Eruptions of Otherwise

Reclaiming Agency Beyond the Capitalist Monolith

Against the Mirage of Monolithic Capitalism

To walk the streets of California is to encounter the intricate architecture of solidarity economies: Black cultural organizers in Oakland building networks of worker-owned cooperatives that circulate wealth and decision-making within communities; the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust returning land to Indigenous stewardship and enacting collective care through rematriation ceremonies; the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative supporting tenants, many of them immigrants and people of color, to co-own and democratically govern their homes outside the pressures of speculative real estate; artists and activists in Santa Cruz establishing mutual aid funds and creative wildfires that support one another through crisis and transformation; and Monterey Bay’s expansion of social housing initiatives, where permanently affordable homes are insulated from market speculation and governed by residents themselves. There are countless examples.

These are not random acts of charity or isolated exceptions, but living, evolving ecosystems—rooted in mutuality, cultural memory, and the refusal to accept scarcity as destiny—that quietly and persistently rupture the supposed totality of capital. To walk through this world is to be surrounded not by the monolith of capital, but by a riotous polyphony of worlds.

The myth of a singular, all-encompassing capitalist system is a sleight of hand, a conjuring trick performed by those who benefit most from its supposed inevitability. But as Edouard Glissant reminds us, opacity is not a deficit but a right: the world is not transparent to capital, nor is capital transparent to the world. We live, instead, in a landscape of eruptions—sites of non-capitalist practice that persist, resist, and insist on alternative logics of relation, value, and survival.

This essay is a cartography of those eruptions, a refusal of capitalist realism (Fisher) and its suffocating closure. Drawing on the relational poetics of Glissant, the nomadic becomings of Deleuze and Guattari, the fungal entanglements of Anna Tsing, the material imagination of Gaston Bachelard, the radical reimaginings of Haraway, Barad, Bennett, Braidotti, Wynter, Hardt, Negri, Gibson-Graham, Zizek, and others—alongside the critical interventions of David Graeber, whose scholarship on debt, mutual aid, and bureaucracy fundamentally reframes both the story and the stakes—I argue that the world is always-already more than capital. Agency is not a privilege reserved for the market’s invisible hand; it is the birthright of every subject, every mushroom, every collective, every moment that slips the grasp of commodification.

In California, the cracks in the capitalist edifice are not mere accidents—they are the living tissue of other possible worlds. From the radical cooperatives of the Bay Area to the mutual aid networks that flourished during the pandemic—though some, such as Oakland At Risk, have since shuttered their operations—from Indigenous land rematriation movements to the underground economies of care, we witness not the absence of alternatives, but their irrepressible proliferation. This essay is a call to see, to name, and to inhabit those alternatives—not as utopian dreams deferred, but as the everyday reality of life in the ruins of capital.

The Myth of Totality: Capitalism as Spectacle and Ideology

Capitalism, we are told, is the air we breathe, the water in which we swim, the only game in town. This is the foundational myth of capitalist realism, as Mark Fisher so incisively diagnosed: the belief that “there is no alternative” is not a neutral observation but a hegemonic project, a psychic enclosure. It is a narrative so totalizing that it becomes invisible, naturalized, even as it is violently enforced. Yet, as Deleuze and Guattari remind us, every system is haunted by its own lines of flight, its own becomings and escapes. Capitalism deterritorializes, yes, but it cannot contain the multiplicity it unleashes; the world overflows its circuits, always.

Gibson-Graham’s The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It) is a direct assault on this myth. They argue that the economy is not a monolith but a “diverse economy,” a field of heterogeneity in which capitalist, non-capitalist, and anti-capitalist forms coexist, compete, and contaminate each other. The very insistence on capitalism’s totality is an act of ideological violence, erasing the everyday practices of barter, gifting, mutual aid, and care that persist beneath the radar of economic orthodoxy. David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years amplifies this by documenting how non-capitalist forms of exchange and mutuality precede, persist alongside, and often undergird what we conventionally describe as "the economy."

