1968: another world is possible

In 1968, young people throughout Europe and North America insisted that ‘Another world is possible’ and sought to claim and enact it. The spirit and culture of this revolution were, in part, informed by the concurrent popularization of Indian spirituality – forever immortalized in the Beatles’ 1968 song, ‘Across the Universe’ – which offered tools for individual emancipation that were seen as necessary to accompany and realize the transformation sought for society at large. In the years leading up to 1968, in India, two ‘spiritual activists’ had begun (r)evolutionizing the yoga tradition (Flores, 2009). Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) was a revolutionary in India's independence movement who had turned to spirituality to further the work of realizing an emancipated society, while The Mother (1878–1973) was a French mystic who first met Aurobindo in 1914 in Puducherry, a French colony at the time. Rather than individual enlightenment achieved through ascetic withdrawal, the premise of their ‘Integral Yoga’ was the spiritualization of all aspects not only of self but also of society.

Auroville was founded in Tamil Nadu, South India, in 1968 by The Mother as an experimental township dedicated to this endeavour. The project drew both young Westerners stirred by the radical period of 1968, seeking alternative ways of living, and young Indian and foreign members of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, where The Mother resided, in nearby Pondicherry (see Figure 1.1). Some local Tamilians integrated the community with their families from surrounding villages and even further afield, a growing trend in more recent years.

My father, who joined Auroville in 1975, was one of the young protestors of the late 1960s and early 1970s barricading the streets of London.

Provocation

Who engages research participants who come from communities deemed ‘high risk’, ‘hard to reach’, ‘hard to identify’, ‘hard to access’ or just plain frightening? Who is qualified to access those same communities and is required to demonstrate credibility in order to receive that access and gain valuable insights alongside the data? What does a researcher do when he or she is faced with an emerging situation that is ‘spontaneous’ and ‘instant’, which requires an ‘improvised’ approach to the gathering of data? What happens when such encounters are captured with sensitivity, when ethical considerations for the safety of those involved are taken into consideration, even when the site where the events took place is chaotic? Who decides that these encounters are not valid forms of understanding the social world? And who discounts the gatherer of such information, as merely acting like a journalist? These are all questions I myself face, have faced and continue to face. Welcome to the autoethnographic reflections of an ‘on-road’ criminologist.

First, I want to make my position clear. Based on the sheer awkwardness and barriers imposed upon my own work over the years, this chapter sets out to develop a position which is less dictated by institutional protocols, and more within a paradigm where research is part of a process of reflecting hidden and silent research narratives.

On-road researcher

‘On-road’ is a term broadly used to depict the code of the streets. For me, an ‘on-road’ criminologist is ‘a credible researcher who has been granted permission, alongside access to the lives and stories of individuals not accessible in the traditional routes of engagement when conducting academic research’ (Glynn, 2021). The key to gaining access to people in my constituency comes through my own lived experience, which like theirs has also been fraught with danger and fear, although in my case not because of a criminal lifestyle. My implicit knowledge of, and connection to, the ‘road life’ from which they come is also a prerequisite. In addition, powers of persuasion, street level reasoning, and navigating the code of the streets must become embedded in the ‘on-road’ researchers’ ‘modus operandi’.

Introduction

This chapter develops from the analytical logic of being ‘on-road’. Used by racialised, urban male youth, the logic of ‘on-road’ characterises the contemporary street as a space for both discrete individual transformation and wider social participation (Honneth, 1995). Being ‘on-road’ references activity constituted by youth's co-option of the road, a ‘disenfranchised social milieu’ distinguished from ‘engagement in conventional society’ (Young, 2016: 35). The street represents an irregular space, in this regard, supporting youth's performance of ‘a physical reality and, or a general way of being’ (Young, 2016: 11). Hallsworth and Silverstone (2009), for instance, emphasise the prevailing exclusion characteristic of youth's disenfranchisement, denoting their relegation from conventional resources and opportunity structures (Merton, 2019 [1995]). While violence delineates the road as a disenfranchised space for social participation, disqualification is constituted by the broader ‘consumption logic of consumer capitalism’ (Hallsworth and Silverstone, 2009: 361), shaping social exclusion from conventional resources and opportunities (Young, 2007). In this way, the urban street exposes contradictions wrought by modernity's undertaking of greater social progress, by emphasising the social disaffection, alienation and social strain tenaciously normalising itself into the efforts of the many, consequently (Merton, 1938, 1968).

