On Political Imagination and the 
Claiming of Our World-Building Potential

It is with great pleasure that I write these words in commentary on the contributions gathered in this edition of Occupational Punk vol. 3. Reading the texts presented here was a transformative experience, capable of affecting my own narrative about everyday life on Earth. Imagining worlds and producing narratives about shared life is a fundamental human need, which demands continuous activation and sustenance — especially if we wish to reclaim the authorship of our own history.

By allowing myself to be affected by the narratives imagined here, I was repeatedly led to recall the reasons that moved me to cultivate soil, herbs, and food in my backyard, resignifying the meaning of everyday life and my sense of connection. I also reaffirmed my daily commitment to emancipatory projects, responding to the urgent need for anti-capitalist struggle and resistance to the advance of the far right, which aligns itself with a logic of planetary consumption and oppression. This refers to a connection with the Earth, with my ancestry, with future generations, and with those who share this planet with me in the present. I thus begin by thanking the editorial team for the opportunity to take on this role, and the authors of this edition — as well as all those who submitted texts — for the exercise of life and connection expressed and nurtured by their work.

The reason why these texts transformed me seems to reside in the revolutionary potential of analysing everyday life as a pillar of social totality (Galheigo, 2020; Farias, Lopes, 2021). Although constitutive of our condition as social beings, everyday life can only be grasped through an analysis that transcends its appearance towards its essence. For this, it is crucial to analyse the mediations enacted by human activity in the everyday life. To glimpse — and activate — its transformative potential, it is necessary to recognise the ontology of the social being structured in everyday life; that is, to collectively understand how each action manifests the totality and simultaneously transforms not only the world around us, but also ourselves (Lukács, 1980).

The concept of teleology offers an important interpretative key for this understanding. It refers to the capacity to imagine the outcome of an action before its execution — not merely as planning, but as intending transformation and recognising oneself within it (Mendes-Gonçalves, 2017). This process activates our engagement in the shared world, guiding how we select the materials with which we interact, determine the order of each gesture, and indeed, engage in everyday occupations. We must imagine before we can build something.

However, this capacity is sometimes interrupted. The concept of estrangement helps to explain this rupture: it concerns the phenomenon of separation between ourselves and the outcome of our activity in the shared world. In estrangement, we carry out tasks without recognising ourselves in them, establishing a utilitarian-practical relationship with everyday life, manipulating artefacts without an awareness that the world in which we could live depends on reclaiming the creative potential that lies within us (Farias, Lopes, 2022; Marx, 1984). Estrangement affects all individuals within the capitalist context, as capitalism depends on estrangement and alienation to generate profit from human labour. After all, if all of us could be horrified by the structure of capitalist labour — as happens with the young woman in Everyday Value — we would hardly accept it for long.

Rosana Pinheiro-Machado (2022), in a profound anthropological analysis of our times, identifies that the advance of the far right relates to an appropriation of the anger and insubordination of impoverished and oppressed populations, who constitute the majority. While it is legitimate to resist and act to overcome what oppresses us, resistance can take many forms. Especially in a context of capitalist cultural hegemony, individualism, competitiveness, and the notion of scarcity lead us to believe that we must fight only for ourselves and, at most, for our own.

In a world saturated with catastrophic narratives that exalt solitary heroes and absolute villains, imagining together is an act of resistance. Recognising that we are connected by something in common is a political gesture. It means acknowledging that our limitations do not stem from resource scarcity, but from isolation and the belief that we do not belong. It is imperative to reclaim hope as an active proposal, in line with the ideas of Paulo Freire and bell hooks (Farias, Lopes, 2022; Freire, 2005; Pinheiro-Machado, 2022; hooks, 2021). Texts infused with critical imaginative potential, like those in this edition, can support the redirection of just indignation and the production of radical needs to overcome the capitalist mode of production (Mendes-Gonçalves, 2017). It is a matter of contesting the legitimate anger and insubordination of oppressed populations, aligning them — and aligning ourselves — with a movement of collective and emancipatory transformation.

In this context, political imagination and hope become essential (Von Hunty, 2022). To imagine is to outline possibilities for the world. For this, we must possess a repertoire of possibilities and, above all, a consciousness of ourselves as subjects capable of imagining. Célia’s anguish in Let’s eat, when faced with her estrangement from the ability to imagine and plan a simple meal, reveals how nefarious — and how close — this estrangement truly is.

It is imperative to open up spaces that allow us to reclaim our doing, in its full teleological and ontological complexity. By experimenting with materials, relationships, and gestures, we become able to construct new repertoires and imagine previously unthinkable responses, such as the magical and ancestral use of the little finger in Otro cielo es punksible. The narratives in this edition constitute a meta-experimentation: the movement required for writing these stories, as well as that produced in those who read (or listen to) them, activates exercises of utopia and political imagination. This experience has the potential to engender new movements in everyday life by instating novel teleological processes aimed at connection, sharing, and a sense of belonging to a common project.

Connection and belonging emerge as central elements in reclaiming our creative condition. It becomes clear that an illusion of connection is not enough — no matter how realistic it may seem — as exemplified in the dialogue with artificial intelligence in Found, or in the holographic club in Outside. The sense of depth in a gaze exchanged without screens, as described in Transhumance, points to the need for experience and consciousness accompanied by a narrative that provides meaning — so that we may desire to break with daily oppressions and create innovative responses for shared life (Farias, Lopes, 2022). We must meet, touch, and see each other without interface mediation, so that genuine belonging can emerge.