-free loans Intellectually, the DE approach positions itself between the utopians and the Marxists. Gibson-Graham (1996, 2006) define capitalism in relation to five pillars as shown in Table 1: waged labour, exploitative enterprises, private property, market exchange and interest-based finances. They contend that there are too many experiments that do not follow these five characteristics and they criticize the structuralist Marxist approaches for being ‘capitalocentric’, meaning that they ignore the immense variety of practices in the non-capitalist categories. They further argue that Marxist approaches assess capitalism with an essentialist, monolithic discourse that clouds ‘other’ economic practices that are not based either on wage labour or on exploitation. Marxist work, they claim, describes capitalism with ‘totalising concepts and machine-like metaphors’ (Jonas, 2016: 6) to express its domination over non-capitalist spaces. As these practices go unnoticed and are treated as unworthy of consideration, the Marxist narrative would endorse the belief that non-capitalist projects are too small, marginal and irrelevant to achieve any systemic transformation. According to Gibson-Graham (1996), keeping non-capitalist projects hidden or invisible makes them appear irrelevant and powerless, thereby silencing existing diversity and further preventing the imagining of non-capitalist futures. The capacity to see diversity is thus impaired and part of the DE project is precisely to construct another dictionary to discuss and analyse alterity. The point of departure of the approach, that non-capitalist economic systems have remained invisible, calls for further discussion. Radical political economy scholars have examined these different economies within capitalism but based on the assumptions that they are subordinate subsystems of the capitalist economy, which sustains them to secure its own survival, and that they lack autonomy as alternative economic projects (Jonas, 2016). For example, radical development geographer Milton Santos (1977) posited the theory of spatial dialectics with two interconnected economic circuits. Santos reasoned that the urban economy is composed of the ‘upper circuit’ populated by capital-intensive modern industries while the ‘lower circuit’ groups the labour-intensive smaller enterprises exposed to price bargaining. In Santos’s account, the two circuits struggle for control over the urban territory, with the upper circuit normally dominating the lower one and relegating it to the margins. Similar, or at least compatible, theories of two-sector economic structures in which one is superior to the other were salient in radical political economy and structural economic theory (e.g. Fuchs, 1974; Hirschman, 1958; Lewis, 1954). Other authors (e.g. Elson, 2007, 2017) argue that capitalism depends for its reproduction on the unpaid work of the domestic economy to sustain the political and economic spheres, which in turn generate the resources that sustain the capitalist economy. These parallel readings of the relation between capitalist and non-capitalist economies situate the latter in a relationship of subordination. Gibson-Graham criticize this a priori value judgement; at the risk of overgeneralization, they argue that Marxist accounts fail to see the potential of such alternatives and, rather than regarding them as equals, they are treated as subordinates. In contrast, the diverse economies approach emphasizes horizontality and spatial differentiation with co-existence, although not without tensions. Gibson-Graham critiqued the assumed superior–inferior relationship and proposed an escape out of capitalocentrism by means of a systematic analysis of diversity and alterity. That is, they aim at ‘creating a discourse of economic difference as a contribution to a politics of economic innovation’ (Gibson-Graham, 2005a: 6). Their approach emphasizes diversity and combinations across the five pillars of capitalism (see Table 1) and the prospect that current heterogeneity is only the beginning of future systemic transformation. They substitute a conception of a single overarching global capitalist economy with a diverse economy (Jonas, 2016). They seek to reveal that the economy is heterogeneous and that it includes other mechanisms of exchange, organization of production, types of property and rewards for labour and finance (Healy, 2009, 2011). As a research programme, the DE approach focuses on identifying and recording the great variety of economic activities around the globe. It is oriented towards describing a post-capitalist economy in which ‘other’ projects are registered and revalued. While Gibson and Graham took explicit distance from Marxism, they also distanced themselves from utopianism. The diverse economies approach aims at identifying the myriad of economic practices already implemented as complements or as alternatives to the capitalist economy. The idea is to show them as autonomous spaces, and not as inferior or subordinated projects that may occur in neverlands. As a result, the academic project is also a legitimizing force for innovative activists who have already conceived and implemented alternative economic practices and who see their efforts reflected in scholarly theorization. They equally encourage acting, and especially invite academics to try action research. The focus of the DE approach is on the possibilities of the struggle and not on the probability of success (Gibson-Graham, 2008: 615). The idea of diversity suggests an innate positive connotation or a certain aura of progressiveness that needs to be examined. As argued by Samers (2005), some non-capitalist economic practices are equally or more exploitative than capitalist practices, such as modern slavery and various forms of unpaid work. According to a recent database, over 30 per cent of the world economy is produced informally, although the proportion has been shrinking substantially in the last two decades, up to the pandemic (Medina and Schneider, 2019). This figure of 30 per cent hides an enormous diversity in itself; the informal economy is an amalgam of economic relations and practices under a single name that includes informal workers paid in cash, semi-informal workers that are not completely remunerated through the formal banking channels, and others that work without any pay (Gómez et al., 2020; Williams, 2011; Williams and Windebank, 1998). In some corners of informality, agents have organized marketplaces, associations, self-help initiatives, and other ways of structuring their economic life that fit nicely in the ‘other-than-capitalist’ box of the diverse economies framework. However, in other corners of the informal economy, there is nothing