Building on this logic, the chapter historicises ‘on-road’, exploring an intersection between youth, race and gender. Specifically, it explores an intersection of racialised, gendered politics informing interwar British youth penal reform. Historicising the intersection between youth, gender and race expands ‘on-road’ to give a unique insight into entrenched social exclusion experienced by racialised young women, in the historic British Metropole. The ‘on-road’ logic, for instance, contributes a unique racially specific gendered relevance to rich critical gendered histories of this period (see Lawless, 1995; Cox, 2003; Bland, 2005; Christian, 2008; Cox and Shore, 2018). If, for instance, ‘on-road’ signifies contemporary racialised, urban boys’ resistance against exclusion, a space co-opted to carve out both material and moral resources and opportunities, this chapter places racialised young women within this longer historic trajectory. This corresponds with Black, feminist epistemologies both condemning and exhorting the invisibility of historic race, gender concerns (Hill Collins, 2000; Young, 2016; Battle, 2019; Choak, 2020; Hill Collins and Bilge, 2020).

As we discussed in the Preface, an edited collection is by nature a collaboration, a milieu of different perspectives and experiences which together create a provocative mosaic of scholarly work. In a similar vein, an editorial group is an alliance of people with a shared interest but from differing perspectives. This is what makes it so wonderful to work as a team. To reflect our cultural and gender diversity as a team we have decided to organise this concluding chapter into three parts, where we each reflect on the aspects of the collection which speak most to us and our own work, and most importantly, what the next steps are for this field of study. What questions need to be further posed.

Jade's reflections: feminist lens on the soundtracks to subjectivity, relationality, love and community

As some contributors in the collection have noted, adult anxiety about the generation beneath them is perennial (Powell, 2011). Although the concept of ‘youth’ is relatively recently conceived. From the mid-17th century young people started to be seen as separate from both adults and children, with the concept of ‘adolescence’ coined by G. Stanley Hall (1904). In this text he discussed ‘several “problems of youth”, including: unbridled sexuality; rejection of parents/teachers; lack of concentration; extremes of emotion including aggression; and unpredictability’ (Powell, 2011: 11). The causes for this were attributed to both social context and biological changes in the shift to adulthood. The reason for this increased focus on the teenage years came from an enhanced concern around deviance, delinquency and social reform (Garland et al, 2015). The focus on youth has been said to be laden with symbolic value. The concept of youth has ‘served as a metaphorical device to embody both the aspirations and anxieties of a particular historical time … a harbinger of change, an emergent consumer, a signifier of hope, or a portent of social decline’ (Garland et al, 2015: 2). Therefore, it is important to focus on the wider meanings and social context of the current youth moral panic and what it indicates about contemporary social and political change. This collection has sought to go beyond the individuals that are often viewed as a collective who are on the periphery or in the throws of ‘gang-involvement’.

If you’ve lived or worked in any of England's major cities over the last 25 years and had any contact with young people, you will probably have heard them use the phrase ‘on-road’ to refer to their experiences. Each of the editors has encountered this phrase and appreciated the uncertain urgencies of its meaning to young people (Earle, 2011; Hallsworth and Young, 2011; Levell, 2019). Our concern has been to listen more closely and explore the meanings evoked in the term ‘on-road’. As young people appropriate language to express new meanings they shine a light on the limitations of our existing conceptual lexicon and this book hopes to expand it by attending to what they are feeling and experiencing. ‘On-road’ tells us of a travelling vitality by invoking familiar and implicit sociological tropes of youthful ‘street culture’. It is a creative phrase which accommodates the complexity and fluidity of youthful urban life but, as we argue in this book, even as its use has become widespread among young people, as a concept it has largely escaped sociological scrutiny. In this collection, we gather diverse research on experiences of life on-road that reflects part of the vibrant urban diversity of young working-class people in Britain's multicultural cities. Part of our objective is to disrupt criminological assumptions that stereotype young people's lives as violent, or criminalise or racialise routine aspects of their everyday life, particularly when they are not White. The vernacular use of ‘on-road’ has become a popular shorthand that refers to the myriad ways that some young people move into and out of home life, school life and income-generating activity of various kinds. It encompasses streets and clubs, pavements and takeaways, social and work life, worklessness, recreation, leisure, boredom, and random ways of making a living.

‘On-road’ creatively evokes open vistas of a life propelled, going somewhere out there, but in a way that is uncontained; a direction without a destination. Being ‘on-road’ or, for some young men, becoming a ‘roadman’, is not the same as being in a gang, or becoming gang affiliated, but each of these conditions are relevant to it by reference or proximate reality.

Introduction

‘What political organisation do you want for Auroville?’, someone asked The Mother in 1972, four years after the founding of the community. ‘An amusing definition occurs to me’, she replied: ‘a divine anarchy’ (The Mother, 2003b: 218). When she passed away in 1973, just five years after Auroville was founded, she left no blueprint for Auroville, no plan for how it should be governed – in her words, ‘organised’ (The Mother, 1977: 70) – nor any designated individuals who should assume this responsibility. While utopian communities were historically based on ideal blueprints that predetermined how society should be organized, Auroville was to be a prefigurative polity, destined to develop in tandem with the progressive spiritualization of its members. The kind of society that would emerge from this could not be anticipated: ‘Men must become conscious of their psychic being and organise themselves spontaneously, without fixed rules and laws – that is the ideal’ (The Mother, 2003b: 218).

