[LAF] An article from Stevphen which may be of interest...

[justin]

Can't remember if i sent this one either, so will send it now...

This is an article by Stevphen, who was one of the speakers
at the LAF last Sat...

An Ethnography of Nowhere: Notes Towards a Re-envisioning of Utopian 
Thinking

By Stevphen Shukaitis

“We have no interest in abilities apart from the revolutionary use that
can be made of them, a use which acquires its sense in everyday life . 
. .
Wherever the new proletariat experiments with its liberation, autonomy 
in
revolutionary coherence is the first step toward generalized
self-management.”- Raoul Vaneigem, from “To Have as a Goal Practical
Truth” (1981: 218)

Face it. Anarchists on the whole have not articulated any sort of 
coherent
alternative vision of what a society not based on capitalism and the 
state
might look like. We have produced copious amounts of political, 
economic,
and social critiques – but a comparatively smaller amount of work has
focused on developing alternatives to what we’re critiquing. Least of 
all
has there been any clearly sketched out version of how a liberatory
economy might function. This has not to say there has not been thought 
or
work put into these subjects, which there clearly has been. But when 
faced
with the question “I understand what you’re against, what are you for?”
far too often radical activists and organizers on the whole are 
stymied;
at best we end up mumbling something about a world of autonomous or
semiautonomous communities based upon mutual aid, self-organization, 
and
voluntary association. And those are all very well and good, and could
form the basis of a liberatory society - but for many people such
statements mean virtually nothing. It’s one thing to say that we want a
world where people manage our own lives, the environment isn’t 
destroyed,
and life is life desolate and alienating – but it’s another to start
talking about what such might actually look like. And starting to 
actually
create forms of cooperative practice, to re-envision utopian thinking 
as
lived reality, is another.

It is a common observation among radicals that the order of the world
easily becomes naturalized, normalized, and reified. Why do things work
they way they do? Because that’s how they operate. Perhaps the most
striking way to examine how this phenomena works is by trying to 
imagine
alternatives, or even to imagine how previously existing social orders
(such as Bronze age Greece or the classical Greek and Roman eras)
operated. Chances are what you’ll find is that most people have a
relatively easy time imagining what a different political order might 
look
like, how a different religion might work, and perhaps even how a 
family
might be structured differently. But chances are they will find it
difficult to imagine how a different economic arrangement or society 
not
based around the state would work. Try it a few times. Ask someone how 
an
economy would run if not based on private ownership. Ask them describe
economics relations in Greece. Ask them how society would operate 
without
a state. Chances are they will find it very difficult to describe, 
which
is odd considering that for thousands of years of human history there 
was
no state or a market economy. But yet such has become so normalized 
that
thinking outside of such is nearly impossible for many people. Such
“stateness” (and “market-ness”) has become so normalized in political
theory that it is argued that that democracy itself cannot exist 
without a
state. (Linz and Stepan 1996: 7)

Clearly if one wants to seriously put forward the idea of revolutionary
social change one has to move conceptions of how such an alternative
arrangement might work out of the realm of inconceivable thought and 
into
the realm of possibility. This can help to explain why it is musicians,
writers, and artists who have been commonly drawn to radical politics –
the flexibility of creativity makes it easier to imagine that 
alternative
social arrangements are possible. The task at hand for those of us who
advocate radical social change is making that sort of flexibility and
utopian social vision seems like an achievable possibility to the vast
majority of the population – and that will happen not through saying or
proclaiming that is so, but through a concrete demonstrations that such
forms have existed and present a realistic alternative to the current
social order. It is this task that Pierre Bourdieu spoke of he said 
that,
“We need to invent a new utopianism, rooted in contemporary social 
forces,
for which – at risk of seeming to encourage a return to antiquated
political visions – it will be necessary to create new kinds of 
movement.”
(2002: 67)

And that is the role of visionary thinking: to seize the creative 
latitude
and inspiration of existing forms of non-hierarchal organizing to 
create
webs of knowledge, skills, and experience that can be constantly 
redefined
according to the needs of situation and time.

But Why Utopian Vision?

