Neoliberalism has failed, social democracy is impossible, and only an alternative vision can bring about universal prosperity and emancipation.

The utopian potentials inherent in twenty-first-century technology cannot remain bound to a parochial capitalist imagination; they must be liberated by an ambitious left alternative.

folk politics [...] often rejects the project of hegemony, valuing withdrawal or exit rather than building a broad counter-hegemony

The problem is rather that folk-political thinking is content to remain at (and even privileges) that level – of the transient, the small-scale, the unmediated and the particular. It takes these to be sufficient rather than simply necessary moments

If even ‘successful’ revolutions led to sclerotic technocracy and political repression in the long term, what then was to be the properly emancipatory course of action?

Responding to the twentieth-century failures of state-led political change, horizontalist movements instead advocate changing the world by changing social relations from below. They draw upon a long tradition of theory and practice in anarchism, council communism, libertarian communism and autonomism, in order to – in the words of one proponent – ‘change the world without taking power’.

The participatory economics (Parecon) project, for instance, envisions direct democracy at every level of society; but this vision for a postcapitalist world translates into endlessly ramifying staff meetings over every detail of life – hardly the inspiring stuff of utopian visions.

The problem with localism is that, in attempting to reduce large-scale systemic problems to the more manageable sphere of the local community, it effectively denies the systemically interconnected nature of today’s world.

It is food that offers the most visceral embodiment of the benefits of the slow lifestyle, overcoming the vicissitudes of fast-paced capitalism by returning to an older culture of savouring meals and traditional production techniques.

Localism, in all its forms, represents an attempt to abjure the problems and politics of scale involved in large systems such as the global economy, politics and the environment.