Never mind I Amsterdam:
here comes New Autonomy

The alternative movement?
A few weeks ago on a Saturday morning, I was distributing copies of Amsterdam Alternative in the Kinkerbuurt. I was about to put the paper into someone’s letter box when suddenly the door opened and an elderly gentleman looked at me slightly puzzled. I recognized his face; he was someone I had seen frequently in one or another vrijplaats. He asked me what I was doing at his door, so I handed him the paper and said that we were “trying to keep the alternative movement alive”. Now he looked at me even more puzzled and said: “The alternative movement? Does that still exist? I haven’t heard that expression in ages!”

This made me think. The guy was right of course: the space once claimed by Amsterdam’s alternative movement has been shrinking rapidly. The proud, self-determined, defiant movement that shaped Amsterdam’s cultural life has all but disappeared. What made Amsterdam an attractive and indeed creative city in the recent past was exactly the existence of a movement that in decades of collective struggle and creative expression had built a city within the city, or rather, a city below the city. Underground, yes, but not deeply subterranean. All one needed to do was scratch the surface a bit and there it was: a rich and colourful urban fabric expressing an incredible will to live, experiment and party like there is no tomorrow. This wasn’t just a place to escape the dullness of work and business, this was real existing proof that the joy of life that capitalism constantly promises (but of course never delivers) could be experienced in a world that played by rather different rules. The energy that drove the alternative movement to the creation of these moments of wonder and amazement had a name: autonomy. It expressed the collective conviction that profit doesn’t matter; living life to the fullest does.

Autonomy lost
Speaking of autonomy in the context of Amsterdam’s subculture was always a bit of a stretch. In the strict sense of self-government (from Ancient Greek αὐτός/autos/‘self’ and νόμος/nomos/‘law’), autonomy never really existed. Even when squatting was still ubiquitous, few spaces were bulwarks against state and capital. Instead, they were pragmatic attempts to make room for social and cultural experimentation. Autonomy was always meant as an aspiration; a countercultural energy that gave a certain direction to the escapades of the alternative scene. As late as the early 2000s, it would have been unimaginable that this energy could disappear from the city. And yet, if we’re honest, this is what (nearly) happened. This potentially transformative energy got sucked into the cynical marketing campaigns of the creative city, not least because too many of us naively subscribed to the new spirit of entrepreneurial individualism. Some of us thought it couldn’t do much harm to cash in individually on what had been built collectively but it did. Of course it did! Others thought of themselves as being part of a new generation of “creative geniuses” whose business ideas were “making the world a better place.” Few understood that the immense personal wealth amassed by their Silicon Valley role models was the reward for the creation of a hyper-individualist techno-culture that destroyed the potential of collective emancipation for decades to come. Thanks to such – often wilful – ignorance a considerable part of the city’s subculture became complicit with the neoliberal zeitgeist. Now the motto was: never mind collective autonomy, here comes I Amsterdam.

It would be wrong to assume that such complicity was inevitable. In other cities, subcultural movements led the charge against the sell-out of their cities that the proponents of creative city ideology propagated. Hamburg’s campaign “Not in our Name, Marke Hamburg” is a case in point. Starting as a subcultural initiative, it mobilized the city’s entire cultural sector in a collective rejection of creative city policy. Rather than letting themselves be co-opted into a city marketing campaign that only served the interests of real estate capital, the cultural scene came together in solidarity. One of the things they achieved was saving the famous Gängeviertel from its destruction by a real estate investor. This didn’t mean, of course, that commercialisation and neoliberal vandalism disappeared from Hamburg. However, it demonstrated the power of a (sub)cultural scene that can get their act together. In contrast, Amsterdam’s cultural sector, much of it with roots in the alternative scene, doesn’t even seem embarrassed that its Uitkrant (the local equivalent of Time Out) gets published by the creative city marketers of I Amsterdam.

A post-pandemic orgy!
Part of what echoes in the above-mentioned question of the elderly gentleman seems to be the disappointment with our complicity in the neoliberal devastation of Amsterdam’s urban cultural fabric. However, if one listens attentively, one might also sense a certain desire there, a desire that emanates from the city itself, a desire not for that old kind of alternative movement but for a new autonomous energy and its timely expressions. The question is: are those of us who have built their lives on the heritage (should we say: on the ruins?) of the alternative movement ready to take the responsibility and help kick-start a new movement? The timing would be great! The city is coming back to life after a long pandemic shutdown. Could there be a better moment for a radical creative reset of Amsterdam’s alternative infrastructure? Can we bring back the glorious experiences of ecstasy and bliss to the city? Times are different, that’s true, but we still got resources, we still got energy and we still got the will to live, love and party. We shouldn’t underestimate the power of that. Let’s have that post-pandemic orgy and re-energize our collectives, spaces and projects. And if you feel too tired for new autonomy, consider sending your kids instead…

Vrij Beton sets out to
liberate real estate from
the market by turning it
over to the ownership of
everyone and no one.

Amsterdam Alternative’s new initiative Vrij Beton is an attempt to help make the physical space for such a project of new autonomy. Vrij Beton sets out to liberate real estate from the market by turning it over to the ownership of everyone and no one. It’s a far cry from squatting, of course, and we wholeheartedly salute all those who have the guts to keep the good old practice alive and support them wherever we can. Yet in the current juridical, political and cultural climate we decided that it might be time to try adding another instrument to the alternative toolbox. In this effort, Vrij Beton is part of a wave of experiments that are happening throughout the city around notions of collective ownership, the commons and so on. It is indeed exciting to see how many of these projects ground their internal organization on principles of inclusivity and radical democracy. Sometimes they even understand themselves in terms of post-capitalist practice.

New autonomy: outsmarting the system
The great challenge for these projects – and this is true for Vrij Beton as well – is to be conscious of the impact they have on their urban environment. Amsterdam’s recent history is full of promising cultural experiments that eventually became drivers of massive gentrification processes, thereby enhancing the very mechanisms of exploitation and inequality they set out to defy. Currently, the absolute low point of this tendency are the developments at NDSM, where the proud history of Kinetisch Noord has been reduced to the decoration of an urbanist nightmare of exclusively boring luxury compounds. This is city planning by brutal humiliation, but it is certainly not the only case of neoliberal co-optation in Amsterdam.

There are no easy solutions when it comes to the question of how to resist the lure of complicity and avoid the pitfalls of co-optation. Yet, if we don’t confront it, then all those proclamations of “change making”, “commoning” and “doughnut economics” are worthless. To challenge the system that vandalizes our city and ravages the planet we must get smarter than that system. We need to talk to each other, learn from each other and organize. We need to develop tactics and strategies that help us escape the cunning mechanisms of marketing and gentrification. Amsterdam Alternative Academy could be one opportunity to begin such a dialogue, but we need much more than just one platform. We really need to get a lot smarter than we are right now. But we can do it! We can turn our subculture into a hotbed of a new city-wide counterculture. And maybe, just maybe “new autonomy” could at once be an aspiration and a battle cry for such a project. Never mind I Amsterdam: here comes New Autonomy!