Other economies are possible :

Can thousands of diverse, locally-rooted,grassroots economic projects form the basis for a viable democratic alternative to capitalism? It might seem unlikely that a motley array of initiatives such as worker, consumer, and housing cooperatives,community currencies, urban gardens,fair trade organizations, intentional communities,and neighborhood self-help associations could hold a candle to the pervasive and seemingly allpowerful capitalist economy. These “islands of alternatives in a capitalist sea” are often small in scale, low in resources, and sparsely networked.

They are rarely able to connect with each other,much less to link their work with larger, coherent structural visions of an alternative economy.

Indeed, in the search for alternatives to capitalism,existing democratic economic projects are frequently painted as noble but marginal practices, doomed to be crushed or co-opted by the forces of the market. However it is precisely these innovative, bottom-up experiences of production, exchange, and consumption that are building the foundation for what many people are calling “new cultures and economies of solidarity.”

Grassroot Economic Organizing, June-July 2006