Capitalonormativity

I’ve lately been talking a lot about “the diverse economy” and how I wish there were a broader understanding that economics is not limited solely to the analysis of cash transactions. Here, I’ll try to explain why, and also explain why understanding the economy as necessarily diverse and heterogeneous is so important to composition. (This is also one of the last chunks of my dissertation’s Chapter 3, which I’m working this weekend on putting together into a semi-coherent early draft.)

As Gibson-Graham, Resnick and Wolff point out, “The contemporary economic (and therefore also the social) field is represented as dominated by […] capitalist exploitation” (Class and Its Others 13): in other words, we tend to talk about “the economy” as comprising only monetized capitalist market transactions. There are dangers in this essentialized view, however, and “When we refer to an economy-wide imperative of capital accumulation, we stand on the same unsafe ground […] that we tread when we refer to a maternal instinct or a human drive to acquisition” (Gibson-Graham 16). The essentialized equation of economy to money, and its concomitant assertion that the only economic activity operates in the service of the accumulation of money, simultaneously naturalizes a complex set of social relations and interactions, and places that naturalized economy on a transcendent plane, beyond human intervention, beyond question. But “to the extent that the economy has been taken from us — represented as removed from the forces of social and discursive construction — it becomes imporant and urgent to take it back, not as a homogenous and unified level, sphere, or system, but as a discursive terrain” (Gibson-Graham, Resnick and Wolff 2): to do otherwise is to allow for the rationalization and naturalization of economic inequality, to shrug our shoulders and say, “Nothing to be done,” to unconcernedly cast the less privileged into the outer dark, where there will be a weeping and a gnashing of teeth.

The essentialization that Gibson-Graham, Resnick and Wolff describe is performed via “the operations of a discourse that places capitalism at the defining center of economic identity. All other forms of production are seen as opposite (and therefore deficient), complementary, the same as, or contained within capitalism; they are measured against a capitalist norm. Such ‘capitalonormativity’ confines the proliferative potential of economic difference within a binary frame” (13).

As alternatives to such capitalonormativity, Gibson-Graham, Resnick and Wolff pose “a range of slave, feudal, independent, and communal class relations that co-exist in the formal, market-oriented, and legally regulated economy, as well as in those more hidden or devalued sectors characterized as informal, domestic, and nonmarket” (13). Inmates at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola (“The Farm”) perform economically valuable labor under conditions beyond their control, and so could be said to be participating in non-monetized slave transactions within the American capitalist economy. Homemakers are not monetarily compensated for their labor, and so could be said to be participating in feudal transactions. Computer programmers labor without pay on such free and open-source software projects as Apache, Perl, MySQL, and PHP, the bedrock upon which most of the World Wide Web rests, and so could be said to be participating in independent transactions. The Mondragón Cooperative Cooperation, a worker collective in Spain’s Basque region, is “Spain’s largest exporter of machine tools and the largest manufacturer of white goods such as refrigerators, stoves, washing-machines and dishwashers” and “the third largest supplier of automotive components in Europe” (Matthews 2, qtd. in Gibson-Graham 26), making up nearly 8% of Spain’s GDP. In short, “haunting the commodity and the market are noncommodity production and nonmarket exchange […]. Noncommodity production and exchange haunt capitalism as some of its many conditions of existence, for example, noncapitalist production of goods and services in households and non-market exchanges both within households and within corporations” (Gibson-Graham 245), and “What haunts the capitalist commodity is not only noncommodity production (those home-cooked meals and made beds, those inputs produced internally within enterprises, and transacted there) but noncapitalist commodity production – independent commodity production by the self-employed, slave commodities […], family-based relations of commodity production and exploitation, commodity production in collective and communal enterprises, to name just a few of the noncapitalist forms for which there are names and therefore histories” (246). The discursive construction of capitalism’s homogeneous and monolithic orientation towards market-based monetized transactions is not only pernicious and limiting – it’s also, in point of fact, mistaken.

Understanding the proliferative, heterogeneous, multiplicitous, and overdetermined nature of contemporary capitalism allows us to “begin to see a huge state sector (incorporating a variety of forms of appropriation of surplus labor), a very large sector of self-employed and family-based producers (most noncapitalist), a huge household sector (again, quite various in terms of forms of exploitation, with some households moving towards communal or collective appropriation and others operating in a traditional mode in which one adult appropriates surplus labor from another)” (Gibson-Graham 263), and so to “discern the elements of a language of economic difference and the possibility of complex class readings of internally differentiated social and economic formations” (Gibson-Graham, Resnick and Wolff 5) wherein individuals act and interact according to complex sets of motivations. Just as we see diachronically exemplified in Culture and Society, and just as we see synchronically hinted at in the proliferation of class positions Bourdieu catalogs in Distinction, we understand from Gibson-Graham that the old “image of a massive collectivity of workers all defined by a similar relation to industrial capital is part of a receding social conception and politics of change” (69) driven, in large part, by the technological changes of the last half-century.

What necessitates this understanding of the economy as diverse, heterogeneous, and overdetermined; as different from itself? Why do I think this is this important for composition’s burgeoning literature on class politics, and particularly important for composition’s problematically anemic literature on the intersections of technology and class? Because to fail to grasp such an understanding is to deny that students are economic beings within the classroom, to construct their non-monetized writing labor as non-economic, to turn us back to an essentialized concept of class that denies any possibility for reduction of economic inequality except by teaching them better manners. That denial reinforces a system of valuation where economy equals money, and if teachers are paid for their labor and students are not, then the only valuable labor is the teacher’s, and students might as well purchase the papers they turn in for grades.