“If you dream alone, it's just a dream. If you dream together, it's
reality.” – from a Brazilian folk song

To this there will be many objections: Isn’t utopian thinking just a
frivolous waste of time better used with pragmatic forms of organizing 
and
action? Isn’t there a danger that one could recreate the same class 
based
structures of power and domination in one’s vision that exist now, as
Foucault was fond of constantly objecting with an almost defeatist 
tone?
Isn’t it classist to be engaged in this kind of visionary thinking? 
These
are objections with varying degrees of validity. It would be silly to 
say
that one should be spending time coming up with utopian visions instead 
of
engaging the day to day struggles to alleviate the wretched conditions
which face large segments of the world’s population. But it also 
equally
true that even when there exists a period where revolutionary change
becomes possible unless one has some idea of what sort of arrangement 
one
wants to create, it is all the more easier for such situations to 
recreate
the same oppressive structures or become dominated by the most 
malicious
“liberators.” The Russian, Cuban, and Chinese experiences should be
sufficient examples of such.

The point here is not that one should have a blueprint for exacting
details of a new social order. Such would be silly and more destructive
than helpful. But unless one has at least a rough idea of how such an
alternative social arrangement might work it would extremely difficult 
to
convince others that such is desirable or achievable. Marx knew that he
was going to fish in the morning and hunt in the afternoon, but other 
than
the functioning of a post-capitalist society was at best anyone’s 
guess,
at worst the decision of those with the most guns. The question then
becomes how one can best approach the task of creating a utopian vision 
in
a way that does not recreate current forms of domination and brings the
utopian vision put forth into the realm of possibility in a way that 
show
avenues for how that order can be brought into existence in the here 
and
now. It is part of trying to sketch out the functioning of what Raoul
Vaneigem described as generalized self-management, or when the logic 
and
methods of the worker’s councils could be extended over society as a
liberated whole.

The problem is that you can’t study utopia. The study of utopia is the
ethnography of nowhere. There is no ready made existing liberatory 
society
which one can go and study, takes notes on, and then return and try to
recreate here. It is also debatable even if one could find such an
existing situation that trying to recreate such out of the context 
where
such emerged would be the best of ideas. And that’s the problem of 
utopian
vision, is that it doesn’t exist anywhere – that’s implicit in the 
word.
But there have existed a multitude of examples of cooperative 
structures
and non-hierarchal social practices that have existed through out 
history.
Little slices of liberation and non-alienated experience – what Pierre
Clastres describes as the “vast constellation of societies in which the
holders of what elsewhere would be called power are actually without
power; where the political is determined as a domain beyond coercion 
and
violence, beyond hierarchal subordination.” (1977: 5) And that’s the
starting point of reformatting a non-vanguardist approach to the 
creation
of utopian social theory.

The typical approach to considering radical social and economic change 
is
to select a set of values and ends and then try to create some social
structures based upon those values. For example, we could say that we 
want
a society based upon solidarity, mutual aid, voluntary association and 
so
forth – so what would social institutions look like based upon those
values? One example of this sort of approach is found in the example of
Parecon, or participatory economics. Parecon and its founders should be
praised for articulating a vision, as at the very least regardless of 
what
you think of their ideas they at least offer up some sort of overall
vision which can be looked at and evaluated as to whether or not such
would ultimately be desirable and effective. However, I think that when
you look at this formulation (and not just Parecon in particular) you 
can
see the flaw in this approach.

The problem is that such an approach to envisioning radical 
alternatives
is that it begins with abstract concepts and ideals as its founding 
basis,
and then proceeds to try to fit life to those ideals. The danger of
beginning with abstract values and goals as the basis for trying to 
plan
social reality is that it’s very easy to get caught up in ideological
conflicts through such a process, to get involved in conflicts over
theoretical systems and interactions that may or may not occur when the
new vision hits the pavement of actual existence. Conversely, such a
process of going from abstractions can overlook very real pragmatic 
issues
that can be glossed over in abstract models. And perhaps most important 
is
that people don’t act like theoretical constructs – they act like 
people,
whose behavior can never be fully described by any model of any kind.
Among the areas which modern economics can be criticized for is that it 
is
very good at creating abstract models of how an economy functions, but
such do not describe (and really cannot describe) the actual 
functioning
of the world. Similarly, if the radical intellectual or theorist cannot
formulate alternatives from a position separated from social struggle 
and
their experiences. From such a position radical social change is itself 
an
abstraction.

