stevphen writes:

Greenpepper Project Launches “Life Beyond the Market"

Greenpepper Magazine (Greenpepper Magazine), an Amsterdam based autonomist and direct action oriented magazine, is proud to announce the release a special issue on the theme of “Life Beyond the Market.” The issue covers a wide variety of topics from gift economies and gender to Yugoslavian worker self-management, community currencies to the occupied factories of Argentina, critically interrogating existing realities and practices to draw out the liberatory possibilities contained within.Released to coincide with the Life After Capitalism gathering in New York City, the issue features contributions from an impressive array of international organizers, activists, and writers. Collaboratively designed and edited, the issue seeks to redefine and expand the bounds of activist media projects through developing new approaches to communicating radical politics, shaping and forming languages of autonomy and aesthetic possibilities.

For more information about the Life Beyond the Market issue please contact: stevphen@greenpeppermagazine.org.

Greenpepper Project
greenpeppermagazine.org
CIA Office
Overtoom 301
1054 HW
Amsterdam The Netherlands
+31 (0)20 779 4912
US Phone: 973 985 3786 (until the end of September)

Living Liberation Now! Post-capitalist Economics and the Possibilities of the Present

Between forgotten past and utopian future the insurgent multitudes seem to lack a present, a praxis for the immediate realization of desires and liberation from the fetters of the rationalized spaces created by the market and the state. Confronted with the demands of “what are you for?” the necessity of articulating and implementing living alternatives to present systems of domination becomes all the more pressing. For it is not a present that we lack, but rather a critical focus drawing from existing practices in the present to construct future realities.

But before beginning formulating visions of what a post-capitalist society might look like it is necessary to briefly consider what is economics. Economics is general describes the social relations of production, distribution, and consumption of social goods that reproduce a society. Under western capitalism it is the dismal science: the technical forms of knowledge necessary for creating and maintaining spaces of control through forms of imposed market relations and exchange, an elaboration of production based upon the maximization of one value, profit. Economics constitutes the almost religious, mystical, and unquestioned cornerstone of a worldview that naturalizes market relations as an outgrowth of a particular conception of human nature, one which underlies claims that all other possible forms of human relations are unwise at best and more than likely totalitarian. It is the elaboration of forms of knowledge necessary for the subsumption of all social life and value within the gridded spaces created by processes of quantification and measurement through market exchange.

But capitalism does not and cannot totally colonize existing social realities. There still exist spaces and cracks in the sterile projections of control the twin forces of the state order and the market create. Here are located organic orders and practices that constituted and supported life before the existence of the market, underlie and continue to support the social order, and are constituent of life beyond the market. In these spaces, which contain everything from gift giving practices to community currencies, self-managed factories to barter networks, it possible to form new social relations and build the beginnings of new conceptions of community and social interactions.

The question of what life beyond the market might look like then involves the articulation of a different conception of economics, of the means through which a liberatory social order might reproduce and support itself. This is not a question of coming up with impossible projections or blueprints that can be implemented “after the revolution” or any other real or imagined historical rupture, but rather the process of seeking out the cooperative projects and processes that already exist through out the world and history to build links and networks between them.

It has been observed that is it easier for many to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Such is not an accident, but part of naturalizing and reifying certain forms of social interactions, rendering impossible the existence of alternatives, of any other possibilities. By examining existing cooperative economics structures and practices, forms of non-alienated production and experience, a sense of possibility is restored. Rather than an impossible imagined and projected total rupture we find a multiplicity of revolutions of and within daily life, anti-environments and spaces of possibility that contain within themselves incipient forms of a new world. Rather than adopting the optics of power, the perspective that claims triumphant capitalism has ended history, such a perspective recasts the multitude of existing cooperative economic practices as possible nodes in forming rhizomatic networks whose spread that can produce ruptures and breaks in the colonization of daily life by the market enabling the emergence of another social order, one that acknowledges human dignity as a higher value than unquestioned pursuit of personal profit.

Is this utopian? Yes, but it is a utopia not of distant and imagined futures, but rather one that starts from the practical realities of everyday to imagine the possibilities of other worlds hidden and constrained by the imposition and gridding of our social worlds by capitalist relations. Beneath the factory the forest still grows. By framing and considering these questions and concerns in such a way it will be possible to shift the terrain of debate and discourse of the creation of a post-capitalist world from the realm of abstract imagined impossibility to the liberatory possibilities located within the present.