Any anti-capitalist movement has at some point or other to deal with the nature of urban life and social reproduction and seek out paths towards a radical transformation of social relations, of productive apparatuses, of ways of living and in the relation to nature.  Experiments under way right now, some of which have been the focus of concern in this conference, pre-figure what a future social order might look like.  But there is a need to bring many of these moving parts of transformation together around a more organic conception of city life as a whole and ask the question: what will an anti-capitalist city look like and what would it be like to live there?

Sin Patron (without a boss) describes a new social creation taking place around the world. Coined by people in the recuperated workplace movement in Argentina, it has come to mean not only working literally without bosses and hierarchy, but represents a new way of relating based on solidarity and the creation of a value system outside the framework of capitalist value production. This new way of working and relating is taking place in everything from metal and print shops, hotels and restaurants to emergent self-organized groups and collectives, from Argentina, Brazil and Greece, to Chicago in the US.
Marina Sitrin, moderator, Claudia Acuña Debbie Litsa

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