The Rocky Road of Post-Capitalist Grassroots Experimentation

This paper explores more radical notions of social and ecological transitions beyond life as currently conceived under capitalism. It forms an inquiry into the everyday practices of what is called post-capitalist grassroots experimentation. It explores what these practices mean through an empirical case study of a community-led housing project in the North of England. Drawing on six themes which were derived from in-depth interviews with residents, this paper explores how everyday practices in this project give shape to post-capitalist grassroots experimentation: taking risks, transformational change, a fine grained approach to place making, deepening deliberative democracy, embedding security in insecure times, and learning. By drawing on the concept of the urban commons, the paper concludes by sketching out some future issues along the rocky road to post-capitalism. First, exploring these practices as part of a minoritarian politics focused on qualitative development rather than mere quantitative growth offers different perspectives on scaling up. This kind of prototype niche experiment is more interested in break-out from, rather than breakthrough to, the dominant regime. Second, these practices represent hybrid bottom-up and middle-out forms of experimentation, which can help form novel meso-level institutions to deepen a post-capitalist urban commons. Finally, this kind of grassroots experimentation acts as a reminder of the need for deeper critiques of global capitalist urbanization, and that the broader struggle remains resisting the further embedding of capital accumulation and commodification rather than mere environmental or climate change issues. Drawing on Holloway’s (2010) concept of cracks, we can see that the daily practices of niche experiments represent a complex spatial politics of being simultaneously in, against and beyond life under capitalism.