I was yapping with Jim from The Approach the other day, and our conversation turned to a set of institutions that had been significant in both our lives – *not* collectives, necessarily, *not* coops, simply small businesses run by human beings, who’d decided for whatever reason to be “bad at capitalism.”
That is, these businesses and their owners faced the world with policies and practices that were consciously suboptimal, by the late capitalist economy’s cut-throat rules of accumulation, because it allowed them to preserve space for the community, for taking care of neighbors, and for the introduction of other, more congenial values.
After I got off the call with Jim, I remembered what it was like to run a West Philly coffeehouse, a long long time ago, that was like that, so we could e.g. let runaway kids crash in the basement, feed unhoused customers for free on the DL, etc. And I thought: huh, actually, this space is really undertheorized on the left.
Because, sure, I’ve spent plenty of time in my life in social centers and infoshops and free clinics, and similarly counterhegemonic spaces. But we talk about these things – we articulate their affordances and constraints, we valorize them, in some way they’re the furniture of our aspirations.
But I’ve spent just as much time, if not a good deal more, in coffee houses and bike shops and diners and video stores (remember them?) that are just kind of crap businesses, but vital and beloved social condensers. And other than, I guess, liberal “third place” theory, it feels like we just don’t have a way of talking about these spaces that captures their importance to us and our communities. Am I missing some body of thought?