Date: Fri, 6 Aug 2004 15:28:26 +0200 (CEST)
Subject: AUT: Intro Type Thang
From: "stevphen shukaitis" <stevphen-AT-greenpeppermagazine.org>


Greetings:

The info page for this list said that you should write an intro about
yourself – therefore I’m going to tactlessly babble about myself . . .

For the past few months I’ve been working in Amsterdam editing the
Greenpepper Magazine (www.greenpeppermagazine.org) “Life Beyond the
Market” issue, which focuses on alternative economic models and practices.
It’s getting released in August to coincide with the Life After Capitalism
conference (www.lifeaftercapitalism.org) being held in NYC on August
20-22nd. I’m attaching the editorial that I wrote for the issue, which
argues for a critical refocus of trying to conceptualize post-capitalist
relations and practices by networking between existing cooperative
practices. Also, as a note, the next issue of Greenpepper will be about
precarity. It’s being put together by Alex and Zoe from the Chainworkers
and will come with a DVD made by Candida about May.

Before I came to Amsterdam I was studying sociology at the New School for
Social Research, where I just finished my MA this May, which tried to come
up with a sociological framework for considering ideas around global
citizenship. Sandro and Franco kindly came to the New School last December
and delivered a most excellent guest lecture that I ruthlessly ripped off
(uhm . . . I mean borrowed from) in my thesis. For a variety of reasons
that are both too long winded and boring to warrant typing I decided to
leave the New School this fall for a PhD program at the University of
Leicester.

So, I’ll be starting my PhD at Leicester this fall, which tentatively is
going to look at cultural discourses around worker self-management and how
they are affected by the dynamics of globalization. In particular I was
thinking it would be interesting to use the cases of worker
self-management in Yugoslavia in the 60’s, the Mondragon collectives in
Spain, and the current occupied factories, barter networks, and unemployed
worker’s unions in Argentina to work from. I’m interested in considering
how notions of self-management could be updated and reworked to be more
effective within the constraints imposed by the world market. My initial
thoughts about such have been trying to see how notions of self-management
would operate if considered in a broader sense (say, self-management in a
biopolitical sense where the distinctions around “work” are constructed in
a looser fashion, incorporating notions of immaterial and affective labor
necessary in the reproduction of the social order) and by playing such off
of ideas around the production of space ala Lefebrve. Notably, that’s why
I’m on this list – as I thought it would be a good way to get better
oriented to discussions that might give me some critical insight into
this.

Ok – sorry for babbling so long. Cheers.
Stevphen


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.



stevphen shukaitis
Guest Editor, "Life Beyond the Market" issue
www.greenpeppermagazine.org

Greenpepper Magazine
CIA Office
Overtoom 301
1054 HW
Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Phone: +31 (0)20 779 4912
AIM: foucaultisdead



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