This book explores the question of how contemporary collectives are creating diverse, new forms of creative economies that arrange diverse peoples, animals, natural environments, technologies and others around economic concerns. Like older forms of left association, these collectives seek to bring about change. They do so, however, not by working to overthrow and replace an underlying capitalist ‘system’ with an equally totalising alternative like socialism, but by experimenting with and inventing diverse new forms of economic life in the present. This book examines how economic concerns are f ... More

This book explores the question of how contemporary collectives are creating diverse, new forms of creative economies that arrange diverse peoples, animals, natural environments, technologies and others around economic concerns. Like older forms of left association, these collectives seek to bring about change. They do so, however, not by working to overthrow and replace an underlying capitalist ‘system’ with an equally totalising alternative like socialism, but by experimenting with and inventing diverse new forms of economic life in the present. This book examines how economic concerns are formed and the techniques through which concerned groups are gathered and come to create alternative economies. In doing so it maps out a geography of collective action. It takes actor network theories of action as a starting point for thinking about how collective action brings the new into being, and argues that contemporary collectives are best theorised as hybrid collectives. This approach enables an understanding of how collectives initiate change and provides a view to the diverse forces through which they do so, including through the generation of non-discursive bodily experiences such as affects and emotions. In particular, this book argues that the relational and geographical nature of performative action is central to understanding the way in which hybrid collectives create alternative economies.