Nowtopia: Strategic Exodus?

Abstract: Nowtopia identifies a new basis for a shared experience of class. Specifically, the
exodus from wage labor on one side, and the embrace of meaningful, freely chosen and “free”
(unpaid) work on the other. A product of three decades of decomposition of the working class,
nowtopians are different from “drop-outs” in general, or surplus populations that constitute
the necessary “outside” to capital, in their conscious withdrawal from capitalist culture and
concerted rejection of the value form. In emergent convivial “nowtopian” communities, largely
grounded in unpaid practical work which creatively meets needs such as transportation (the
bicycling subculture), food (urban gardening/agriculture), and communication (open-source
communities), we see a gradual reversal of the extreme atomization ofmodern life. While facing
the threat of corruption via re-integration into the system, this constellation of practices, if taken
together, is an elaborate, decentralized, uncoordinated collective research and development
effort exploring a potentially post-capitalist, post-petroleum future.

Keywords: decomposition of the working class, wage labor, use value, collectivity, work,
atomization, capital

Chris Carlsson & Francesca Manning
Antipode Vol. 42 No. 4 2010 ISSN 0066-4812, pp 924–953