This is what a post-capitalist economy looks like: worker-owned cooperatives

Mondragon, Spain, home of the Mondragon cooperatives. 

From http://model-economy.wikispaces.com/Mondragon+Cooperatives

Mainstreamers are fond of telling radicals like me that there "is no alternative." To anything. Splattering human bodies to burned chunks of entrails in Afghanistan; supporting a corporate-controlled, self-described progressive President who seeks to build Social Darwinism with a human face; cutting the budgets of social service agencies; whatever.

Instead of arguments, the mainstream acolytes of such pragmatism often employ cliches and bromides which they mistakenly think are arguments. Like, for example, "we all know Malthus was wrong, therefore peak oil isn't real." Or: single payer health care isn't "practical." Or, a counsel of despair masquerading as worldly wisdom, recently deployed against me in a particularly infuriating conversation: if you had to run a social services agency, you'd be cutting budgets too. Because, like, silly boy, cutting budgets for social service agencies is the way it is. Because, you naive simpleton, you must realize that in fact There Is No Alternative.

Besides which, the good guys won the Cold War. So shut up, lefty, and climb onto St. Ronnie's ash heap of history. There's no alternative.

But there is. Yes, the political and social barriers to the alternative are enormous. But that doesn't make them inconceivable. Parliamentary democracy in 1970s Poland was impractical, and kind of ludicrous as a short term political objective, but it wasn't inherently impossible. As we all learned.

So too with post-capitalist economics. It's a short-term pipe dream, but to say it doesn't exist or hasn't been systematically practiced in a way that works -- without Soviet style totalitarianism -- is simply wrong.

Case in point: worker-owned cooperatives. They are democratically-controlled organizations, administered directly by the people who do the useful labor, to make profits in a market economy for those people, for their own benefit and that of their community. Not for the monetary gain of a bunch of assholes in a far distant city who collect all the fruits of that labor and cannibalize those fruits into corporate financial machines to rape and pillage the planet.

And I'm not alone in sharing this sort of view. It turns out that the United Nations has declared 2012 to be the International Year of the Cooperative. Kinda cool to know that somewhere in the world, there's a major organization which doesn't think I'm a woolly-headed loon.

For more, you can read a nice little account of the Mondragon Cooperatives, the world's foremost  example of a functioning, large-scale, non-granola chewing post-capitalist market economy.

These sorts of institutions will be important models for the coming century, as we try to move beyond the capitalist, growth-fueled social (and legal) structures that have destroyed the Earth's Holocene biosphere, unleashing a totally new Anthropocene ecology upon the new planet now being born.