An increasing number of initiatives, organizations and networks are challenging the hegemony of capitalism in Catalonia. Going beyond the familiar slogan ‘another world is possible’ (Ponniah and Fisher, 2003), the people involved in these projects are trying to show that ‘another world is already in existence’ (un altre món ya existeix). Within the context of this edited volume, I would like to draw attention to the fact that many contemporary alternative economic projects revolve around generating the conditions necessary for people to pursue a worthy existence, often alongside or even entirely outside of wage employment (Gibson-Graham, 1996; Jonas, 2010; Zademach and Hillebrand, 2013). I seek to understand why many of my interlocutors explicitly rejected, as they called it, ‘el món assalariat’ (‘the world of wages’) and sought instead a ‘life worth living’ (Nartozky and Besnier, 2014, S5).

In this chapter I draw on 14 months of fieldwork in 2016–2017 with an eco-network (ecoxarxa) and an affiliated cooperative-cum-social movement based in Barcelona in order to examine various articulations of ‘alternative’ work that fell outside of the wage labour relation. In particular, I will show that the members of the Cooperative and eco-network actively sought to minimize their dependence on waged labour out of a desire to pursue a life lived outside of a routinized, ‘capitalist’ work rhythm. I will argue that the literature on precarious work is ill-equipped to analyse cases such as this, where people eschew waged labour and the supposed existential stability this kind of work is thought to bring. Instead, I will draw on recent ethnographic studies from Latin America which examine how people fashion a meaningful existence through different kinds of work that are often characterized as precarious or informal (Gandolfo, 2010; Millar, 2018; O’Hare, 2020). In this way, this chapter contributes to the ‘decentering’ (Ferguson and Li, 2018) of waged labour by examining experiences of work in Catalonia in relation to perspectives from wage-scarce economies in other regions of the world.

In particular, I will show that the literature on precarious work tends to direct our analytic gaze solely towards the material insecurity of ‘wageless lives’ (Denning, 2010).