progressive about it and the notion of diversity veils myriad forms of exploitation and misery. The diverse economies framework does not acknowledge the contrasting diversity of other-than-capitalist enterprises. In keeping with the heterogeneity of the informal economy, there is a minority of well-paid digital workers that have little in common with the great number of unprotected apps-based workers (Meagher, 2019) and low-income ‘working poor’ (Fisker, 2022; Williams and Round, 2008). Similarly, the ‘community’ behind the community economy is often rife with power asymmetries and inequalities (Bayat, 1997). Cooperatives and self-managed worker businesses rarely provide a decent living to the unemployed that create them (Suryanata et al., 2021). Collective action requires trust which generally is absent in the informal economy or economies, so it remains unorganized and populated by crowds of destitute workers struggling to survive. By critiquing capitalist practices, all other practices appear deserving of promotion, whereas alterity is not necessarily superior. Samers (2005: 883) questions this myopic understanding of the informal economy and asserts that ‘we need a more analytical treatment of informal or diverse economies by distinguishing between their more mundane but dyspeptic varieties (that is, large swathes of informal employment) and those with a seemingly more “progressive” production, extraction, and redistribution of the surplus’. In other words, we need to move beyond the assumption that all that is different to capitalism is desirable. There is a related question, namely ‘what is the theoretical advantage of making an inventory of capitalist and non-capitalist practices if this includes exploitative projects?’. A more careful distinction between desirable diversity and undesirable diversity is a pending assignment of the DE framework that has not yet been resolved and does not appear under scrutiny in the handbook either. Various scholars therefore advocate moving away from an inherently positive appreciation of ‘diversity’ as a central expression of disapproval of the status quo (Schreven et al., 2008). Others prefer the concept of ‘alterity’ as a non-binary discursive option that expresses degrees of separation and depends on specific contexts and spaces (e.g. Jonas, 2013; Lee, 2000). They define alterity as ‘a way of knowing, representing and narrating the other in terms that exist outside’ the established categories (Jonas, 2016: 9). In other words, alterity is the construction of a sense of other both analytically and empirically (Fuller et al., 2016). Still, alterity in any measure and degree suggests an immanent positive content that overrates the progressiveness of many initiatives. Other scholars developed the notion of ‘autonomous geographies’ to refer to the political networks of activists who aim at dislodging capitalism and building post-capitalist collective spaces (e.g. Pickerill and Chatterton, 2006). They thus identify political and economic autonomy as the central criterion that couples the desirable to the alternative. Such a conceptualization presents the advantage that a socially minded movement needs to be present in the production of alterity, as opposed to any form of non-capitalist diversity that may or may not be sought after by a particular social group. A second well-researched critique of the diverse economies research programme is the issue of scale, which has been noted by several authors. Lee et al. (2010) notably questioned the effectiveness of projects that are small scale, intimate, niche, local and grassroots. The critique examines the realistic transformative potential of the entire inventory of localized case studies and research interventions that show that these are many, varied and individually relevant to its participants. The issue of scale is discussed explicitly in the Introduction to the handbook, in which it is asserted that many non-capitalist practices are ubiquitous around the world, so they do not need to be large to have transformative potential (p. 18). Among other-than-capitalist practices that occur everywhere, the editors of the handbook include a variety of economic activities that are undoubtedly global and salient, such as care labour, housework, family lending, migrant remittances, household flows of goods and services, indigenous struggles and local place-based activism. Quoting previous work with St. Martin and Roelvink (2015, cited on p. 16), Gibson-Graham and Dombroski claim that by making these niche, local initiatives visible, diverse economies scholars ‘cultivate a politics of horizontal extent, reach and association rather than a politics of scale’ (p. 20). They further argue that the scale of these actions is global; because ‘women are everywhere and therefore always somewhere, change can be enacted in all those many somewheres’ (Gibson-Graham, 2005b, cited on p. 20). Such a ubiquitous presence would facilitate the replication of change-making practices. This vision admits that replicated practices would not look the same everywhere, as if they were the result of a grand strategy of economic transformation. While this constitutes a response to the critique on scaling, it does not convincingly cast light on the question of transformative potential. The emphasis of the DE approach is on scaling out rather than scaling up, which implies the multiplication of similar practices through relational networks and associations instead of the growth of a single project or location. If they did scale out, and diverse economies mushroomed globally as the 58 chapters in the handbook appear to suggest, would that be enough to generate a new type of economy at the aggregate level? Furthermore, scaling by replication is not as straightforward as suggested. The discourse that emphasizes multiplication and ubiquity as methods for effecting change at a global and aggregate level has been examined by scholars specialized in the different localized livelihoods (MacKinnon, 2008, 2011) that the diverse economies literature seeks to cover. For example, research on not-for-profit enterprise networks reveals that scaling out works only under specific conditions and it is not free of risks and obstacles (Bocken et al., 2016; van Lunenburg et al., 2020; Reed, 2015). Among other limitations, the issue of knowledge is mentioned prominently, because the know-how on starting an alternative or socially oriented project does not travel freely. It requires motivated actors and privately owned resources to grow or to transfer knowledge to others in order that replication can occur. The originators of the transformative project are generally inclined to disseminate knowledge but also seek to benefit