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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Building an Anti-Economy
  • Date: Fri, 03 Oct 2008 11:59:28 -0600

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.





  • [Livingontheland] Building an Anti-Economy, Tradingpost, 10/03/2008

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