Alternatives

Introduction
Relevant Articles
Other Resources

Introduction

In this project area we highlight efforts to create alternatives to dominant institutions, build counter-cultural communities, and provide mutual aid. We also discuss how prefigurative activism—or organizing which is designed to model ways of living that promote liberation and social justice—can interact with attempts to create change within mainstream structures.

Relevant Articles

Should We Fight the System or Be the Change?

By Mark Engler and Paul Engler
June 3, 2014

The strengths and limitations of prefigurative politics.

How movements can maintain their radical vision while winning practical reforms

By Mark Engler and Paul Engler
May 10, 2022

Forty years of struggle by Brazil's landless workers movement offers lessons on engaging the system without being co-opted.

Other Resources

For further reading on the development of alternative institutions in social movements, we recommend the following:

The Mondragon Cooperatives in the Basque Region of Spain provide an important model of study for those interested in building economic alternatives. See: Making Mondragón: The Growth and Dynamics of the Worker Cooperative Complex, by William Foote Whyte and Kathleen King Whyte, Cornell University Press, 1991; and We Build the Road as We Travel: Mondragon, a Cooperative Social System, by Roy Morrison, Beech River Books, 1997.

Another useful model for study is Gandhi’s “Constructive Program” and the related development of the Sarvodaya movement, particularly in Sri Lanka. See: “Gandhi’s Constructive Program: A New Society in the Shell of the Old,” by Joanne Sheehan, August 12, 2014, Satyagraha Foundation; and Dharma and Development: Religion as Resource in the Sarvodaya Self-Help Movement, by Joanna Macy, Kumarian Press, 1983.

We recommend Rebecca Tarlau’s work on Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement, which examines how the MST combines the creation of alternative institutions with direct action, structure-based organizing, and inside-outside politics. See: “Thirty Years of Landless Workers Demanding State Power,” by Rebecca Tarlau, October 7, 2014, Berkeley Journal of Sociology; and Occupying Schools, Occupying Land: How the Landless Workers Movement Transformed Brazilian Education, by Rebecca Tarlau, Oxford University Press, 2019.

Three important books that explore positive and negative aspects of prefigurative politics are:
- Community and Organization in the New Left, 1962–1968: The Great Refusal, by Wini Breines, Rutgers University Press, 1989.
- Political Protest and Cultural Revolution: Nonviolent Direct Action in the 1970s and 1980s, by Barbara Epstein, University of California Press, 1993.
- Hegemony How-To: A Road Map for Radicals, by Jonathan Matthew Smucker, AK Press, 2017.

Andrew Cornell’s study of the Movement for a New Society profiles an organization that sought to combine communal living, direct action, self-education, and alternative institutions. See: Oppose and Propose!: Lessons from Movement for a New Society, by Andrew Cornell, AK Press, 2011.