In this chapter, we will explore the nature and development of Auroville as a polity, a community that has succeeded in sustaining and developing itself over 50 years, while securing autonomous arrangements for its internal administration. Even with this experiment in self-governance being presently threatened by the intervention of government-appointed administrators, its unique trajectory provides an unparalleled opportunity to assess the viability and evolution of horizontal modes of prefigurative collective decision-making and organization. While modes of horizontal organizing are used across various alternative political contexts, including social movements like Occupy Wall Street that are significantly larger in terms of participants than intentional communities, the scope of enactment of intentional communities is broader than that of organizing protests given that they seek to establish alternative societies. Auroville is an exceptionally large and long-lasting community to have engaged in a horizontal exercise of governance, and studying its experience in doing so yields rich insights into issues raised by participants and researchers regarding the sustainability, effectiveness and equitability of such forms of radical political practice (Graeber, 2013; Rowe and Carroll, 2015; Hardt and Negri, 2017).

Examining Auroville's unique relationship with the Indian government will offer nuanced points of consideration for how alternative societies might navigate the challenges of embeddedness in a mainstream political context and engage with mainstream institutions of power.

These days are steeped in a desperate need for radical change in the opposite direction of the world's current trajectory. The ‘profit before life’ motto of global capitalist ‘development’ is destroying the planet and its human and non-human inhabitants. To unlock the present critical situation and bring about the possibility of transitioning from ‘planet crisis’ to ‘planet hope’ resides with those communities creating alternative practices for sustainable life at the grass roots. Critics of localized experiments of alternative forms of being and living in and beyond the capitalist world worry that experiments of holistic, democratic, ecological and cooperative practices will not change the structures, dynamics and powers that sustain global capitalism and its recurrent crises. However, Suryamayi Clarence-Smith's book tells us a different story.

Her autoethnography of Auroville tells us the story of one of the world's most extensive and most well-developed intentional communities. Auroville's Charter states that the community belongs to humanity as a whole, as a place for the flourishing of the human soul and body, bridging past and present. For the past 55 years, Auroville's inhabitants – several thousand, from all over the world – have been reinventing communal life, attaining exceptional levels of ecological restoration and reforestation, a cutting-edge practice of direct democracy, and a new economic model – all from a grass-roots search for real sustainability, beyond grand discourses. Learning about this experience and understanding what was achieved is vital for the needed change our world must work towards.

The impact of this book on our understanding of prefigurative praxis and utopia cannot be overemphasized. Three contributions come to mind. First, Clarence-Smith focuses on process. As she explains, she intended not to document the Auroville community's alternative practices but to investigate the complex processes by which these collective actions and their alternative practices emerge and are established. In addition to many deliberative, organizing and learning activities, praxis encompasses moments of contradiction and conflict. Navigating those contradictions and conflicts, both internal and external, is a component of prefigurative praxis. The second contribution is the clear distinction between abstract and concrete utopia. The main difference between abstract and concrete utopia, writes Ernst Bloch, is that abstract utopia is a ready-made utopia, while concrete utopia is of an anticipatory kind that rejects both abstract utopian dreaminess and immature utopian socialism.

Introduction

In 1977, the term ‘prefiguration’ was first used to define ‘the embodiment within the political practice of a movement, of those forms of social relations, decision-making, culture, and human experience that are [its] ultimate goal’ (Boggs, 1977: 100). The context was the ‘New Left’ social movements that arose in the 1960s, peaking in 1968 (the year Auroville was founded) with the students’ revolt in Paris, which The Mother was very interested in. These protests were precipitated and shaped by changes in culture and lifestyle – captured in the feminist movement's slogan ‘the personal is political’ – and early scholars of prefiguration conceptualized a broad spectrum of social movement practices as prefigurative (Breines, 1989; Epstein, 1991). In this chapter, we will look at a few examples of how practices in Auroville are uniquely spiritually prefigurative – in realms as diverse as work, art, education and town planning.

Over the last decade, the label ‘prefigurative’ has risked becoming exclusive to horizontal forms of organizing and decision making in social movements like Occupy Wall Street and the Global Justice Movement (Franks, 2003; Maeckelbergh, 2009; Graeber, 2010). Only such ‘strategic’ practices, that is, ones that directly engaged with achieving political change, were identified as prefigurative, while the role and significance of sociocultural/lifestyle practices in prefiguring social movements’ overarching goals were disregarded (Yates, 2015). The restrictive scope on strategic political practice is perhaps why prefiguration has barely been associated with utopianism (see Juris, 2008; Dinerstein and Deneulin, 2012; Yates, 2015; Monticelli, 2018). Yet, those articulating a prefigurative politics are driven by the desire to live in a radically different society, shaped by alternative values than those of mainstream capitalism, understood not just ‘as an economy but as a society’ (Streeck, 2016: 201). Such an alternative society needs to be prefigured in all its aspects – education, work, social relations and so on – an exercise that intentional communities engage in through utopian practice.

