“Your Money or Your Life”: Money and Socialist Transformation

This article argues against a common-sense logic that money can assist in socialist transformation, espouses a non-market ecosocialist position and urges greater clarity in associated discourse. Analyses of capitalist operations show that growth is not simply a characteristic tendency of capitalism but rather an essential outgrowth of its deficiencies. Marx identified these deficiencies, indicating that the end of capitalism was an end to money, that is, exchange value. Money is not a tool but evolves as a code of conduct to structure social relationships that reproduce inequity, competition, distrust and alienation. Indeed, the existence of capitalists and capitalism without money is inconceivable and impossible in practice. Money refusal and the development and defence of fair non-monetary forms of livelihood continuously critique capital and demonstrate alternative (or at least “hybrid”) socialist forms. Contemporary anti-capitalists have developed constructive skills to move beyond money and capitalism in their practical development of “green materialism.” However, a wide-ranging discourse remains to be had on moving beyond money sooner rather than later. The final section of this paper sketches a non-market ecosocialist vision.     

You can visit Hotel Mommy: maternal bodies as browsing/consuming biotourists

The technologically charged public domain of cyber(cultural)space, often constructed in opposition to women, femininity, and maternity, can also be a contested scholarly space with the potential to question dominant discourses of gender, race, class, sexuality, and maternity. The cyber-realm has also interconnections to webs of commercialism and the commodification of female and maternal bodies. In order to investigate this topic's interconnections in this paper, I turn to an examination of cybermaternity in the commercial maternity web pages of the Internet. In summary, I argue that mainstream and commercialized maternity websites are domains of paradox, with the possibility of overturning the previously mentioned dominant discourses even as they are saturated in commerce, desire to render maternal bodies completely knowable and conventional tropes of maternity. To further this investigation, I turn to Kim Sawchuk's theory of biotourism to examine discourses of medico-technology and the desire to observe the inner workings of the pregnant body. I argue that this biotouristic desire is enabled by the immediacy of the websites and delivered in the jocular tone of mainstream maternity magazines. In order to further examine possible manifestations of biotourism, I also make use of Jay David Bolter's and Richard Grusin's concept of remediation: the tendency of particular media to represent and refashion other media in response to general Western cultural desires for immediacy.