Historical Archaeology of Capitalism’s Cracks

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Historical Archaeology of Capitalism’s Cracks," at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

It is commonly said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Alternatives are framed as a simplistic dualism of capitalism vs communism that makes it difficult to envision what any alternative would look like. Instead, we would follow Marx to argue that the sprouts of communism already lie concealed in capitalism. This stems from the logic of capitalism based on contradictions that always create cracks or fissures, as well as the twofold nature of labor that contrasts the alienated labor of capitalism with sensuous human activity. The goal of this session is to provide the theoretical framing and concrete archaeological case studies that emphasizes people’s non-alienated activity or living ‘alternatives’ to capitalist logic. We will always find it difficult to envision alternatives to our capitalist present until we realize that models and inspiration have always existed internal to capitalism itself.