Commons-based alternatives to capitalism have been present from day one, they have often been regarded “as roads not taken,” but they are more accurately described as “roads blown up.” In this panel we will present some historical contextualization: the conjoining of the State and the Market against the Commons that has an origin which indeed questions not only capitalism but the geological epoch now named by many the “anthropocene”. We will discuss some commons-based alternatives to capitalism, with special emphasis on the Zapatistas who have definitely revitalized and scaled up the notion and practice of commoning. Their project now involves hundreds of villages, tens of thousands of hectares of land, and more than a hundred thousand participants. Their collective effort is one of the most creative alternatives to capitalism on the planet. In the last twenty years they have made it clear that they will cooperate neither with Mexican state agencies and political parties nor with capitalist firms. They argue (against many critics) that the commoning form of life they are developing cannot co-exist as a sector of a triune society alongside the state sector and capital sector. George Caffentzis, Peter Linebaugh
