Alternative Economic Systems

Catalog description

This course offers a critical examination of economic possibilities, alternative production systems, and subjectivities that can be considered postcapitalist in that they strive to transcend what is conceivable within the current socio-economic order. The critiques and experiments examined here include both past and present attempts to carve out autonomous spaces of non-capitalist production. We will embark on a journey through popular economic organizations, communal self-management of land, experiments in solidarity economy, community economy, and participatory economics, and self-organized workplaces and cooperatives. In doing so, we arrive at a very different notion of development, a perspective grounded in a number of noncapitalist or postcapitalist struggles in different parts of the world. Such struggles for dignity and alternative production systems are epistemic, critical, and prefigurative. At once challenging and re-imagining development, those struggles contribute to an emerging sensibility that another world is possible (McMichael 2009).