ABSTRACT
If the rise of the World Social Forum is any indication, there is a groundswell of support for alternatives to capitalism. But within this movement that links North and South, ‘developed’ and less ‘developed’ nations worldwide, the debate as to what constitutes an economic alternative is fraught with judgments about the purity or contamination of what is on offer. Wholehearted experimentation with the premise that ‘other economies are possible’ is held back by the critical voices (many in our own heads) arguing that this or that element of an alternative project is no different from capitalism or is insufficient to withstand the colonizing forces of the ‘capitalist’ market. J.K. Gibson-Graham’s recently published book A Postcapitalist Politics (2006) argues that the danger of taking too much notice of these objections is that desires for alternatives become destabilized and the intentional practice of building alternatives gets undermined. It seems that a prerequisite for enacting economic alternatives to capitalism is an affective stance that will enable us, as authors, researchers and activists, to be a condition of possibility (rather than impossibility) for the emergence of other worlds and other economies. In this short chapter we discuss how we have cultivated a stance that enables possibility, while building economic alternatives alongside or perhaps outside of something called ‘capitalism’.
