Imagining and Enacting a Postcapitalist Feminist Economic Politics

We, like Hester Eisenstein, have been encouraged by the resurgence of interest in "discussions about capitalism, socialism, and alternative economic systems" and by the innovative organizing energies of "those who believe that another world-a postcapitalist world-is possible." Indeed, our forthcoming book A Postcapitalist Politics (Gibson-Graham 2006b) takes up the very question of an alternative economic politics and, as the sequel to The End of Capitalism (as We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy (1996, 2006a), does so with feminist politics as its guiding inspiration. So it is fascinating to both agree with Eisenstein's core plea, that the women's movement "align itself with the struggle for alternatives to the current economic world order," and yet diverge in so many ways from her challenging stock-taking of feminism's achievements and failures. We wonder whether our idiosyncratic offerings in answer to the question "What is to be done?"(we might ask, "What is being done?") could in any way satisfy Eisenstein, built as they are upon an affiliation with poststructuralist feminism, queer theory, and antiessentialist Marxism. In this brief response to her engagingly personal and provocative essay, we identify some of the theoretical insights we have drawn from these lines of thought and the key elements of feminism's political contribution that we build on to forward our postcapitalist (feminist) political imaginary. As the narrative of her life experience illustrates, Hester Eisenstein has benefited from the gains feminism has been able to effect and she is somewhat amazed at the" ease with which gender discrimination could be reversed," virtually in one lifetime. This leads her to observe that" gender has been a much more malleable feature of public life than either race or class." Her assessment seems to oddly devalue the achievements of feminism, suggesting that gender was an easier target than these other dimensions of social life.