The occupation of the first squats at the beginning of the 1990s to create self managed social centres planted a seed which, within a few years, had created a new political culture, one which dissents from the institutional system and generates life experiences which represent alternatives to the dominant model.

There are self managed social centres with diverse names and ways of functioning. The most historical ones include the libertarian “ateneus”, which recuperate anarchist traditions from before the civil war of 1936-39. There are also the “Casals populars” (“houses of the people”), which have an increasing presence the towns and villages, and contribute to the emerging independentist movement which shares the values of self management discussed here. And of course there are many autonomous social spaces with no ideological label other than that of creating theory on the basis of a practice which they never cease to push forward. Some of these centres are squatted, others are rented, ceded by individuals, or have been wrestled from the administration through a neighbourhood struggle, but all share the values being talked about here. There are more than a hundred of them around Catalonia.

Social centres usually become known as alternatives for non consumerist leisure, through a busy program of activities in the evenings and at weekends. But they are a lot more than that: they are a basic space for socialisation where we can learn to relate to each other in different ways. They are spaces in which to learn without hierarchies, and they are the best context for many of the experiences discussed below to germinate.

Another key example of autonomous practices on the path towards a new society are ecological consumers’ cooperatives. These are groups of families which organise themselves together, by means of assemblies, to buy from local ecological producers, thus avoiding intermediaries. In this way, they give a strong boost to agroecology, they promote alternative economic relations based on solidarity, and help to rebuild social relations in the local community. While there were already a few of these at the end of the 1990s, they have multiplied spectacularly over the last 5 or 6 years. In Catalonia, from where we have information, there are now around 80 of these coops. Some of them receive a basket directly of whatever the farmer has, while others make an order for what they want. In some of them, active participation as a volunteer is a condition of membership; others allow more passive participation and professionalise some of the process. All of them together make up a growing agroecological movement.

Work is one of the basic aspects of living in a different way. Given that work is one of the activities which occupies most time during our life, it is essential to be able to stop working for a businessperson who forms part of the growth economy. There are experiences of work cooperatives which have functioned for many years, in sectors as diverse as printing, lawyers’ practices, insurance, engineering, graphic design, renewable energy, translation, IT, etc. Some of these function in a participative way through assemblies while they try to maintain a socially and environmentally coherent productive activity. There are some who initiate a small productive project individually or in a small group. For example, there are more and more people who escape from the capitalist circuit to offer their services as craftspeople — producing vegetables, fruit, bread, beer, soft drinks, chickens, cheese, honey, pasta, wine, soap, toys or magazines, among others — thus extending the scope of short supply chains, and putting in place an economic network which is an alternative to the dominant system.

Even in the area of finance, which we have criticised so much in other pages, there are alternatives. There is the experience of Coop 57, which provides alternative financing for cooperatives and social entities, while offering individuals a politically coherent saving option. This coop, together with other bodies, is developing the Fiare Project, a citizens’ credit cooperative which would operate as a real alternative to banks, while we survive under the current system.

A strategic aspect of building another economy is to substitute exchanges in the dominant currency, in our case the Euro, with alternative options managed by civil society. Within the Catalan ambit, some exchange networks have consolidated themselves, facilitating direct interchange between individuals who wish to cover some need without going through the market. These networks tend to use Internet as a means of communication. Within these networks, products such as books, clothes, food, IT products, or even services such as babysitting or domestic repairs, are exchanged. These activities are supplemented by interchange markets, physical spaces where, for a morning or all day, people regularly exchange a wide range of products or agree to provide services. Given that alternative production is still at an early stage, the most typical thing in these spaces is to exchange second hand products, such as books, clothes or small electrical appliances. They thus represent a community alternative to consumerism, at the same time as helping to develop new social relations.

And while we are transforming the economy, what could be better than buying and selling for free? Over recent years, new projects have appeared in which anybody can bring what they don’t need and take away what they need, without payment. This is surely they best way of demarketising our needs, and of learning to give and receive without commercial relationships getting in the way.

What we most often find in these spaces are, firstly, clothes, and then books and music, though there is a tendency to diversify. The main impediment for this type of project is usually getting space without monetary cost, so they are most typically found in occupied spaces.

In some self managed social centres and other premises, there are small bookshops with critical and dissident publications, as well as distributors of music, T-shirts and other materials related to the counterculture which emerges out of the social movements. Posters, leaflets and pamphlets can also be found there for different mobilisations and for groups that are publicising their activities, as well as people who can inform you about these.

Another central idea of this other society that we are putting in place is that of freely sharing knowledge and culture. Thus we can find a good handful of social libraries where you can access texts on social struggles and criticism, and learn more about the various alternatives and ideas. Recently, they have come together in a network of social libraries which can be found on Internet.

Some projects involved in the idea of sharing knowledge have existed for years: Knowledge Exchange Networks. In these spaces, people offer workshops and courses about what they know, and are taught about what interests them, always without payment. Any type of knowledge may be offered or learnt: intellectual, technical, artistic or handiwork, depending on the abilities and interests of the participants. These are also important spaces for the creation of community and social relations.
Social centres and alternative movements often organise workshops and courses of different types, especially training aimed at helping us to apply self management to our daily life. Agroecology, alternative energies, self building, electricity, free programming, gender relations, facilitating meetings and many other types of knowledge reinforce the autonomous capability of the increasing numbers of people who opt for other ways of living.

In sharing knowledge, a key idea is to “allow copying”. More and more intellectual, scientific and artistic creations are questioning the concepts of authors’ royalties and patents and creating alternatives to these. There are Creative commons licences, which can be applied to literary, audiovisual, musical and scientific productions, promoting the possibility of copying and sharing without paying the authors. In this way, culture and knowledge spread among people without being privatised and without private interests prevailing over the common good.