Libertarian municipalism, most commonly associated with Murray Bookchin
and related theorists, in general takes the position of subsuming the
economic sphere as a part of a political critique. Thus the arrangement 
of
economic relations becomes something that will be arrived upon after 
the
newly created directly democratic polity (or the decentralization and
further democratization of an existing political structure) decides 
upon
it. This is not to say that the community should not have a role, most
likely a large role, in their economic affairs – but visions put forth
thus far have used this reasoning more as an excuse for not having a
coherent conceptualization of an alternative economic arrangement. The
debate between Michael Albert and Peter Staudenmaier is representative 
of
this. (2002)

Another general style of approaching social change might be summed up 
as
doing so through focusing on the methods of achieving this change, such 
as
with syndicalism. Such are often very useful for particular social 
milieus
and arrangements, but often do not correspond to any broader
reconstructive vision and are difficult to use applicably beyond the
specific circumstance of their formation. For instance, what good does 
the
call to take over the factories mean if you live somewhere where there
aren’t any factories? What if you don’t want factories at all? This
criticism can be directed at much of the “canon” of anarchist theory,
which for the large part is from the 19th to early 20th century 
European
thinkers. Not surprisingly, we live in a much different and more 
complex
world then 1890s Europe – so it would be absurd to think that our 
notions
of social change and strategy for working for such might not need some
radical rethinking. Kropotkin, for instance, outlined a number of
important principles to consider in radical economic visioning: the
integration of manual and mental labor in the organization of 
production,
the importance of space and decentralization in the reduction and
elimination of hierarchy, and so on. (1985) Although it makes a great 
deal
of sense to continue to draw ideas and inspiration from such works, it 
is
important to realize that the principles drawn from such need to be
reworked to be practically applicable in today’s world.

The alternative approach that I would put forward for creating a 
radical
visions would be to look at the existing forms of cooperative economics
and social practice that have existed through out human history and 
around
the planet, and to try to draw out their underlying logic into a more
generalized pluralistic vision. Such an approach draws from an
ethnographic practice and approach (though trying to dispense with the
more noxious forms and tendencies that such has exhibited by the less
ethical of researchers). This would not be just a shift in one’s 
approach,
but the beginning notes of what very well could be an extensive and
on-going project. Thus instead of asking “how can we run the economy so
that it creates solidarity?” or “how can we manage individual interests
and communal interests?” the question becomes looking at different
existing forms of practice and drawing from them, rather than trying to
impose upon them. The role of vision through this becomes not declaring
what should be based upon utopian abstraction, but trying to figure out
what could be based upon the experiences contained within existing 
forms
of social relations.

Just sit back for a second and list some of the examples of cooperative
structures that you can think of: local community gardens, multitudes 
of
cooperative an worker collectives, the Mondragon, time stores and labor
exchanges, collective farms from the US to Russia, the  Mararikulam
cooperatives in India, the Kibbutzim, neighborhood assembleas from
Argentina to New England, the ejidos and autonomous communities in
Chiapas, gift economies and exchange clubs, free stores, squats,
alternative currency systems, cooperative water management in Bali,
communes and intentional communities, practices and concepts such as
guanxi (China) and the potlatch (Kwakiutl), and so forth. Perhaps the
question should not be whether a world based on cooperation and without
hierarchy can possibly work, but why the many examples of how such
structures haven’t been looked at in terms of creating a more holistic
version before?

The Non-Vanguardist Social Researcher and the Task of Utopian Vision

“Rather than value being the process of public recognition itself, 
already
suspended in social relations, it is the way people could do almost
anything (including in the right circumstances, creating entirely new
sorts of social relations) assess the importance of what they do, in 
fact,
do, as they are doing it.” -David Graeber, from Toward an 
Anthropological
Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams (2001: 47)

The question task then becomes looking at the different existing forms 
of
cooperative enterprise and social structures and asking they might fit
together into a more general social vision or system. How might the
different elements interact? If one applied the logic of the 
Argentinean
neighborhood assemblies to the economic structure of a factory in 
Prague,
what might that look like? How would these different cooperative
structures work between communities, between regions, and globally? How
would it be possible to best coordinate resources and create forms of
cooperation across regions while maintaining the highest possible level 
of
autonomy? How can one start creating these types of structures now in a
fashion where they form a sustainable community infrastructure?

