Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

Building an Anti-Economy
by Chris Carlsson
Published in the September/October 2008 issue of Orion magazine
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/3223


EVEN WHILE CAPITALISM continues its inexorable push to corral every square 
inch of the globe into its logic of money and markets, new practices are 
emerging that redefine politics and open up spaces of unpredictability. 
Instead of traditional political forms like unions or parties, people are 
coming together in practical projects, from urban gardening in vacant lots to 
the suddenly ubiquitous do-it-yourself bike shops. More and more people, 
recognizing the degradation inherent in business relations, are creating 
networks of activity that refuse the measurement of money. They depend 
instead on sharing skills and technological know-how within new communities, 
such as the biofuels co-ops that have proliferated in many cities. Networks 
have grown, thanks to the spread of the Internet and other telecommunications 
techologies, and new kinds of “families” based on shared values, alternative 
living arrangements, and non-economic relationships are growing within the 
old society.

Collectively, I call these projects “Nowtopia.” Rarely do the individual 
participants conceive of them in political terms; day-to-day issues about how 
we live, what we do, how we define and meet our needs tend to be understood 
as outside politics. But all Nowtopian activities are profoundly political.

The Nowtopian movement embodies a growing minority seeking emancipation from 
the treadmill of consumerism and overwork. Acting locally in the face of 
unfolding global catastrophes, friends and neighbors are redesigning many of 
the crucial technological foundations of modern life, like food and 
transportation. These redesigns are worked out through garage and backyard 
research-and-development programs among friends using the detritus of modern 
life. Our contemporary commons takes the shape of discarded bicycles and 
leftover deep-fryer oil, of vacant lots and open bandwidth. “Really, really 
free markets,” anti-commodities, and free services are imaginative products 
of an anti-economy provisionally under construction by freely cooperative and 
inventive people. They aren’t waiting for an institutional change from on 
high but are building the new world in the shell of the old.

These practices require sharing and mutual aid and constitute the beginnings 
of new kinds of communities. Because these people are engaged in creative 
appropriation of technologies to purposes of their own design and choice, 
these activities embody the (partial) transcendence of the wage-labor prison 
by workers who have better things to do than their jobs. They are tinkerers 
working in the waste streams and open spaces of late capitalism, conjuring 
new practices while redefining life’s purpose.

Efforts to create islands of utopia have always flourished on the margins of 
capitalist society, but never to the extent that a radically different way of 
living has been able to supplant market society’s daily life. Nowtopians, and 
anyone determined to free themselves from the constraints of economically 
defined life, face the same historic limits that have beset all previous 
efforts to escape. Can the emerging patterns resist the co-optation and 
reintegration that have absorbed past self-emancipatory movements? The new 
apparatus of global production helps speed up the extension of market 
society, but it inevitably also speeds the spread of social opposition, the 
sharing of experiments and alternatives. Our moment in history is at least as 
exhilarating as it is daunting.