California, far from being a seamless capitalist machine, is a palimpsest of such practices. In Oakland, the Bay Area Community Exchange (BACE) Timebank thrives: neighbors exchange hours of labor—childcare, gardening, tutoring—outside the circuits of wage labor and commodification. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the now-defunct Oakland At Risk built a robust mutual aid network, providing groceries and medicine to elders and immunocompromised people, using a gift economy model that explicitly refused market logic. While it has ceased operations, numerous other mutual aid efforts have persisted or evolved throughout the Bay Area and beyond. Berkeley’s and Oakland’s farmers’ markets are not simply nodes of organic commerce but sites of barter, exchange, and the informal economies of immigrants and the undocumented. These are not marginal exceptions but constitutive eruptions, reminders that the “real economy” is always more than capital.

Non-Capitalist Eruptions: Everyday Practices of Otherwise

Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World offers a powerful metaphor for life in the ruins of capital: the matsutake mushroom, thriving in the disturbed landscapes left behind by industrial forestry, assembling worlds that elude commodification. Tsing’s multispecies ethnography is not just a story about fungi; it is a story about the persistence of non-capitalist life within, against, and beyond the circuits of extraction and accumulation.

In California, these eruptions are everywhere if we learn to see them. The LA Eco-Village is not merely an experiment in sustainable living; it is a living critique of property, profit, and privatization. (As of July 2025, LA Eco-Village continues to operate, though it has faced significant pressures since the pandemic.) Residents share resources, grow food collectively, and practice consensus-based governance. Their compost piles are not just waste management but acts of world-making, entangling humans, worms, microbes, and plants in a web of mutual flourishing.

Donna Haraway’s “companion species” and Karen Barad’s “intra-actions” remind us that agency is not the sole property of human subjects. In urban community gardens across Oakland and Los Angeles, tomatoes, bees, and soil microbes co-produce abundance outside the logic of profit. Bureaucratic or market pressures threaten some gardens, but others continue reclaiming land as commons. These are not utopian islands but insurgent commons, cracks in the pavement where other worlds take root.

David Graeber’s anthropological work, especially his essays and Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, foregrounds how everyday cooperation, kindness, and informal reciprocity—what he called “everyday communism”—precede and exceed market logics. He showed that mutual aid is not an anomaly, but the substrate of any functioning society.

Gaston Bachelard’s poetics of space invites us to attend to the home, the kitchen, the garden—not as sites of consumption, but as laboratories of resistance. The communal kitchen, where meals are shared and recipes exchanged, is a site of memory, imagination, and solidarity, a refusal of the atomized consumer subject.

Intersectionality, History, and the Lineage of Resistance

To understand the persistence and power of non-capitalist eruptions in California, we must situate them within a lineage of Black, Indigenous, and immigrant resistance. The Black Panther Party’s Free Breakfast Program, launched in Oakland in 1969, was not charity but a radical assertion of community self-determination and collective care—an early, iconic eruption of the otherwise that prefigures today’s mutual aid networks. Similarly, Chicano/a mutual aid societies and Asian American community clinics in California’s cities provided health, education, and legal support outside state and market structures.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s abolition geography teaches us that “freedom is a place,” and that creating life-affirming institutions—schools, gardens, clinics, kitchens—has always been central to Black and brown survival and flourishing. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s work on Indigenous resurgence and land-based practices deepens our understanding of how land rematriation and collective stewardship are not simply alternatives to capitalism, but refusals of its very terms.

Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything pushes this further by exposing the myth that capitalist or state-based societies are the culmination of progress; instead, they document the countless ways communities have organized around mutual aid, direct democracy, and shared resources throughout human history.

These histories make clear that non-capitalist eruptions are not new, nor are they apolitical—they are forged in struggle, shaped by race, gender, and migration, and continually adapt to new forms of enclosure and violence.

