The end of capitalism (as we knew it)

the long version

Why does the future (not to mention the present) seem to offer no hope of escape from capitalism? Ironically, the author argues, it is not the economic discourse of the right but primarily the socialist and Marxist traditions that have constituted capitalism as large, powerful, active, expansive, penetrating, systematic, self-reproducing, dynamic, victorious, and capable of conferring identity and meaning. What this has meant for left politics is the continual deferral of anticapitalist projects of social transformation and noncapitalist initiatives of economic innovation, since these presumably would have little chance of success in the face of a predominantly or exclusively capitalist economy. In this book J. K. Gibson-Graham explores the possibility of more enlivening modes of economic thought and action, outside and beyond the theory and practice of capitalist reproduction.