This approach has multiple benefits. The first and most obvious is that
since you are starting from cooperative structures and practices that 
have
existed, one does not have to argue that such are possible. Clearly 
they
are. They have existed and continue to exist through out the world. As
noted by frequently by Chomsky, the prospect of a workable alternative 
is
a greater threat to the system than just opposition. For instance, why 
was
the US government so threatened by the Black Panthers? There are many
reasons, but one of the generally least mentioned ones is that through
their breakfast programs, community clinics, and other programs the 
Black
Panthers started creating an infrastructure that showed that those
communities didn’t need the state to take care of them – they could do 
it
for themselves. The threat of a workable alternative cannot be
underestimated. The task of radical vision is not of the “great 
thinker”
or learned sage, but of the ability to listen attentively to the 
desires
and experience of those who struggle for their liberation – and to 
learn
from them. This is the task not an of an elite vanguard, but a role 
that
we all can take part in, as diplomats of struggle, pagans, prophets, 
and
dreamers bringing utopia into our lives every day.

Secondly, from that position it becomes possible to conceive of 
anarchism
not as a philosophy that was invented by a specific set of 18th century
patriarchal bearded white guys, but as the struggle and practice for 
the
creation of freedom and liberated experience that has existed through 
out
human history. As observed in regards to African societies, “To a 
greater
or lesser extent all of these traditional African societies manifest
‘anarchic elements’ which upon close examination lend credence to the
historical truism that governments have not always existed. They are 
but a
recent phenomena and are, therefore, not inevitable in human society.”
(Mbah and Igariwey 1997: 27) This is not to say that one should go 
around
declaring that Balinese tribes are really anarchists and just don’t 
know
it – but that one can learn from the vast historical experience of the
cooperative institutions and practices which have existed. Such grounds
utopian theory and hopes not in wild speculations, but in the lived
realities of daily experience, in the extension of what people already
know to a broader vision.

Utopian theory is not then abstractions and ideals that are designed to 
be
imposed upon the world, dreams that will come into existence after the
revolution, but is the collected experience of cooperative structures 
that
can be generalized into a broader vision. This broader vision, however, 
is
not an imperial vision or one that exists in some abstract universal
space. It is a utopian theory that is more a process of coordinating,
collecting, and connecting the experience and knowledge created through
experience in a way that can be adapted and applied in varying 
situations
and contexts in pluralistic fashion. The task of the utopian theorist 
is
that of acting as a diplomat between struggles, sharing wisdom and
experiences, connecting and synthesizing ideas created through everyday
experience, and offer such back to the community.

This is not to suggest that we can envision radical alternatives in a
“value free” or neutral manner, at least not in any fashion resembling
such claims usually made by the social sciences. It would be silly and
possibly dangerous to pretend that our choice of liberatory social
relations to study would not be based upon personal concepts of 
freedom,
solidarity, autonomy, and so forth. The point is to avoid the error of
giving precedence on abstract values of pragmatic organizing or of
divorcing pragmatic efforts from a larger liberatory vision. The goal
becomes to highlight the liberatory nature of existing social relations
and practices and to draw from them new ideals and theories: to create
liberatory visions not in terms of definitions themselves, but through
looking for the causal relationships in such forms of practice.

There are many possible avenues that this type of an approach and 
project
could take. And to emphasize the point, the goal would not be to 
formulate
the “one true and correct plan” for radical social change, but to amass
the experience and knowledge of existing projects and cooperative forms 
–
to gather a knowledge base that can be drawn from according to the 
needs
and particulars of the situation and setting. This is the task not of
creating a rigid or deterministic blueprint for social change, but
developing a toolbox of knowledge and skills that can be utilized and
adapted in changing circumstances. These type of conversations and
projects are beginning to crop up with greater frequency as that
post-action let down leaves many with a sense of wanting to create
sustainable forms of resistance, projects which are grounded within our
communities and the daily lives.

