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Jacobin: Anticapitalist Utopias that exist right now: Coops, libraries and Wikipedia.
Worker cooperatives are a real utopia that emerged alongside the development of capitalism. Three important emancipatory ideals are equality, democracy, and solidarity. All of these are obstructed in capitalist firms, where power is concentrated in the hands of owners and their surrogates, internal resources and opportunities are distributed in a grossly unequal manner, and competition continually undermines solidarity.
In a worker-owned cooperative, all of the assets of the firms are jointly owned by the employees themselves, who also govern the firm in a one-person-one-vote, democratic manner. In a small cooperative, this democratic governance can be organized in the form of general assemblies of all members; in larger cooperatives the workers elect boards of directors to oversee the firm.
Worker cooperatives may also embody more capitalistic features: they may, for example, hire temporary workers or be inhospitable to potential members of particular ethnic or racial groups. Cooperatives, therefore, often embody quite contradictory values.
Nevertheless, they have the potential to contribute to eroding the dominance of capitalism when they expand the economic space within which anticapitalist emancipatory ideals can operate. Clusters of worker cooperatives could form networks; with appropriate forms of public support, those networks could extend and deepen to constitute a cooperative market sector; that sector could — under possible circumstances — expand to rival the dominance of capitalism.
Public libraries are another kind of real utopia. This might at first glance seem like an odd example. Libraries are, after all, a durable institution found in all capitalist societies. In the United States, the vast public library system was to a significant extent founded by Andrew Carnegie, one of the ruthless robber barons of the Gilded Age. He was certainly no anticapitalist and, if anything, saw his philanthropic support of libraries as a way of strengthening capitalism as a system. Nevertheless, libraries embody principles of access and distribution which are profoundly anticapitalist. Consider the sharp difference between the ways a person acquires access to a book in a bookstore and in a library.
A final example of an actually existing real utopia is the new forms of peer-to-peer collaborative production that have emerged in the digital era. Perhaps the most familiar example is Wikipedia. Within a decade of its founding, Wikipedia destroyed a three-hundred-year-old market in encyclopedias; it is now impossible to produce a commercially viable, general purpose encyclopedia.
bonus:
UBI directly tames one of the harms of capitalism — poverty in the midst of plenty. But it also expands the potential for a long-term erosion of the dominance of capitalism by channeling resources towards noncapitalist forms of economic activity. Consider the effects of a basic income on worker cooperatives. One of the reasons worker cooperatives are often fragile is that they have to generate sufficient income not merely to cover the material costs of production but also to provide a basic income for their members. If a basic income were guaranteed independently of the market success of the cooperative, worker cooperatives would become much more robust. This would also mean that they would be less risky for loans from banks.
