Beyond capitalist enclosure, commodification and alienation: Postcapitalist praxis as commons, social production and useful doing

Abstract

This paper aims to further a geographical agenda through the concept of postcapitalism. We outline its contours across three terrains of transformation between capitalism and postcapitalism: creating commons against enclosure, socially useful production that counters commodification, and joyful doing that negates alienated work. Secondly, we explore how postcapitalism is mobilised with different inflections through three contemporary debates: community economies, post-work and autonomous perspectives. We then illuminate how one area of social practice (platform cooperatives) resonates with postcapitalist terrains and debates. We conclude by exploring the, as yet unclear and partially formed, social and spatial landscape of postcapitalism.

Degrowth and postcapitalism: Transformative geographies beyond accumulation and growth

“…Place, locality, and the everyday spaces of community, in particular, have been reinvigorated against the vertical ordering of (often Marxist inspired) perspectives on capitalist spaces (Brenner, ; Harvey, ). In this vein, Chatterton and Pusey (, p. 16) call for a different “spatial literacy” that is alive to horizontality. At the same time, Chatterton and Pusey (, p. 15) acknowledge different scales of transformation: “the power of micro‐level autonomous radical action, mesolevel community and diverse economies, and macro‐level interventions by the state and other larger‐scale social actors.” Such a relational thinking—as I aim to show—challenges oversimplified assumption of different structural levels and, above all, their translation into spatial categories (Jones, ; Massey, , ).…”

New Geographies of Work: Re-Scaling Micro-Worlds

“…While often claimed to be connected to political activism based on post-capitalist and degrowth values (Demaria et al ., 2019), the general openness of these assemblages to the public nevertheless enables a variety of users to put their diverse orientations and motivations into practice. Emerging social demands for the collective organisation of experimenting, learning, and processing materials are thus strongly supported by bottom-up social innovation, i.e.…”

“…Such socially situated innovation (Demaria et al ., 2019) has been seminal to nascent micro-worlds of concrete work. At first sight these micro-worlds seem to be local phenomena, occasionally supplemented by a virtual world that individual users avail themselves of on demand.…”

“That type of thing does give you a boost”: Control, Self‐valorisation, and Autonomist Worker Copings in Call Centres

“…While the majority of AM workplace studies have focused on work refusal strategies and the creation of non‐capitalist spaces, it is important to consider other forms of human agency which coexist within capitalism (for refusal studies old and new, see Gambino ; Harrison ; Mullholland ; Tronti ; Woodcock ; notably other AM work has focused on non‐capitalist relations outside the world of work: see Chatterton and Pusey ) . This point is similarly observed by Glassman, who notes that post‐Marxist theorists have often focused too much on the pursuit of non‐capitalist economic spaces, “creating unwarranted pessimism about prospects for change emerging from within capitalism” (Glassman :254, emphasis added; see also White and Williams ).…”