Introduction

Most of us have been persuaded, without even realising that persuasion was occurring, that we live in an overwhelmingly capitalist market economy, with just the state sector as a partial exception to the universal reach of the market. Indeed the very concept of the economy has come to be defined in a way that makes it difficult to escape this conclusion. For mainstream economists, ‘the economy’ is more or less coextensive with the commodity economy – it consists of the production and exchange of goods and services for monetary payment – and for both mainstream and (most) Marxist economists the commodity economy is more or less coextensive with the capitalist economy – in which production is done by profit-oriented businesses using wage labour. This understanding of the economy is a political trap: unless we challenge the view that the economy is by definition a commodity economy it is impossible to conceive of economic alternatives to the market and to capitalism.

This chapter begins by asking how the discourse of the market economy has been able to permeate our consciousness so thoroughly, but its main purpose is to examine how we can move beyond that discourse. To do so, we must open up our concept of the economy, and I will advocate an alternative definition of the economy as provisioning: roughly, as those activities that provide the goods and services that people need. This is not as simple and straightforward as it might seem: as we shall see it is an inherently political definition, but so is the one that I am contesting. It allows us to see, however, that an enormous proportion of provisioning occurs outside the commodity economy, in a whole range of diverse forms, and the chapter will offer a little evidence on the range and scale of those forms. Once we have reconceived the nature of the economy, in other words, it becomes apparent that there is a vast amount of economic activity occurring beyond the market, and the challenge of transforming our economies becomes much more viable. Instead of having to reinvent our economies from scratch, we have the opportunity to build on the alternative economy that is sitting right under our noses.