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Accepted Paper:
Rethinking postsocialism through the lenses of postcapitalism: for a postcapitalist postsocialism
Ottavia Cima
(University of Bern)
Drawing on Gibson-Graham’s conceptualisation of postcapitalism, I argue that our gaze on postsocialism has been largely capitalocentric until present. I hence propose the notion of “postcapitalist postsocialism” as a way to radically rethink postsocialism away from developmentalist models.
Paper long abstract:
In the book “The end of capitalism (as we knew it)”, Gibson-Graham called for a rethinking of the economy away from a capitalocentric perspective that, while attributing to capitalism a central and defining role, neglects other economic practices and identities by subsuming their definition to capitalism. She advanced a postcapitalist approach to study economic processes and to engage in the imagination of alternatives. Gibson-Graham's is a politics of possibilities that seeks to transform the frustrating and depressing affects generated by capitalocentric framings into openness and hope.
In this paper, I argue that our gaze on postsocialism has been largely capitalocentric until the present day. This argument emerges from the analysis of the attempts by international development agencies to promote a particular type of agricultural cooperatives in post-independence Kyrgyzstan. The definition of service and marketing cooperatives as the only "true" cooperatives is inserted in a broader normative vision of development, or transition, towards a particular kind of modernity. Despite the harsh critique to "transitology", scholarly literature on agrarian transformation in Central Asia still often reproduces such teleological perspective. As a way to overcome this, I propose a "postcapitalist postsocialism": a rethinking of postsocialism that implies in particular two moves. First, to radically refuse the linear teleology of developmentalist models. Second, to abandon capitalocentric representations of the economy and thereby reveal the existence and value of more-than-capitalist practices that remain invisible in most accounts of both postsocialism and capitalism.