Discuss: Building an Anti-Economy

A really hopeful and wonderful article.

YES!! This is happening in many places. Not just in the ‘States but in Europe too. The fascinating thing to me about it is its rise seems completely NATURAL. The movement has spontaneity, it’s self-organising, and those involved are mostly responding to a deeply held and passionately felt imperative that’s arisen from within them and which they find irresistible.

Personally I don’t much care for the term “Nowtopia”. It has too many associations with utopian idealism which, in most cases, has tended to fail, largely because it’s relied to too great an extent on strong charismatic individuals with great visions who, because of who they are and the nature of attraction, often draw in those who are weak and lack charisma. If the movement survives the individuals who founded it, then it soon becomes systematised, rigid, inflexible, impractical, hierarchical, deferring to “experts” in the original vision, etc, etc.

What’s happening now seems entirely different. There are no obvious leaders. Prominent individuals in the movement are, for the most part, early responders who are merely passing on their own experience. This is how our species naturally learns—it’s only the conditioning of the last 150 years of organised, systematised education (which is now so dry and inflexible it’s failing comprehensively) that blinds us to the fact. To me, this movement is so hopeful BECAUSE it’s so natural. It seems nothing less than the expression of a planetary evolutionary trend. We, as cells in the body of the Earth, are acting to return it to health.

This is good and I totally support it.  However, we also need macroeconomic policy reform or the pockets of local sustainability will collapse from the outside pressures of the bloating national and global economy and its ever-advancing margin.  We see it every day.  The fiscal, monetary, and trade policies need to be steadily readjusted from the current settings, which are conducive to 3% GDP growth, down toward a sustainable, steady state economy in which population and per capita production and consumption are stabilized and GDP mildly fluctuates in equilibrium with the economy of nature.

Brian Czech, President
Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy

I believe that this is a good observation of a current movement. Not a movement in the sense of a centrally organized group, but a very diverse tendency.
  At a very local level I believe that people are breaking away from the heavy handed consumerism. Why is growth the epitome of good? How about reorganization?
  An example of insanity is trucking or flying in items that can be produced in our own backyards. Some local folks would be overjoyed to garden in their own back yards and earn some money from honest work. The $ stay in the local market and the conditions and inputs of this food are totally transparent to the community. I look over the fence next door allows one to see all they need to know about where their food comes from. Compare the inputs of salad greens, tomatoes, radishes and cucumbers grown in local compost and handed over the fence compared to factory farm produced items that come from thousands of miles away and have been packaged with non-renewable materials. A biproduct of this would be you would get to know your neighbors better.
  The key is to make the contact-say hello

Stef

Why paint these things as utopian?  What is so utopian about it?  Of course these alternatives are a natural response. What choice do we have?  Lets look at the line graph of history.  Over the decades do we see independence increasing or decreasing?  I appreciate the positivity of this article but really, utopia?  People miss out so much on the beauty of life always trying to “get there”.

I’m just glad to see that things are finally turning around. People are now realizing that old ways are no longer enough for these modern times that call for drastic changes.

I liked the term “nowtopian” that Chris Carlsson coined to refer to the various (non-market-based) enterprises, like community gardens, bike kitchens and alternative energy coops, that he records in his book of that title, because it exactly critiques the concept of the “Utopian” as something “out there” both in place and time.

However referring to these activities as “anti-economic” seems a bit more problematic. There is the philosophical conundrum we enter into when we pose a concept directly in contradiction to something else, but I am more concerned that we give away the “territory” when we define non-market-based activities as “outside” the economy.

What do we gain when we see economics as a spectrum of endeavors ranging from traditional buying and selling to gift-giving? I believe we gain legitimacy for essential social activity that circulates community goods, not for personal gain, but for collective need and desire.

I had not known about bike kitchens! I am thrilled to read about the “anti-economy”. I find it’s along the lines of the book “Why work sucks and how to fix it” by Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson. This book suggests putting people in control of their time instead of having managers patronize them and treat them like children. I also heard about the “leap frog effect”, where developing countries learn what not to do from problems faced by the developed countries, and chose the evolve in a different direction. I hope, by a leap frog effect, that countries like mine (Lebanon) will pick up the “anti-economy” principle and faster than one would expect.