I will outline alternative economies and social alternatives in this and the next chapter. I will be discussing alternatives in both theory and practice, and ones that have been tried beyond current societies as well as within them. I want to raise some key themes. Some will come up in more depth in the rest of the book, but I will highlight some initially now. One is about socialism after the failure of so-called communism. Another concerns utopianism, not just in the future but also here and now. Another is about goals like human needs and self-determination. Implicit in all these is capitalism. I do not think capitalism is oriented to human goals and self-determination. It is about money and profit rather than human ends. And it is organized around capitalist and managerial power rather than self-determination. This is not to say you cannot achieve human ends and self-determination within capitalism. One of the things I want to say in this book is that you can. But they are not the ends of capitalism.

I will come back to utopianism in more depth in Chapter 3, but I will say a few words about it here as this chapter and the rest of the book are in many ways about utopias. The word ‘utopia’ is usually used to mean somewhere that is good, desirable, or even ideal but that does not exist. It may never exist, or it may do sometime in the future. Take feminism and the women’s movement, the civil rights movement, the movement for working-class representation in politics, the movement for worker representation in employment, by which I mean trade unions, the movement for the welfare state, and the movement for independence from colonial domination – all of these seemed radical and utopian in their early days. But people pursued them and these past utopianisms became real. Critics of radical protest and utopianism today often sympathize with these historical radical and utopian movements and their achievements, yet are negative about radicalism and utopianism now. There is an inconsistency and lack of history in that perspective.