Julie Graham: Imagining and Enacting Noncapitalist Futures. (2001.)

This article is licensed under the Creative Commons.

Source:  University of Notre Dame.

For the Community Economies Collective [1]

Feminists…want to leave their husbands, abandon their children, become lesbians, practice witchcraft, and overthrow capitalism.

                                                                                                                Pat Buchanan [2]

Inspiring, isn’t it? Imagine if rather than having to "overthrow" capitalism (now a virtually unimaginable project) leftists could pursue the other revolutionary options available to Buchanan's feminists—what if we could leave capitalism, abandon capitalism, become socialists, practice socialism? What follows is the unfinished story of such an imagining. It’s the story of a search—for a new way of thinking socialism and a new way of performing it. It’s also the story of a group of people who began a research project together and became a desiring collectivity.

We started out, embarrassingly, with no real desire for “socialism.” Yet maybe that’s not so surprising. Over the last hundred years, the word has been drained of utopian content and no longer serves, as it once did, to convene and catalyze the left.

Tendayi Viki: The African Commons : interviewed by Neal Gorenflo. (2010.)

This article is licensed under the Creative Commons.

Source: Shareable.

Dr. Tendayi Viki was born and raised in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe. He is now senior lecturer in social psychology at the University of Kent in England. Currently a visiting fellow at Stanford University, his research interests include intergroup relations and multi-cultural co-innovation. He's also founder of social news site thegoodin.us, which aggregates stories about those who do good in the world. I recently sat down with Dr. Viki to explore the social structure of Zimbabwean villages and their commons-based agricultural practices.

How was it growing up in Zimbabwe?

Erik W. Davis:  The Gift – Mauss, Bataille, Hyde, and Derrida. (2006.)

This article is licensed under the Creative Commons.

Source: Deathpower.

Mauss

In his classic essay The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, Mauss attacked the long-held notion that among so-called primitive peoples, gift-giving was a clandestine form of rational economic exchange. This was a thunderbolt of an argument, the full ramifications of which are barely absorbed, even in anthropology. Essentially, Mauss was arguing that White people have been assuming, on the basis of their own economic forms of barter and currency-exchange, that this was primary. Instead, Mauss argues that gift-giving was instead the primary form of exchange, of which barter and currency-exchange are secondary distortions which deny the collective good guaranteed by gift economies (cf. general reciprocity).

There were three major points that I take from Mauss in addition to the general structure of the argument (above).