The Pervasive Nature of Heterodox Economic Spaces at a Time of Neoliberal Crisis: Towards a “Postneoliberal” Anarchist Future

Abstract

: Re‐reading the economic landscape of the western world as a largely non‐capitalist landscape composed of economic plurality, this paper demonstrates how economic relations in contemporary western society are often embedded in non‐commodified practices such as mutual aid, reciprocity, co‐operation and inclusion. By highlighting how the long‐overlooked lived practices in the contemporary world of production, consumption and exchange are heavily grounded in the very types and essences of non‐capitalist economic relations that have long been proposed by anarchistic visions of employment and organization, this paper displays that such visions are far from utopian: they are embedded firmly in the present. Through focusing on the pervasive nature of heterodox economic spaces in the UK in particular, some ideas about how to develop an anarchist future of work and organization will be proposed. The outcome is to begin to engage in the demonstrative construction of a future based on mutualism and autonomous modes of organization and representation.

The fantasy of access: Neoliberal ordering of a public beach

“…Of course protest is the most familiar sort of "making a scene" in public but in other cases just showing up is an act that democratizes space (such as homeless activists in Mitchell's "Peoples Park", 1995). Anarchist theorists have documented this sort of spatial reclamation in a variety of urban and rural contexts (Ferrell, 2001;Firth, 2012;White & Williams, 2012). But even without academic study, we understand that social movements need some rooting and visibility in a space.…”

Collective ownership in renewable energy and opportunities for sustainable degrowth

“…CPE are not new forms when compared to the long tradition of cooperatives, local selforganisation, and other forms of heterogeneous economic practices based on mutuality, reciprocity, and cooperation (cf. White andWilliams 2012, Gibson-Graham 1996). There are, at the moment, reasons to be optimistic: CPE may even be what Ernst Bloch once called a ''concrete utopia'' (Bloch 1964).…”

“…Whatever the codex of corporate responsibility for companies like Enron might be, we would not define it as a CPE, simply because a structure of ownership and participation that grants large capital fractions seeking maximum revenue a dominating position will turn the mentioned normative goals into an issue of communication strategies. The normativity that we understand to be a foundational element of CPE projects instead links them to other projects of heterogeneous economic practices and spaces (White and Williams 2012). Suitable arrangements, which we found in the field of renewable energy, were cooperatives, municipal ownership, and-in the case of Machynlleth or the German village Feldheim (Kunze and Busch 2011)-a very local and broadly distributed private ownership.…”

Campaigning for cooperatives as resistance to neoliberal capitalism

“…That co-ops are not something completely different but instead included in mainstream economic theory might be an argument against the resistance potential of cooperation. White and Williams (2012) touch upon this last notion in arguing that noncapitalist practices such as cooperation and reciprocity are in fact embedded confidently in the present, but to focus on and construct cooperation as a presently occurring and viable alternative can be a way to perform resistance in itself, that is, by discursively reiterate articulations of desired futures instead of reproducing the idea of the undesired neoliberal capitalism (Butler 1993, Springer 2016b. Similarly, by performing differently from the reiterated values of neoliberal capitalism in everyday life as a form of 'constructive resistance' (Sørensen 2016), neoliberal capitalism can be challenged without overt protest (Springer 2016a).…”