Alternatives to capitalist domination of social production are creating cracks in the system across the world.

Concrete utopias for social reproduction are discussed throughout this book and I do not want to list those again here. Further examples can include the mutual aid groups that sprung up globally under COVID-19, as well as ones that pre-existed this period, throughout the world. Sitrin and Colectiva Sembrar (2020) collect examples from Argentina, Brazil, India, Iraq, Mozambique, South Africa, South Korea, Syria, Taiwan, Turkey, and Zimbabwe, as well as Europe and North America. In the slums of the world, people raise animals on rooves and grow vegetables on windowsills. Urban squatters internationally are self-provisioning. In Africa, landless women have migrated to towns and appropriated vacant lots of land. Accra community gardens supply the city with up to 90 per cent of its vegetables. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, manioc is grown across the city and goats graze on green areas of streets. In Southern Nigeria, crops are grown and cows graze on university campuses. In Athens, the Exarchia neighbourhood hosts squats and social centres that provide solidary housing, healthcare, social and cultural spaces, and food to refugees, migrants, and others (Karlin, 2022). In the Taita Hills in Kenya, following the failure of colonial irrigation systems, locals have returned to precolonial systems based on complex common property, with households responsible for the sections close to them and repairs and decisions about the allocation of water policed locally (Brand, 2010; Federici, 2019; Basu, 2020b). Kothari (2014) highlights thousands of initiatives in India for decentralized water provision, biodiversity conservation, education, governance, the production of food, materials and energy, and waste management rurally and in urban areas. In the Mexican Oaxaca Commune of 2016, women organized collective reproduction, appropriating and redistributing resources such as food, water, fuel, and medical supplies.

Conclusions

I have been outlining in this chapter and the last one a mix of Marxism, anarchism, social democracy, and democratic socialism. These perspectives can all be the bases of alternative societies within capitalism. I have talked about transformations away from capitalism, the Marxist part. I have outlined autonomous initiatives from below, an anarchist element. I have introduced reformism via the state, the social democratic aspect. Economic democracy, which came up in Chapter 1 and that I will return to, especially in Chapter 5, is the democratic socialist component. These perspectives are often seen as opposed, and they can be. But they can all be part of alternative societies within capitalism and beyond it. In this book, I think the points made imply pluralist democratic socialism, incorporating these diverse tendencies, as an overarching framework.

Some of the themes and alternatives I have discussed in this chapter and the previous one, but not all, I will take up in the rest of the book in more depth. I have talked about: communism, co-operation, participatory economics, less work, a slow society, eco-localism, and online alternatives; alternative education, communes, food counterculture, alternative social centres, alternatives to prison, and social democracy. I have outlined forms of alternative society based less on money and corporate and managerial power, and more on human needs and self-determination. The examples I have used have been about these goals. They have often involved communist or socialist and utopian principles but within capitalism, here and now, as well as breaking with capitalism and going beyond it.

I will finish this chapter with a contribution made by John Holloway. I do not agree with everything Holloway says. For instance, he is against using state power, and a key point for me in this book is that I see non- political initiatives and state politics as compatible and mutual, if not without tensions. However, Holloway wrote an interesting book called Crack Capitalism (2010). He uses the word ‘crack’ as both a noun and a verb. So, he says you can find cracks in capitalism where non-capitalist things go on, like some of the examples I have mentioned – co-ops, freeganism, squats, Occupy, and so on. But you can also crack capitalism (crack as a verb) – you can create cracks like these. Holloway talks about alternative societies being built in the present and not in the distant future, and he discusses alternative societies or cracks being made by ordinary people, not leaders. He discusses them as prefigurative. So, types of alternative society are experimented with now and if they work out well, they can be a basis for a bigger alternative society in the future. I mentioned this approach in Chapter 1 when outlining Mill’s proposals for co-operative experimental socialism. Holloway discusses crack capitalism as a politics of misfitting. People who do not want to devote themselves to making profits for private actors do not fit in, so they must find new, alternative places for themselves. This misfitting becomes the basis for alternative societies within capitalism. He talks about dignity and says lots of us lack dignity because we do not have much self-determination in our lives. This is what I have been looking at: alternative societies which are about putting humans first and where we can have the dignity of self-determination.