The idea of “allowing copying” was born out of free programming, an already consolidated movement which has shown how networks based on social cooperation can be as or more effective than the big transnational corporations. From free programming came hacklabs, authentic autonomous laboratories of free information, which tend to be found in social centres. Also emerging from this culture are autonomous servers — which let us self manage our e-mail, web pages and our own IT security, without going through a commercial company — and free wireless networks — of which guifi.net is a reference point in the Catalan ambit — which go far beyond just sharing an Internet connection.

And if we are going to share, what could be more important than the basis for being able to feed ourselves, that is, the seeds which allow farmers to grow food? Given that industrial agriculture and especially genetically modified food are putting local varieties in grave danger, the task of conserving seeds, and providing them to local farmers who want to plant them again, is fundamental. Luckily, this is one of the tasks that the agroecological movement is carrying out, and across the country there are more and more seed banks which conserve biodiversity and protect life now and in the future.

Cultivating vegetables can also be a social and communal activity, not just a job. That is shown by the many community vegetable patches which have been established around Catalonia over the last few years. Luckily, there have always been plots for personal consumption, but it is especially interesting to learn to share and to recover community participation by cultivating a vegetable patch together. A good example of this are the community vegetable patches at Can Masdeu, the occupied country house in Collserola, on the outskirts of Barcelona.

By the way, plants don’t only produce food for people, but also many other resources for everyday life, such as curative products for our health. These are what are known as medicinal plants and the truth is that capitalism also makes our lives difficult in the field of health. One example is Stevia, a natural sweetener which has been shown to cure diabetes, but whose sale for health purposes is prohibited in the Spanish state. Could it be that the drug companies have no interest in a treatment that cures diabetes completely? Even so, Stevia is spreading among the social movements, after all, if we’re going to practise civil disobedience, what better than cultivating healthy plants?

And speaking of health, let’s move on to talk about alternatives for receiving newcomers to the world, since here we can also find options outside the realm of the hospitals and the drug companies. Groups which help women to give birth naturally, which promote breastfeeding and baby care groups, form part of a series of alternatives for newborn children which help to improve their wellbeing, during birth and in their first few months of life, with consequences for all their lives.

And advancing in time, the area of infant education mustn’t be left out while creating alternatives for a new society. Whether people develop as free beings, with values and initiative, or are passive and submit to the existing system, depends on education. Many mothers and fathers know that, so following some earlier initiatives, educational alternatives have multiplied over recent years. Sometimes they are fathers and mothers who educate their offspring at home, sometimes groups of families who educate their children together — increasingly with educators who, jointly with the families, guide the children in their learning, without subjecting them to excessively determined models — and there are some examples that can really be called free schools. There are projects for up to 12-year-olds, and it is intended to go further. This is what is known as free education, and within the Catalan ambit, the Free Education Network (Xarxa d’Educació Lliure, XELL) facilitates the creation of initiatives of this type, and links up those involved in them.

When looking for somewhere to live, and rather than waiting in vain for the administration to give us the right to housing, we guarantee it for ourselves. The squatting of empty housing is already a very frequent alternative in our country, though it is impossible to know how extended this option is, because many squats don’t publicise themselves. Sometimes squatting allows people to live for many years without having to face up to one of the largest items of expenditure imposed on us by the system, but squatting tends to be accompanied by the anxiety of not knowing how long it will last. Another option, which is more incipient but has a future, are usage rights housing cooperatives. In this format, which is much cheaper than mortgages and individual rental, ownership stays with the cooperative and participants cannot resell their rights at a different price than what they cost them, thus preventing speculation. It is an option which is widespread in other countries, and just beginning here thanks to the Sostre Cívic (Civil Roof) association.

These housing options are usually accompanied by alternative forms of communal living, which overcome the individualism of modern flats, creating spaces for communal use around the building, such as shared IT spaces, laundry, library or living room.
Such housing alternatives are ideal locations to self manage the production of energy, with experiences such as using thermal solar power to heat water and putting photovoltaic solar panels on the roof. Something else which is necessary in urban areas, and where experiences are already beginning, is in using roofs for gardening plots. In rural houses, there are starting to be experiences of creating small biogas generators to warm the building using organic residues.

And speaking of living together, there are even alternatives in one of the most untouchable areas of official culture. There are more and more people who are considering, and beginning to put into practice, alternatives to the nuclear family, which has been simply the western model for the last 50 years and has been useful to consumerism, given that it has helped to break wider social connections. Faced with that, and sharing ideas of the struggle against patriarchy and the sexual liberation movements, new models of relations are emerging, based on the freedom to love more than one person, with communication and transparency. Before it was called free love, now it is also known as polylove.

In the personal realm we also learn to relate with each other as equal and diverse persons, without discrimination by race, class, gender or sexual identity.

All the information which is deliberately ignored, all the mobilisations which we mentioned before, and all these alternatives which we are now presenting, have something in common, which is that they want to make themselves known and reach more people. Here we touch on a fundamental alternative for making other viewpoints known: the alternative media. They can be local, thematic, generalist… There are many in print and masses in Internet. There are a number of free radio stations, and very few TV channels. More typical is the production of interesting documentaries and news reports, which can often be found on Internet or through alternative distributors. Alternative media are projects which imply ongoing commitment and usually require a lot of dedication and effort, as well as needing economic resources to get beyond a minority audience. In the section of links you can find the web pages of many of these projects.

There are other collective alternatives and it is impossible to cover everything, but we hope that you have got an overall idea. In fact, we have shown you a good range of alternatives which are in operation and which affect many aspects of life. Now, what ideas are helping the people involved in these diverse initiatives to come together to build another society? How is the network being created? Of that, we will speak in the pages that follow.