Book Review: Nowtopia by Chris CarlssonRobert Ovetzbyline‚ Aug. 06‚ 2009“We see people responding to the overwork and emptiness of a bifuricated life that is imposed in the precarious marketplace. They seek emancipation from being merely workers.” This is an attempt to articulate a new analysis and understanding of the strategy of self-organization emerging among the working class. New emerging forms of resistance to capitalism lies, Chris Carlsson asserts, in how people are attempting to transcend capitalism in the present by evading, reappropriating or subordinating work to more pleasurable community oriented projects. Such projects create new often short lived spaces that are outside or antagonistic to the objectives of control and profits. Nowtopia is packed with thoroughly documented examples of cooperative bike kitchens, urban gardening movements, biofuel co-ops, and the free software from someone intimately knowledgeable about each of these movements. The fundamental commonality among these nowtopias is their insistence on Do-It-Yourself (DIY) tinkering and inventing “to produce a different way of life.” |