Agency, Relation, and the Right to Opacity

Edouard Glissant’s poetics of relation is a radical challenge to the transparency demanded by capital. To be opaque is to resist being rendered legible, measurable, and extractable by the market. Opacity is not a deficit but a mode of survival, a refusal to be reduced to data points or market segments.

Sylvia Wynter’s critique of the “overrepresentation of Man” as the universal subject of capitalism calls us to imagine other genres of being human. In California, the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust enacts this refusal daily, rematriating land to Indigenous stewardship and practicing forms of relation that exceed property and profit. Their ceremonies, gardens, and land trusts are not simply acts of resistance but eruptions of another world, one in which land is not a commodity but a relative.

Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic subjectivity is not a metaphor but a practice: to become otherwise, to refuse the fixity of capitalist identity, to inhabit the in-between. In the Bay Area, queer and trans collectives practice forms of kinship and care that defy the nuclear family and the wage relation, inventing new forms of life in the cracks of the old.

Drawing on Graeber’s analysis, the bureaucratic and capitalist drive to render life “legible” is precisely what undermines our social agency. His critique of “bullshit jobs” and the proliferation of pointless labor exposes the vast gap between what society claims is productive and what actually sustains and liberates community life.

Anti-Capitalist Movements and the Plurality of Struggle

Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s concept of the multitude is a direct rejoinder to the myth of capitalist totality. The multitude is not a unified subject but a swarm, a collective intelligence always in excess of capital’s attempts at capture. The Occupy Oakland port shutdowns in 2011 were not simply protests but acts of counter-logistics, disrupting the flow of goods and capital, opening space for new forms of solidarity and struggle.

Slavoj Zizek insists on the necessity of rupture—acts that interrupt the smooth reproduction of the system. The proliferation of mutual aid networks during the COVID-19 pandemic in California was such a rupture: neighbors organized food distribution, medical care, and rent support outside the logic of profit. While some groups have dissolved, many others have remained nimble, shifting from emergency response to building sustainable, ongoing networks of care. These networks were not charity but solidarity, a refusal of the market’s monopoly on value.

Black Lives Matter, immigrant rights groups, and climate justice coalitions in California are not simply responses to injustice; they are laboratories of the otherwise. Their blockades, occupations, and encampments are not just tactics but eruptions—moments when the world is remade, however briefly, in the image of justice rather than profit.

David Graeber’s activism and writing on direct action—and his leadership within the Occupy movement—articulated these moments as living experiments in direct democracy, mutual aid, and horizontal organization. His phrase “We are the 99%” became a rallying cry for collective agency beyond the market.

The Material Imagination: Building Worlds Otherwise

Jane Bennett’s vital materialism challenges the extractivist logic of capital by insisting on the agency of things, the vibrancy of matter. In California, the People’s Kitchen Collective in Oakland reimagines food not as commodity but as commons, history, and relation. Their meals are rituals of remembrance and resistance, feeding bodies and imaginations alike.

Karen Barad’s agential realism insists that the world is not a collection of resources but a field of entanglements. The community gardens, land trusts, and food co-ops of California are not simply alternatives but experiments in entangled living, in which humans, plants, and infrastructures co-produce value beyond the market.

Gibson-Graham’s community economies framework invites us to see these practices not as marginal or utopian, but as the everyday reality of life in the ruins of capital. The challenge is not to invent alternatives from scratch, but to recognize, nurture, and defend the alternatives that already surround us.

Graeber’s notion of “everyday communism”—the baseline sociality necessary for society to function—undergirds all such projects, insisting that building worlds otherwise is both perennial and necessary, and that the horizon of possibility extends far beyond capitalist realism.

Dismantling Systems: Fascism, Authoritarianism, and the Persistence of Non-Capitalist Eruptions

To write of alternatives in the United States today is to write in the shadow of a present storm. The myth of capitalist totality—already a fiction—now finds itself reinforced by a new, more sinister narrative: the rise of fascism and authoritarianism as both method and spectacle. The dismantling of democratic systems, the centralization of power, and the weaponization of the state against dissent are not abstractions but lived realities.

