7 March 2011: "We are living in a world where Subway is more ubiquitous than McDonalds."

This post is about envisioning real utopias. Utopian thinking, as many on the Left have recently argued, is a necessary preliminary to broadening the political imaginary of progressives and others engaged in the fight for broader social justice. Utopias establish the contours of the alternative, delimiting the possible by redrawing the boundaries of the impossible, allowing for a re-visioning of the scope of political praxis and a modulation of what goals are to be considered "reasonable."

As a thinker engaged in theorizing a more egalitarian distribution of the cultural and material wealth of Western society as it has emerged in the so-called "information age," Carles naturally has a great deal to say on the question of what constitutes a utopia, and where the horizon of the communist hypothesis, as French Maoist Alain Badiou has termed it, should be fixed relative to the everyday lives and struggles of those merely casually engaged in the possibility of political change. Fred Jameson has noted that "the Utopian impulse ... is profoundly economic, and that everything in it, from the transformation of personal relations to that of production, of possession, of life itself, constitutes the attempt to imagine the life of a different mode of production, that is to say, of a different economic system."

Carles implicitly draws on this thesis, illustrating it by contrasting two fundamentally differing modes of production and reproduction of the laboring classes within a characteristic, if not the paradigmatic, service industry of the late capitalist period, namely the fast-food restaurant. Carles even calls fast-food dining "the only 'shared human experience' that we can use 2 relate 2 other humans."

On the one hand McDonald's, with its emphasis on fried food and "super sized" portions; on the other Subway, with its toasted sandwiches and relatively unprocessed vegetable toppings. In Subway's rise -- surpassing the once mighty McDonald's in number of worldwide locations -- Carles suggests that we see the rudiments of an emerging alternative, an economic order that stresses flexibility and opportunism in order to subsume more and more of quotidian experience to the all-encompassing ubiquity of the sandwich, an emblematic meal form of an accelerationist culture. This model stresses post-Fordist values of convenience and speed over other potential consumption goals, even somatic satisfaction, and produces an effective redundancy of options, an overdetermination of dining habits:

So many Subways in my local area
that whenever I am craving a sandwich
it just seems more cost + time effective 2 go 2 my local Subway
which is located 'just around the corner'
potentially inside of a gas station
inside of a Walmart

The "ubiquity" of Subway -- the word is critical to Carles's analysis, such that he leads the essay with its dictionary definition -- produces the subject's cravings, manufactures the desire for that which already exists in overabundance. In this way, debased utopias are forged, retrofitting existing surpluses that inefficiently serve the purposes of capitalist accumulation to a consumerist fantasy about easy access to what one longs for. That Subway promotes itself as a healthy alternative only attenuates the fantasy further. The chain promises longevity and convenience, as though they were mutually reinforcing, as if the time saved through hectic consumerism were to be added on to one's life expectancy. Carles coins a clever name for this particular utopian vision: "plausible 'over-expansion.'" The crises of overproduction that have threatened capitalism since the late 20th century are magically waved away.

But another discursive label for this phenomenon has been circulating in leftist circles. Subway presents itself, Carles seems to suggest, as what Erik Olin Wright has dubbed, somewhat oxymoronically, a "real Utopia," which Wright defines as "utopian ideals that are grounded in the real potentials of humanity, utopian destinations that have accessible waystations, utopian designs of institutions that can inform our practical tasks of navigating a world of imperfect conditions for social change." That Subway can vanquish McDonald's and promote healthful convenience would seem a really existing manifestation of progressive politics in action, of solidarity manifesting itself spontaneously:

Taking a step back
And thinking abt what we have in common with other humans
What common ground we have with ppl from all over the world
Ppl who are poor, rich, middle class, uneducated, black, white, Chinese, etc.

The only thing we share
is the low price consumer experience

But as Carles is quick to insist, we must not be taken in by the consumerist ruse and blind ourselves to the labor realities that underwrite this ersatz real utopia.

Subway couldn't do this without the little people
The Sandwich artists who come into work every day
and resentfully make your sandwich 4 u
and h8 u for asking for 'a little bit more spinach/lettuce'

Carles adroitly suggests that "little people" are at once "artists," demonstrating the way post-Fordist labor arrangements are such that workers are often "paid" in flattering titles rather than wages, and of course this leads to mounting rage, as the proletariat is pitted against itself, fictitiously split into laborers and consumers. This divide-and-conquer strategy, by which proles vent their frustration on each other in bouts of consumer petulance over allegedly negligent service from their fellow comrades exhausted by inhumane demands made by capitalist bosses, exposes the true divisions underlying the false consumerist unity.

So it is that we are confronted with a dialectical movement that meets "our own version of sandwichian utopia" promising "more consumer freedom than ever" and the capability "to customize our own version of reality" with the antithesis of exploitation, suffering, alienation, belittlement and ignominy in the workplace experience in which one must ask whether "the ppl who work at Subway 'complete ass holes' or just modern slaves?."

"Our own version of fast food Subway has liberated us," Carles declares ironically, for it is a false freedom, a real utopia that is in fact an underground train to hell.