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Clarification, qualification, and the problem of authoritarianism

I am deeply grateful to these commentators for their serious engagement with my work, and I am particularly appreciative of Jamie Peck for organizing both the session at the American Association of Geographers conference and this publication of the commentaries. It is disconcerting, however, to write a deliberately provocative essay and then receive such gentle and generous critiques. I was braced to have to engage in fierce polemics, but it is probably more productive to explore the nuances that are raised in each of these replies. First, I need to apologize for leaving out a reference to JK Gibson-Graham’s (1996) The End of Capitalism (As We Know It) from the article. In my book, Capitalism: The Future of an Illusion (Block, 2018), I make clear that my analysis is building on the anti-essentialist foundation established in that work. I am also very sympathetic to the discussion of fantasy that Healey and Gibson-Graham offer in their comment, although I lack the expertise to add anything to that discussion. But I would say in response to both that comment and the one from Jennifer Clark that a part of my intention was precisely to validate bottom-up strategies of resistance and transformation in households, workplaces, and local communities. I am in complete agreement with Gibson-Graham’s fundamental point that a totalizing view of an omnipotent capitalist world system actually disempowers resistance and projects of social transformation. If significant change requires pulling up the whole global system by its roots, then most people will just give up and accommodate to the irrationalities of that system. However, the reality is that significant reforms can be won by mobilizing people at the grassroots. To be sure, protecting those reforms requires building movements that are able to exercise power at the national and ultimately at the global level, but we have real examples that show that this is possible. Even after we acknowledge the limitations of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change agreement reached in Paris in 2016, it still has to be recognized that this was a genuine achievement of a global movement