However, while the utopian practice of such communities is not necessarily tied to political change in mainstream society, prefigurative practice is expected to enact and engender such change.

Introduction

It was clear from the inception of Auroville that its economic organization would be critical for prefiguring a spiritualized society. This grounding of a utopian project in the material conditions of life is characteristic of what Marxist utopian scholars define as ‘real’ (Wright, 2010) or ‘concrete’ (Bloch, 1986) utopias. To this day, the topic of how to prefigure such an ‘Auroville economy’ is alive, being a source of both aspiration and frustration, and wrought with challenges, not only legal and financial but also of competing visions and approaches to economic administration in Auroville. Here, we will explore how the community's founding economic ideals continue to galvanize, underpin and inform the emergence and evolution of Auroville's communal economic framework, institutions and policies to prefigure an alternative embedded in a mainstream capitalist context by engaging in a critical and reflexive process.

We will begin with understanding the founding economic ideals for Auroville and the roots of Auroville's economic organization in that of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, and then investigate the early history of the community's economy and how its communal character and administration has (d)evolved over more recent years, and under which pressures. Specifically, I will be drawing on autoethnographic insights into the management of Auroville's ‘central fund’, or municipal budget, and the ‘Maintenance’ (or economic support) of Aurovilians to explore attempts to balance collective and individual provisioning, as per the community's socio-economic ideals. Revealing the means and praxis of prefiguring the community's socio-economic ideals, including the ongoing efforts and trials faced by fellow community members in doing so, this rich case study will be particularly relevant for practices of participatory budgeting and non-monetary forms of provision, universal basic services, and basic income policy programmes.

Sri Aurobindo Ashram: the roots of Auroville's economic organization

Auroville did not start with a blank slate in terms of its economic imaginary; The Mother had already created a unique economic unit out of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, in which she prefigured a model for economic organization congruent with the ideals of a spiritualized society of Integral Yoga, as well as spiritualized approaches to economic activity.

Introduction

The character and dynamics of urban space play an important role in the lives of young men on-road and recent studies have illuminated the ways in which urban geography can foster forms of identity and affiliation (Reid, 2017; White, 2020). While urban localities or ‘hoods’ can engender pride, belonging and ‘care’ (White and Ilan, 2021), they can also be confining, limiting young people's opportunities and forcing them into narrow forms of gendered subjectivity (Reid, 2017). Across many communities, urban regeneration has played a central role in manifesting this encroaching sense of entrapment with young people increasingly priced out of housing, barred from the labour market and excluded from the physical spaces they used to freely inhabit (Reid, 2017; White, 2020). White (2020) has recently documented the effects of gentrification on Black, working-class, urban communities, describing the ways in which young people's sense of belonging is challenged by urban redevelopment which favours middleclass consumers, leading to what White describes as ‘social and economic segregation’ (2020: 60).

Within this increasingly bleak neoliberal landscape young people have less access to legitimate sources of employment and status and feel increasingly disconnected from their wider communities. It is within this context that Billingham and Irwin-Rogers (2021) suggest feelings of insignificance and alienation can lead young people into criminal enterprise and violence to retrieve a sense of ‘mattering’. As Wacquant (2001) has noted, the withdrawal of government support from the most vulnerable and marginalised regions of neoliberal societies has tended to be matched with an increasingly punitive approach to criminal justice. The aggressive policing and criminalisation of young Black men in inner-city areas enforces these spatial demarcations leading many into contact with the criminal justice system. As Fatsis (2019) has argued, the discourse of gang warfare has played a crucial role in characterising young Black men as a threat to be contained and the intensive policing of disadvantaged areas has led to the continued overrepresentation of Black people in both youth and adult prison estates (Lammy, 2017).

In the face of political, spatial and cultural exclusion experienced by Black people, White (2020) has argued that music represents an important means of resisting marginalisation and forging significant connections to their lived environment.

• 1. Auroville belongs to nobody in particular. Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole. But, to live in Auroville, one must be a willing servitor of the divine consciousness.

• 2. Auroville will be the place of an unending education, of constant progress, and a youth that never ages.

• 3. Auroville wants to be the bridge between the past and the future. Taking advantage of all discoveries from without and from within, Auroville will boldly spring towards future realisations.

• 4. Auroville will be a site of material and spiritual researches for a living embodiment of an actual human unity.