The current administration’s project—rooted in a white nationalist ideology and operationalized through technocratic coups, sweeping personnel changes, and the systematic undermining of civil society—bears the unmistakable marks of a 21st-century American fascism. What was once the slow violence of neoliberalism has become the open violence of the state: mass deportations, the targeting of migrants and transgender people, the suppression of protest, and the censorship of language and thought. The state, echoing Mussolini’s dictum—“everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State”—now seeks to regiment not only industry and commerce but the very boundaries of the imaginable.

Yet authoritarianism, as Deleuze and Guattari remind us, is never total. Fascism, for all its brutality, cannot eliminate the lines of flight, the becomings, the minoritarian practices that persist in the cracks of the system. The authoritarian turn is, in part, a reaction to these eruptions—a desperate attempt to foreclose the alternatives that proliferate beneath the surface. The targeting of NGOs, the criminalization of solidarity, the attacks on mutual aid networks and land trusts are acknowledgments, however perverse, of the power of non-capitalist and anti-authoritarian forms of life.

In California, these eruptions are both threatened and intensified by authoritarianism. The Sogorea Te’ Land Trust’s rematriation work faces increased surveillance and bureaucratic obstruction but persists, drawing strength from deep relational ties and the opacity of Indigenous knowledge. Mutual aid networks, including some that have been criminalized or forced to operate underground, continue to distribute food, medicine, and care. The People’s Kitchen Collective, LA Eco-Village, and countless informal economies adapt, morph, and endure, embodying what Glissant calls the right to opacity—the refusal to be fully known, mapped, or controlled.

Graeber’s late work, including The Utopia of Rules, illuminates how new forms of bureaucracy and repression breed creative forms of resistance; his anthropology of hope suggests that the unruliness of lived alternatives cannot be fully regimented or destroyed.

Reclaiming Agency Amidst Authoritarianism—Inhabiting the Eruptions of Otherwise

The myth of capitalist totality has always been a fiction, but in this moment—when the United States is engulfed in open authoritarianism and fascism—it becomes a weapon wielded with new ferocity. The state’s desperate project to dismantle democratic systems, to regiment the boundaries of the imaginable, and to criminalize solidarity is not a sign of strength, but of fear: fear of the unruly, generative alternatives that persist and proliferate in the cracks of both capital and the state.

As fascism asserts itself through violence, surveillance, and the suppression of dissent, it seeks to foreclose the very agency that defines us as collective and creative beings. Yet, as Glissant, Deleuze and Guattari, Tsing, Bachelard, and their interlocutors—and especially Graeber, whose life and work stand as testament—teach us, the world is always more than the systems that seek to contain it. The lines of flight, the becomings, the eruptions of non-capitalist life—these are not erased by authoritarianism; if anything, they become more vital, more necessary, more visible.

In California, as across the country, we witness daily the persistence of alternatives: Indigenous land rematriation in the face of bureaucratic obstruction; mutual aid networks enduring despite criminalization; community kitchens, gardens, and co-ops adapting and flourishing beneath the gaze of the state. These are not merely acts of resistance, but of world-building—assertions of the right to opacity, to relation, to care, to collective imagination.

Fascism and authoritarianism thrive on the fantasy of total control, but the reality is always more entangled, more alive, more resistant than any regime can tolerate. The alternatives are not utopian dreams deferred to some distant future; they are the living tissue of the present, the everyday eruptions of otherwise that give us back our agency and our hope.

The task before us is urgent and clear: to see these alternatives, to defend them fiercely, and to inhabit them fully. To refuse the closures of both capital and the state is not only possible—it is already happening, in every act of solidarity, every communal meal, every reclaimed plot of land, every moment of care that slips the grasp of commodification and control. In the face of authoritarianism, our agency is not diminished; it is demanded. The world is always-already more than capital, more than the state, more than any system that would claim to be total. Our lives, our relations, our futures—these remain, irreducibly, ours to make and remake.

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