While capitalism certainly represents a powerful project for making and remaking the world, deploying the concept of capitalism as a complete mapping of the economic and social landscape has the effect of obscuring noncapitalist forms of economic organization and cultural sense-making. “Capitalocentrism” (akin to the role played by “phallocentrism” and “logocentrism” with respect to gender and language) hides from view the diverse ways in which people in the United States and elsewhere engage with individual and collective noncapitalist economies— including barter, communal production, gift-making, and solidarity—that fall outside the practices and presumed logic of capitalism (Gibson-Graham 1996; Ruccio and Gibson-Graham 2001). On this view, U.S. culture is heterogeneous and contradictory with respect to different class structures. It contains elements that foster and reproduce capitalism and, at the same time, its noncapitalist others.

This is an excerpt from David F. Ruccio’s entry in Keywords for American Cultural Studies (p. 36).