Community Economies (CE) is a key term in the growing interdisciplinary subfield of diverse economies (DE) scholarship, a perspective that continually grew from the pioneering feminist political economy and economic geography scholarship of J.K. Gibson-Graham (2006). It defines ‘community’ as a space where humans negotiate the terms of our shared coexistence and in which ‘solidarity’ is one possible disposition.
This essay offers conceptual development for thinking diverse economies in terms of their relationship to antagonism. Rather than seeing antagonism as unhelpfully fueling capitalocentric thinking, the essay argues that antagonism can usefully recognize and engage with problematic forms of power and domination.
Social and solidarity-oriented and self-governed processes of organizing economic life have
existed since humans have collaborated to survive. However, the conscious demand and con-
ceptual realization of the social aspects of the economy only arose in Western thought with
the emergence of a primarily market-based exploitative economy and the enclosed commons,
forcing working people into capitalism’s system of production and exchange (McMurtry,
2010; Polanyi, 2001 [1944]).
