Yes—but not completely, at least not for most people living in a modern industrial society. What is possible is reducing dependence substantially, and there are historical and contemporary examples of people doing so.

The crucial distinction is between autonomy and total independence.

Total independence is probably impossible

If you mean:

• no dependence on global supply chains,
• no dependence on the state,
• no participation in capitalist markets,
• no dependence on other people's specialised labour,

then essentially no. Humans have always depended on other humans. Even a self-sufficient farm depends on accumulated knowledge, tools, seeds, land rights, medicine, roads, and often some relationship with surrounding communities.

Electricity, telecommunications, medicines, agricultural inputs, machinery, fuel, banking and transportation all involve enormous networks that an individual cannot realistically reproduce.

You can escape a particular system, but you generally can't escape interdependence.

But you can change the kind of dependence

This is where things become much more interesting.

Imagine four possibilities:

Arrangement	Main dependency
Modern consumer	Employers + markets + state + global supply chains
Self-sufficient individual	Land + local ecology + own labour
Cooperative community	Members + local resources + some markets
Commons-oriented society	Community institutions + shared infrastructure

The last three aren't independent. They are differently dependent.

And historically, this distinction is enormous.

A peasant household might have produced most of its food, fuel and clothing itself, but depended upon a village, commons, kinship network and local markets. A medieval monastery could be remarkably economically autonomous while still being deeply embedded in political and religious institutions. Modern intentional communities sometimes attempt something similar with gardens, workshops, renewable energy, communal finances and shared ownership.

So the realistic objective isn't:

“I need nobody.”

It's:

“I want my necessities to depend less upon institutions I have no meaningful control over.”

That's a very different proposition.

There is actually a spectrum

You could move progressively along something like:

global corporation → national corporation → local business → cooperative → household production → commons

without pretending that the final stage eliminates dependence.

For example, you could:

• grow some of your own food;
• buy food from local farms;
• participate in a community garden;
• join a food cooperative;
• learn basic repair and fabrication;
• use second-hand goods;
• share tools rather than individually owning everything;
• generate some electricity;
• reduce dependence on cars;
• preserve food;
• learn basic textile, woodworking, gardening or building skills;
• participate in mutual-aid networks;
• join or establish a cooperative;
• reduce personal debt;
• acquire productive rather than purely consumptive assets.

None of these makes you “outside capitalism.” But they can change your bargaining position within it.

The state is particularly difficult to escape

There's an important complication here.

People sometimes imagine the state as simply one more external dependency that can be discarded. But many things we associate with “freedom from the state”—land ownership, property rights, contract enforcement, currency, roads, communications infrastructure, public health, emergency services—are themselves partly constituted by state institutions.

And if you withdraw from the state completely, you don't necessarily arrive at freedom. You may instead become dependent upon whoever exercises power locally.

That's why the historical alternatives to the state aren't necessarily anarchic individualism. They can be kinship systems, communes, religious communities, village assemblies, customary law, guilds, cooperatives, federations, commons, etc.

The real question becomes:

Can political power be distributed among institutions small enough for people to exercise meaningful control over them?

That's a much more interesting question than simply “state or no state.”

And capitalism has the same problem

If you somehow abolish capitalism tomorrow, you still have to answer:

• Who produces food?
• Who allocates scarce resources?
• Who builds houses?
• Who decides what gets produced?
• How do strangers cooperate?
• How are disputes resolved?
• How is specialised knowledge coordinated?
• Who maintains infrastructure?
• How do people obtain things they cannot produce themselves?

You don't get rid of the coordination problem by getting rid of markets.

You need some other mechanism: communal allocation, reciprocity, gift economies, cooperatives, public provision, commons, planning, customary arrangements, or some mixture.

And historically, most societies have actually used several mechanisms simultaneously.

The most realistic alternative is therefore not “self-sufficiency”

I'd call it distributed self-reliance.

Instead of trying to become an isolated Robinson Crusoe, you build a network in which no single institution has complete control over your necessities.

For example:

household → neighbourhood → cooperative → local producers → public institutions → wider markets

rather than:

household → employer → bank → supermarket → multinational supply chain → state

The first is still interdependent. But its dependencies are more visible, reciprocal and potentially governable.

There's also an interesting political consequence.

If ten people individually try to become completely self-sufficient, they have ten isolated households.

If ten people collectively own a workshop, garden, vehicles, tools, energy infrastructure and perhaps housing, they can achieve far more autonomy with less individual labour.

That is why historically important alternatives to capitalism have so often involved cooperatives and commons rather than isolated self-sufficient individuals.