| Serrano, Melisa R. and EdliraXhafa (2012) The Pursuit of Alternatives: Stories of Peoples’ Economic and Political Struggles Around the World. München, Mering: Rainer Hampp Verlag. | |
Stories of peoples’ struggles
across the globe are testaments to their determination to resist
exploitation and injustice, and to imagine and construct their own
narratives of economic and political difference. These stories of
emancipatory moments demonstrate that something radically different in
terms of dominant socio-economic relations and mental conceptions of the
world may arise out of and beyond capitalism. The Pursuit of
Alternatives: Stories of Peoples’ Economic and Political Struggles
Around the World presents a fresh and new perspective on how the
‘process of becoming’ alternatives might take place based on peoples’
lived experiences. The chapters here, by labour activists and academics,
explore how various forms of peoples’ economic and political
initiatives and struggles in six countries – Brazil, Canada, Colombia,
Nigeria, the Philippines, and South Korea – might become ‘actually
existing’ spaces and moments for the development of critical
consciousness and transformative capacities which are both central in
challenging the dominant social, economic and political relations. The
stories in this book bring to light today’s language of peoples’
struggles; what inspires people to create their own emancipatory moments
and spaces for transformative self-change. While this book does not aim
to propose an alternative to capitalism per se, it makes a stimulating
contribution to the continuing debate on what alternatives to capitalist
relations and arrangements might look like by grounding these
alternatives in the everyday lives and struggles of workers, women,
aboriginal peoples, the unemployed, and the poor.
