There’s quite a list — turns out there’s no One Easy Trick to build­ing an entire par­al­lel econ­o­my. Just for starters: Work­er coop­er­a­tives; com­mu­ni­ty land trusts for green afford­able hous­ing; neigh­bor­hood veg­etable gar­dens; free health clin­ics; barter net­works and time banks; par­tic­i­pa­to­ry bud­get­ing, in which com­mu­ni­ties demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly deter­mine local spend­ing pri­or­i­ties; and more.

Do We Real­ly Need a New Economy?

It’s hard to look at ris­ing inequal­i­ty and ris­ing tem­per­a­tures, shrug one’s shoul­ders, and say the present econ­o­my is fine as it is. But it’s one thing to cri­tique the old, and anoth­er to actu­al­ly build some­thing new. Reformists see sol­i­dar­i­ty econ­o­my efforts as a way to ​“fix” cap­i­tal­ism; for some social­ists, they’re a stop­gap to help peo­ple get by until the Left seizes the state. But some enthu­si­asts see the sol­i­dar­i­ty econ­o­my as both the means and the end: a bot­tom-up, ful­ly func­tion­ing econ­o­my out­side of cap­i­tal­ism, even­tu­al­ly replac­ing it entirely.

So, Does It Work?

Plen­ty of indi­vid­ual work­er co-ops (around 300 in the U.S.), com­mu­ni­ty gar­dens and oth­er sol­i­dar­i­ty econ­o­my insti­tu­tions are flour­ish­ing. Many, too, strug­gle to take off in the cap­i­tal­ist mar­ket­place — tra­di­tion­al fund­ing sources aren’t always too enthused about the whole ​“peo­ple and plan­et over prof­it” thing. But var­i­ous orga­ni­za­tions are exper­i­ment­ing with alter­na­tive finance meth­ods, and groups like the New Econ­o­my Coali­tion are try­ing to link these scat­tered efforts into a larg­er, more resilient move­ment. Nowhere has this vision been ful­ly real­ized, but advo­cates from Jack­son, Miss., to Cleve­land to Barcelona are mak­ing progress.