Capitalistic overconsumption traps us in fabricated communities. Only the neg can access a counter-epistemology of anti-markets can communally create spaces of care

To be sure, many consumers do extend their care for other consumers beyond their family members. They often form brand communities (Muniz and O’Guinn, 2001), subcultures of consumption “ (Schouten and McAlexander, 1995) or “tribes” (e.g. Cova, Kozinets and Shankar, 2007; Cova and White, 2010) that sustain a certain extent of sociality and help them cultivate ties on the basis of shared interests in brands, products, leisure activities and consumption practices. Sometimes they also mobilise themselves against powerful actors to reclaim a sense of agency and control over their environment (e.g. anti-Starbucks communities; Thompson and Arsel, 2004). Not surprisingly then, some have suggested (e.g. Streeck, 2012) that commercialisation has created opportunities and apparently quite attractive ones, for a new type of what Simmel called Vergesellschaftung or “sociation” – i.e. a way for individuals to link up to others and thereby help define their place in the world.¶ Yet the idea of market-mediated communities or communities of consumption is in many ways inadequate. To begin with, such communities are more often than not ephemeral, loosely connected and rather superficial. Steve Miles (2010), for instance, talks of “complicit communality”, referring to the observation that we as consumers are complicit in partly reviving a bygone community ethos in commoditised spaces that we know are not communal enough. That is, we are habituated into the comforts and pleasures offered by consumer[…]”¶ “infrastructures that are really needed for radically enlarging our commons and making them more genuinely caring: from community libraries and libraries of things to shared urban spaces, parks, local arts centres, as well as for more democratic ways of local governance (e.g. radical municipalism; The Care Collective, 2020).¶ Importantly, such communities also stubbornly remain organised around common (consumer) identities and interests. In doing so, they run the risk of building upon logics of individualism rather than collectivism: consumers continue to exist within them as individuals not as part of collectives that can be (and do) bigger than the sum of their parts (Gilbert, 2013). Their underlying ideologies of care foreground notions of proximity and sameness. Conspicuously absent are more radical ways of caring for one another that extend across difference and beyond the market. A good example here would be the various welcome centres that were formed in response to the European refugee crisis. City Plaza, for instance, was a hotel in the centre of Athens, Greece, that was squatted between April 2016 and July 2019. It became home to a shifting mix of about 400, mostly Syrian refugees (but also Eritreans, Ghanaians, Iranians, Somalis) and many European “solidarians[…]”¶ “. As a community project, it proceeded through collective cooking initiatives, shared cleaning and maintenance rotas, participation in gifting and solidarity bazaars. Such practices had in common was their embrace of anti- and non-market values of collaboration, sharing, mutuality and co-production; and ideologies of care that stretched beyond individualism and notions of “people like us”.