Negotiating interdependence and anxiety in community economies

The reproductive and care work predominantly undertaken by women has historically been undervalued in traditional measures of the economy. However, calls for more work, or better work for women (and men) doesn’t necessarily solve the issues surrounding waged labour such as zero hour contracts, the ‘double work day’, and other forms of increasing precarity and competition. In this article I explore how alternative forms of labour exchange in the Wellington Timebank provide one way in which subjects can partially operate outside the waged economy. I draw on Jacques Rancière’s understanding of how a radical equality underpins a democratic politics to explore the everyday negotiations around labour that occur in this alternative economy. I connect work being done by the Community Economies Collective to ideas of radical equality and a feminist ethic of care to show how embodied and everyday practices like timebanking enable subjects to challenge the inequalities of waged work and in Rancière’s terms, partially construct alternative ‘distributions of the sensible’.

Counterfutures

This commentary was invited by the special editors of this issue and is partly based on the Community Economies session that the four authors organised at the Social Movements Conference III: Resistance and Social Change in Wellington, 2016. In the Community Economies session we reviewed the diverse-economies framework and showed how it translates into a politics grounded in economic difference, specifically non-capitalist economic practices. We gave various examples of how people enrol different practices into the formation of community economies that prioritise ethical interdependence among people and with the planet. In what follows we briefly outline some key theoretical underpinnings of Community Economies scholarship, and then provide some reflections on the questions asked during the 2016 conference session.

Counterfutures, 2021

Mohan Dutta, Director of the Center for Culture-Centred Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) at Massey University talks with Sue Bradford, the centre’s first activist-in-residence in Aotearoa New Zealand. The conversation outlines the role of community organising in communication for social change, with both Mohan and Sue drawing on their work in grassroots organising at the margins. Mohan and Sue detail the role of voice infrastructures at the margins as a basis for structural transformation. They critically interrogate the tensions that emerge in the relationships among communities, activists, and academics, and discuss how these tensions can be addressed in creative ways. The conversation wraps up with the authors’ thoughts on the role of community organising in building socialist futures in the post-pandemic world.

Community economies can be considered as examples of the diverse economies growing outside common capitalist logics of private accumulation and profit, seeking to bypass or reconfigure dominant global trends of societal and economic organization. Yet, these communities seem to fit quite well under a neoliberal program in which responsibilities are shifting downwards, favoring multi-level governance over State intervention and accountability. This binary character makes imperative an open and critical discussion on the development of community initiatives, including on the motivations and visions of citizens practicing alternative ethical consumption. This article explores the neoliberal rationalities embraced by community members within the ima-ginaries of change they frame and examines how these rationalities contribute to (re)producing neoliberal conditions and forms of governance. Our analysis builds on semi-structured interviews conducted among the members of 11 initiatives in 5 EU countries and on participant observation. We argue here that communities articulate an " alternative imaginary " of change that appears imprinted by core neoliberal rationalities around questions of individual responsibility, the role of the State, and civic participation and equity. It is an imaginary related to the construction of CBEs to bypass existing socio-political and economic configurations. This imaginary more often than not responds to neoliberal promises of individual freedom and autonomy and seems to undermine CBEs' more radical possibilities at the same time obscuring more diverse voices of transformation.

2005

In Aotearoa New Zealand, as elsewhere, partnership programmes overtly targeted to the strengthening of local communities are developing in a range of institutional sites. This development, it is claimed by some, moves social governance well beyond the narrow, market-oriented, contractualism of earlier forms of neoliberalism, and into a new era of joined up, inclusive governance.

The Ashgate Research Companion to Planning Theory Conceptual Challenges For Spatial Planning, 2015

Today in Australia we see the proliferation of a range of different kinds of community enterprises whose 'core business' is not to maximize private benefit but to produce community well-being, particularly for marginalised groups. This paper explores how we might assist these community enterprises to offer an alternative to capitalist economic practice. Drawing on arguments elaborated in J.K. Gibson-Graham's book The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It) and its recently published sequel, A Postcapitalist Politics, we argue for cultivating an affective stance that enables us to think and enact possibility.

Urban Studies

This paper explores the ambivalent nature of community organisation as a response to a ‘crisis of authority’ in post-industrial areas subject to urban regeneration. In the discourse of the Third Way, activism has been increasingly discursively framed as ‘participation’, legitimising a shift in welfare provision from the state onto civil society and a proliferation of private actors. As part of the process, existing local solidarities based on long-term shared interests and histories of conflict with the parts of the state, have been transformed (in theory) into social networks, forms of short-term instrumental co-operation based on consensus. Community activists are brought into contact with what Rose (after Foucault) describes as the ‘technologies’ of power which are deployed to produce governable subjects, co-opting and dividing them from their base communities. However, local participation also provides our most immediate experience of political economy, what Gramsci identifies a...

2016

Agriculture is an increasingly capitalized and industrialized enterprise that has resulted in the alienation of consumers from the process of food production. The separation of consumers from producers is a fundamental source of non-sustainability in the modern food system. In this paper, we present three case examples of civic agriculture representing a breadth of alternatives in the social and spatial organization of agricultural production and distribution. In all cases, producers form associations to engage directly with alternative modes of production, and create markets that enroll consumers in the process of food production and distribution. We argue, using Gibson-Graham’s (2006) “post-capitalist politics ” that the (re)negotiation of the economic basis of agriculture generates new subjectivities directed toward a more integrated, interdependent and cooperative economy of agriculture.

Cooperating with other women in their communities and allying beyond local First Nations were necessary stratagems. The final substantive chapter, by Cybéle Locke, delves into the ways Maori women activists moved from race-based protest organizing to a demand for Maori sovereignty. That trajectory underlies the book itself, intelligently sequencing chapters from contact-period Tasmania through reservation situations to late-20th century political activism.