The following article is inspired by the making of a short film called Nowtopia, which will be launched as part of the Community Economies Research Network (CERN) Liviana Conference on the 12th November 2020. Filmed in Brno, Czech Republic, it explores a multiplicity of nowtopian alternatives through three community-based projects: a maker space, a community bike workshop and an urban garden. The film includes interviews with Chris Carlsson, author of Nowtopia (2008) and Nadia Johanisova, a researcher of heterodox economics and eco-social enterprise. More details are available here.
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A Universe of Stories – Constructing Nowtopian Alternatives
The universe is made of stories, not of atoms. Muriel Rukeyser
In hopeful conversations about the possibilities of social change, the analogy of metamorphosis often crops up. It is usually deployed in an abstract, inspirational and utopian sense: A caterpillar cocoons itself and, as if by magic, a new, glorious insect emerges, fluttering in its place. If this miraculous process occurs in nature, why not take inspiration from it for how we think about social-ecological transformation?
However, the simplistic and linear presentation of the metamorphic narrative begs the question of what really happens during the period of flux in-between states? What happens once a caterpillar enters its capsule of transformation? Is the process that takes place smooth and harmonious, or is there a pain contained within, a vicious struggle for the new?
Scientists use their own poetic term – imaginal cells – to describe the agents of the change taking place inside the cocoon. It goes something like this: First, a structural breakdown occurs. The old form dissolves, and imaginal cells, which had previously lay dormant, emerge. These cells prefigure the bodily tissues of the butterfly. They are few and far between at first, and their vision of what the organism can become is so different from what already exists that they are initially attacked and killed by the organism’s immune system. They continue to proliferate, however. Over time, a tipping point is reached, whereby the cells gain momentum and collective unity, and begin to work in concert. A new organism emerges.[1]
The story doesn’t end there, of course. This is a process immersed in an ecological web, and therefore often fails. Such failure could be due to the cocoon being located in the wrong context – attached to the wrong plant, say, or in an environment which is not humid enough – or due to predation. Some butterflies develop deformations, for whatever reason, and die on their emergence.
The 20th century was riddled with political utopias of various kinds – whether the Third Reich, state socialism, or the market society – each of which was a potential butterfly to its proponents, but all of which wrought destruction. Instead of beauty and life, these transformations created horrifying deformations of human potential, mass terror, genocide, and starvation. As the century came to an end, utopia had seemed to run its course. The cold war was over, the struggle of great opposing ideologies appeared to be finished, and we were left with a neoliberal ‘end of history’. Mark Fisher called this absence of alternatives, ‘capitalist realism’.
Amidst ecological and social disruption – compounded now by the rolling Covid-19 crisis – that uneasy stasis is over. In this new context, the term ‘Nowtopia’ is increasingly used by both activists and academics to describe a variety of interconnected tendencies. More than just a catchy neologism, devoid of real significance, the nowtopian perspective can tell us something crucial about the moment in which we live. It can speak, for example, to a new politics of work, whereby communities seek collective freedom outside the confines of wage labour, or to the creation of liberated common space in the here and now. Like imaginal cells, nowtopian alternatives emerge to point to possibilities for the future, avoiding grand top-down plans. While utopianism (based etymologically on the Greek for no-place) is founded on some imaginary or impossible future, nowtopianism emerges from current liberatory practices.
Nowtopian initiatives constitute the opposite of growth-oriented market ideology – the latter grounded in its own utopian vision of the ‘free hand’ and self-correcting market. They eschew instrumental values, exchange value and growth for growth’s sake, in favour of voluntary co-operation and use value. As Chris Carlsson, author of the book Nowtopia: How Pirate Programmers, Outlaw Bicyclists, and Vacant-Lot Gardeners are Inventing the Future Today! has written, ‘When people take their time and technological know-how out of the market and decide for themselves how to dedicate their efforts, they are short-circuiting the logic of the market society that depends on incessant growth.’ He talks about the important re-composition of the working class which he sees taking place, in communities themselves, rather than being instigated from the outside. Such initiatives may seem like small, stand-alone islands with no wider relevance, but, like imaginal cells, they can be magnetic, pulling others into their orbit.
Heretofore marginalised scholars, including the late social theorist Andre Gorz, have for decades maintained that we have reached the end of a road which started with the industrial revolution, where much of our identity comes from the waged labour we do. In the 20th century, one of the first questions people in the West asked each other when they met is ‘what do you do?’ This, of course, almost never referred to activities outside of formal, often exploitative, wage relations.
‘What do you do?’ is a strange, Eurocentric, and work-centric question, reproducing the idea of something increasingly absent from daily experience – stable employment. Neoliberalism and a globalised economic race-to-the-bottom, among other things, have produced a rolling dystopia – an ecocidal way of life premised on the gig economy, labour casualisation and mass youth unemployment in swathes of the West. While this brings precarity, anxiety and suffering, the Nowtopian perspective also sees it as a potential turning point or liberation.
Covid-19 is another such Janus-faced development. With the contemporary workplace now deemed risky, home and work have been reconnected. This was a distinction which capitalism had created and cemented: We were to leave our homes, commute unpaid to one location, originally a factory, and spend most of our waking hours there under some authority’s watchful eye. Corona has brought this system into question. While there are overwhelming negatives, particularly for those burdened with multiple caring roles, it also holds the potential to reconnect us, with neighbours, with family, with time and space to do things for ourselves. Millions of children have been freed from the authoritarian post-industrial classroom. People who previously had to grab a quick lunch on their way to the office, have instead taken up gardening, baking and other self-provisioning activities. All of this works to question the domestic as a gendered space for the reproduction of workers, and opens up the possibility of thinking differently about the multifaceted role of the home, as it was prior to the industrial revolution.
While this decline of work-as-we-knew-it is valid for Western Europe or North America, we shouldn’t pretend that more than a small – albeit growing – minority of the world was ever really tied into this system. Nevertheless, this period of radical uncertainty calls for ideas and practices which don’t just grow out of panicked fear or baseless hope. Instead, as Ernst Bloch’s famous dictum states, ‘processus cum figures, figurae in processu’ – The process is made by those who are made by the process. This is an autopoietic, emergent vision of change, more similar to concepts such as Erik Olin Wright’s ‘real utopias’ than distant visions of a perfect society.
In allotments, gardens, maker spaces, bike kitchens, and a multiplicity of other non-market spaces, nowtopians are making life better right now – but they are also setting the foundation, technically and socially, for a genuine liberation from commodified life.
[1] While the imaginal cell analogy has been used before, I gratefully came across it in an essay by Emily Kawano, the coordinator of the U.S. Solidarity Economy Network. The process is, of course, presented here in a somewhat simplified version.
Teaser photo credit: Christiana Housing, author provided.
