From Green Economies to Community Economies: Economic Possibility in Massachusetts

This dissertation both reflects and constitutes an attempt at theorizing, locating, analyzing, and helping to create non-capitalist possibility among community groups and social movements in Massachusetts from 2010-2013. I began my research working with green economy coalitions that brought together community groups, social justice organizations, and environmental non-profits in order to respond to economic and ecological crisis. As these groups moved forward and transformed, I participated in campaigns, internal discussions, and public representations. I wrote field notes when appropriate and conducted and recorded over 50 interviews. As I did the work, I came to understand economy as a heterogeneous field of economic ideology, practices, relations, dispositions, and desires. In this theoretical context, I ethnographically investigate the ways in which individuals and groups negotiate and contest dominant economic discourses, and create their own meanings of economy. I ask, how are community groups and activists imagining and desiring economy? How are non-capitalist projects being assembled? Under what conditions can people begin to imagine, desire, and create other worlds? To answer these questions, I mobilize economic anthropology, postructural theory, and Lacanian scholarship, extending and critically engaging with the diverse economies project of J.K. Gibson-Graham. In Chapter 2 I discuss two green economy coalitions whose campaigns brought anti-capitalist and non-capitalist politics into dialogue. I found that a reframing of economy towards economic difference leads to economic possibility for some, but is politically problematic and hinders economic possibility for others. In Chapter 3 I explore the nature of worker cooperatives, finding that social actors involved in non-capitalist development can understand and imagine it in radically different ways; non-capitalism is produced through these differences. In Chapters 4-7 I discuss a community organization that was building its own community economy. I show the effectiveness of performative, ontological politics in proliferating economic possibility. I also show the limitations of such a project when it neglects critical analysis of the forces constraining possibility. I point towards a reconciliation between performativity and critique. In the conclusion I theorize economic possibility in relation to and as part of a cultural-political struggle, a ‘war of position’, around the nature of economy