Prefiguring alternatives through the articulation of post- and anti-capitalistic politics: An introduction to three additional papers and a reflection

Abstract

In this introduction to the second part of the special issue on alternative economies published in Organization in 2017, I first briefly chart key fora where the debate has continued in the last two years, and then present the three additional contributions included here. Moving the conversation forward, I argue that, in order to evaluate the prefigurative potential of alternative organizations, we need to address more thoroughly the relation between alternatives and their outside. A productive place to ground this reflection is in the debate between post-capitalism and anti-capitalism. The main lines of this debate are reconstructed based on the keynote speeches delivered by Jodi Dean and Stephen Healy at the last Rethinking Marxism conference held in Amherst, Massachusetts, in September 2013. I conclude by claiming that post-capitalist immanence should be articulated with an anti-capitalist communist horizon, and advance the Open Marxist notion of de-mediation of social relations as key to do this. Although capitalist institutions (e.g. the market, the state) mediate all social relations, mediation is never definitive, as it always contains the possibility for its own negation, de-mediation. So conceived, de-mediation redefines our understanding of class struggle beyond the capital-labor relation in the workplace, into society as a whole, broadening the ethical and political scope of the organizational research agenda on alternatives to capitalism.