Abstract
AbstractThe article sets out the thesis that the social-ontological account based on the form of life concept can be used to analytically and normatively reflect alternative economies and their attempt to overcome capitalistic structures.2 To develop the thesis, I provide conceptual work on the “economic form of life”, pointing at its plasticity due to the general substitutability of economic practices. Against this background, I argue that Capitalism makes use of this plasticity to create a fully commodified, radical contingent form of life. Actors of alternative economies can wake up of from this dream world of Capitalism by using the substitutability of economic practices to deconstruct the capitalist form of life. The two most important practices for doing so are the practices of “in-sourcing” and “solidary out-sourcing”. They also reveal the normative kernel of conviviality, namely to seek to do justice to the economicity of human life. The paper ends with locating the presented form-of-life-account within the strand of literature on alternative economies.
Highlights
The article sets out the thesis that the social-ontological account based on the form of life concept can be used to analytically and normatively reflect alternative economies and their attempt to overcome capitalistic structures.[2]
Capitalism dreams of a form of life, in which the subject focusses exclusively on what he or she can sell on the market, while he or she buys in all other economic goods and services from others
Different from Gibson-Graham, who wants the immediate experiences of the alternative economies actors to be the starting point of theorisation, the representatives of the gift-economy approach advocate the primacy of theory
Summary
The concept of form of life plays a significant role in the Wittgensteinian as well as the Hegelian tradition of western philosophy and has been successfully actualized by different philosophers in recent years (cf. for example Laugier, Care, The Ordinary, Forms of Life; Laugier, This is Us; Jaeggi, Critique of Forms of Life). 9 Most importantly, these practices can become the starting point for transforming the form of life they are part of Their latent efficiency, which is objectively there, can be increased by the actors up to a point at which the supremacy of the dominant practice pattern and, the overall character of the form of life is called into question.[10] One could imagine, for example, how the monk’s religious form of life is transformed into a political one by increasing the irreducible, non-religious practice of talking to each other. The crucial point is, that it is possible to describe and explain the qualitative transformation of a form of life through the irreducible efficacy of the non-dominant practices, which are contained in every form of life, no matter how monolithic it is This holds true for the capitalist form of life as well. What is more important here, it allows to reconsider the colonizing character of Capitalism and to describe its dystopic dream world
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