Building community economies : a postcapitalist project of sustainable development

In this chapter, we address these questions and others that circle around the concept of sustainable development. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, we focus first on the forms of economic subjections/subjectivity that militate against sustainability as a possibility and a practice. Then, using examples from our action research on “rethinking economy,” we explore ways of thinking and enacting economy that render sustainable development a practical everyday project, and trace the emergence of subjects and practices of sustainability in several sites around the world. In the final sections of the chapter, we return to the “subjects of impossibility” with whom we began, addressing familiar reactions and resistances to our examples of “actually existing sustainabilities”. A brief conclusion recalls us to what we have glimpsed in these pages – practical experiments that move beyond impasse and impossibility.