Alter Worlds Template

Alter-Worlds Ian Shaw and Marv Waterstone	Wageless Life: A Manifesto for a Future beyond Capitalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020.
Author: Who proposed it and why (purpose)	Ian Shaw is senior lecturer in human geography at the University of Glasgow. He is author of Predator Empire (Minnesota, 2016). Marv Waterstone is professor emeritus in the School of Geography and Development at the University of Arizona, where he has been a faculty member for more than thirty years.
Time horizon: stated, implied, or unclear	Unclear
Scope: global/regional/national or affluent/emerging/poor	Local scale on the global scene
Key Drivers	Shifting values, Technology acceleration, Inequality, Automation, Stagnation, Climate and carrying capacity, Ineffective left
Key Ideas	Their call is for a shift from work oriented by capitalist laboring at increasingly meaningless jobs to a vision of work directed at resourcing Alter-Worlds. The kinds of things they are talking about: temporary and permanent autonomous zones, worker’s councils, community gardens, free schools, pirate radio stations, squats, collectives, communes, LETs, and other parallel institutions. These spaces offer refuge and prefiguring new post-capitalist politics. A prominent example they refer to is the Zapatista movement in Mexico.   Bring in Polanyi’s three communal forces that capital destroyed, using their restoration as part of the solution: Reciprocity, a territorially bound principle of give – and – take or obligation Redistribution, the sharing and exchange of goods between people , as with potlatch Householding or autarky, the production for one’s own needs
Ideal or guiding values: something akin to an organizing principle/motivation, i.e., create a more just or fair society	There is not a single or all-encompassing approach but rather lots of them. And there is a lot that can be learned from movements springing up outside or on the margins of the system.
Emotional, aesthetic, and spiritual aspects: is it appealing or compelling	In some ways, this makes it refreshing as it suggests very tangible ways that one can start working toward this new future vision now
Personal: How are individuals affected by this future? Who’s bearing the most costs, who’s accruing the benefits?	It’s a very personal and local vision. It’s a question of knowing how to fight, to pick locks, to set broken bones and treat sickness; how to build a pirate radio transmitter; how to set up street kitchens; how to aim straight; how to gather together scattered knowledge and set up wartime agronomics; understand plankton biology; soil composition; study the ways plants interact; get to know possible uses for and connections with our immediate environment as well as the limits we can’t go beyond without exhausting it.”
Pathway or plan	It is suggesting that progress can be made by working on the margins or outside the system today.