They are rooted in everyday life, in the body, in social relations, in the commons. While these knowledges and practices are based on traditions of resistance, they are bringing new dimensions to the task of surviving in the urban space: co-operatives, self-management and communal projects, together with non-representational politics and anti-oppressive pedagogies. Collective actions by a variety of social subjects are moving onto the social reproduction dimension of the politics of work, organizing cooperative productive and reproductive activities related to housing, food, land, education and health that have emerged within a context of poverty, hardship and exclusion. The latter signals a shift in grassroot politics. 4 Second, the emergence of new collective subjectivities that are challenging the concept of work altogether: waste pickers in Ahmedabad, Medellin, Buenos Aires rural workers gathered in La Via Campesina women running community gardens in Detroit. 3 This is exemplified by the biggest strike in history with 180 million Indian workers paralyzing all the strategic sectors of the economy, from coal mines to the financial sector. 2 Today, we can observe two simultaneous developments: first, the formation of a new international working class in the global south - mainly in India, China and South Africa. This has fostered a ‘multiplication’ of work situations.
But the 2008 economic and financial collapse resulted in another apparently insoluble crisis, the crisis of formal waged employment and associated forms of welfare as the means for individual and urban communities to reproduce themselves. This is ‘a crisis and widespread vulnerability…that has opened an incredible number of struggles around social, economic, resource and survival, which have put the struggle for life in the center of politics.’ 1 Crises are a recurrent and inherent feature of capitalism, a necessary evil to enable the expansion of capital. The context for a discussion of utopia today is provided by a general crisis of social reproduction. Utopia, Production and Social Reproduction The question is what kind of utopia and where to look for it. The problem is not whether we should seek a utopia or not. On the contrary, utopia has become necessary and indispensable for millions of people in the world, struggling for survival. In fact, we live in a time when utopia can be no longer objected to. What would be the place for utopian thinking in a world that is desperate to solve the accrued problems that it has created for itself? Would utopian thinking distract us from the real tribulations besetting the world? No. Not only does the term ‘utopia’ indicate no place, when it found a place, it was mistreated and mutilated. Where is Utopia today? Is this question relevant? One might argue that the term utopia is incongruous with the politics of our time, to say the least.