from it in financial or reputational terms. At the least, they seek to be acknowledged as the source of the social innovation, including the possibility of being paid for the conception of the idea, and at the most, they hope to obtain financial resources to progress further in their initiative. Similarly, even if knowledge becomes publicly available and free floating — to support, for example, a women's organization in Ireland to replicate the positive experience of a rotating savings and credit association in Kenya — the differences in context and subjectivities require considerable efforts in translation and adaptation, with all the costs, hurdles and risks of failure that this implies. The handbook asserts that ‘women are everywhere’ and there is considerable evidence corroborating that women tend to form organizations in a multitude of places and situations (p. 20). However, the women's associations that support female entrepreneurs in Ireland have little in common with the informal lending circles (chamas) in Kenya. While the transformative potential of scaling by multiplication could allow an other-than-capitalist project to reach ‘many somewheres’, the reasoning does not cast light on why it would happen or who would notice that it is worth the effort. Who would provide the resources, time and energy for a social innovation to travel from one context to another, safeguarding the transformative potential of the original? Perhaps the transformative impact of scaling non-capitalist initiatives out and up lies elsewhere. Engaging with the diverse economies approach, Smith et al. (2008) suggest that the issue of scale is not always critical for transforming the system. In their study of diverse economic practices in post-socialist Eastern Europe, at the level of the household they found that workers combine formal and informal employment alongside legal and illegal work, unpaid domestic labour and reciprocal forms of exchange. In other words, each household participates in diverse economic practices to supplement its income and make a living in a capitalist economy. Smith et al. (ibid.) conclude that such a diversity of economic practices within households raises questions over the ability of capitalism to ensure social reproduction. Such questioning may lead to social and economic transformation. It is therefore not the scale of the diverse economies that matters but the questions on occupational identity, class processes and social roles that the practice of diversity can raise. In a more general sense, the need to combine various capitalist and non-capitalist economies in one household to make a living reminds its participants that the arrival and domination of capitalism in Eastern Europe and other areas of the world has brought a series of important challenges to groups of the population struggling to make a living. Looking at this line of enquiry from a slightly different angle, another question arises. If non-capitalist activities at the level of the household aim at supporting survival and not at transforming the system, then those other-than-capitalist practices barely represent a move away from capitalism. At the level of the household, practices converge and co-exist, and there is an intimate interaction of the diverse economic practices, with the result that households may not always be able to establish which practice nourishes which. Yet, as Elson (2017) suggests, this convergence of non-capitalist practices at the level of the household has systemic implications and may have consequences for those living in the capitalist economy. Suryanata et al. (2021) conducted research among ‘new farmers’ in Hawaii, who left previous professions and entered farming to change their lifestyle and adopt the diverse socio-ecological values promoted by the DE approach. The study found that, driven by their nostalgia for a romanticized rural life, the new farmers ended up working long hours and resorting to unpaid labour to be able to make a living. Their behaviour reconfirmed that it is impossible for any farmer — old or new — to make a decent living from agriculture without working long hours and exploiting unpaid family members and themselves. The outcome was that the former-professionals-transformed-into-farmers undermined the social reproduction of those who had no other option but to live from farming. The diversification of economic practices in households that could afford it was counterproductive for the well-being of other households that could not make such choices. Hence, it is not possible to affirm that the diversification of economic practices away from capitalism necessarily represents a force that transforms the system in a positive direction; the opposite is also possible. Moreover, alternative economic spaces are often populated by agents who lead a capitalist existence during working hours and a non-capitalist existence in their spare time, doing volunteer work, for example. With such a blend of social groups acting in various spheres of economic life, the rationalities that guide emancipatory projects are rarely isolated from the need to obtain resources to keep the various practices alive and extract surpluses to safeguard their survival and impact. It is likely that a large proportion of non-capitalist initiatives are hybrids that blend rationalities and absorb the pressure to secure resources — time and funding — from the capitalist system. The larger the scale, the greater the need to share the space and interact with other spheres and institutions. For instance, the diverse economies inventory presented in the handbook includes complementary currency systems that are convertible to formal national currencies, and therefore dependent on the capitalist economy. It also includes cases of self-managed and non-profit enterprises that require funds to pay salaries and achieve their social goals, and farmers’ markets where sales are concentrated among a handful of traders, excluding the less efficient or productive ones. While some of these cases may be successful in terms of their transformational impact and scaling, they blend elements of alterity with a mainstream existence, thus constituting changing hybrids. At what point is a partially alternative practice — a hybrid — no longer an alternative practice? This thus becomes an ontological question. It is not always possible to separate the market from the non-market, paid from unpaid labour, monetized from non-monetized and the formal from the informal (Rodgers and Williams, 2012). Together, this set of studies and critiques leads back to the question of the relationship between capitalist and non-capitalist practices. While the DE approach emphasizes horizontal diversity or the