It would be the elaboration and theorization of what James Scott called
mētis, or the informal rules and processes that sustain and support
community practices and institutions. Scott contrasts this more 
informal
“rule of thumb” knowledge to analytical and rationalistic knowledge 
that
is characteristic of bureaucratic institutions and centrally planned
efforts of social reconstruction; he argues that much of the failure of
centrally planned and engineered efforts lies in how they fail to
incorporate, and most often relegate and deny the validity of the forms 
of
cooperative and informal practices that support the formal social 
order.
(1998: 313-340) The horror and atrocity of such “revolutionary states”
emerges when such centrally planed schemes come to be backed by an
authoritarian state apparatus willing to implement them by force.

What this gets to is reformulating one's approach to the task of 
utopian
thinking and vision. The challenge is not to contemplate and brood in 
some
library until one is finally structure with a grand vision of truth and
wisdom that will enable the creation of a vision to lead and direct the
masses in the radical struggle for freedom. The task of utopian vision 
is
to examine the already existing liberatory practices, structures, and
forms which exist and have existed through the course of human history,
and to draw from them a broader vision of how particular forms of 
freedom
might be generalized into an overall social vision. The task is to 
network
and connect multiple and divergent struggles and practices in a 
mutually
complementary and beneficial manner. The goal is not to lead the 
masses,
to create a new human nature or state of being, but to identify 
existing
forms of freedom, and to draw out the underlying logic and generalize 
them
into a pluralistic reconstructive vision. It is to reconceptualize 
utopian
thought not as a static end but as a flexible and adaptable process.

Through this process knowledge and vision are created through 
experience,
through the result of human experience and creation. The goal of 
utopian
thinking should not be to come up with impractical schemes of a how a
future society might work or to formulate plans that preclude them from
starting to be created now. When Marx labeled his socialist 
predecessors
as “utopian” that was his objection, that they had plans and dreams 
which
were unobtainable, and therefore to a large degree useless in trying to
alleviate the totally unnecessary suffering brought about by capital 
and
the state. While neo-liberals like to pretend that the market is
autonomous and self-supporting, working off of principles inherent to
itself, such conceals the inventory of ideas, practices, and values 
which
underlie it and allow it to adapt to continually changing 
circumstances.
Similarly, the long-term success of building movements against the 
state,
capital, and all forms of oppression, is to create those reserves of
knowledge, experience, and ideas that will enable us constantly 
redefines
the specifics of non-hierarchal organizing based upon the changing
circumstances of time and place.

The struggle for liberation isn’t about creating unrealizable plans or
visions, but about bringing ideas about cooperation and non-hierarchal
organizing into our daily lives. Utopian thinking becomes looking at 
forms
of liberatory social relations, extending their logic, and beginning to
implement such notions and ideals within the way which we live our 
lives
now. We create the space for revolutionary thought and action by 
creating
those spaces where community grows, where our lives and political and
struggles can be sustain in an ongoing fashion. It is the task of 
bringing
what Durruti called “the new world we carry in our hearts” into 
existence
as a tangible reality, even if only in a piecemeal fashion. The
reformulation of utopian thought is not finding a better way to imagine 
a
future revolution, but drawing from human experience in finding way to
live liberation now.


References
Michael Albert and Peter Staudenmaier. “Participatory Economics & 
Social
Ecology,” available at www.social-ecology.org/forums/

Pierre Bourdieu and Gunter Grass. “The ‘Progressive’ Restoration: A
Franco-German Dialogue,” New Left Review 14 (March-April 2002), 63-77.

Pierre Clastres. Society Against the State: The Leader as Servant as
Servant and the Human Uses of Power Among Indians of the Americas (New
York: Urizen Books, 1977)

David Graeber. Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False 
Coin
of Our Own Dreams (New York: Palgrave, 2001)

Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan. Problems of Democratic Transition and
Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist 
Europe.
(Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1996)

Peter Kropotkin. Fields, Factories, and Workshops Tomorrow. Ed. Colin 
Ward
(London: Free Press, 1985)

Sam Mbah and IE Igariwey. African Anarchism: The History of a Movement

James Scott. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the 
Human
Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998)

Raoul Vaneigem. “Toward Truth as a Practical Goal,” The Situationist
International Anthology. `Ed/Trans. Ken Knabb (Berkley, CA: 1981),
216-219.

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