As part of the larger pool of contributions to ZNet’s Reimagining Society debate, Len Krimerman discusses the Solidarity Economy movement at length.
This article is well worth reading in full for its strategic assessment and recommendations.
Here, we excerpt Len’s discussions of the strengths of the movements, closely related to how it deals with subjectivity, i.e. breaking out of the stories that limit our potential and possibilities.
Len Krimerman:
“First, and what for me is most distinctive and exciting, is what might be called SE’s “constructivist” or “agency centered” account of economic institutions. To get at this, recall poet Muriel Rukeyser’s statement: “The world is not made of atoms, it is made of stories.” Applying this to the “economic world”, we find that the very common belief that a single homogenized economy called “capitalism” prevails in this or that country or across the globe is, ultimately, just one story among many.
This constructivist perspective is clearly expressed in another of Ethan Miller’s papers, in which he encourages us to leave behind “a story that makes us feel small and powerless”, and which “has hidden from us our own power”. In that new and empowering story, we would view
capitalism, with its free markets, its “jobs” and “wages”… as only one part of how we actually create and maintain livelihoods in our families and communities. When we peel away the misleading idea of one giant “Economic System,” we can begin to see the workings of many different kinds of economies that are alive and well, supporting us below the surface.3
In A Postcapitalist Politics, another fountainhead source of both the theory and practice of SE, Gibson-Graham discuss the problems faced by Argentine factory workers involved in the “Take”, the initiative which began in 2001 to take over abandoned factories and recuperate them under worker control. The main obstacle faced by these workers, according to Gibson-Graham
…was not the state or capital…but their own subjectivities. They were workers, not managers or sales reps or entrepreneurs, and as one of them said, “If they had come to us with 50 pesos and told us to show up for work tomorrow, we would have done so.4
In other words, they had swallowed the capitalist story and their place within it. To move beyond this story, a first step in helping construct a solidarity economy, required what these workers came to call “a struggle against themselves”; that is, they found that
…combating capitalism [involves] refusing a long-standing sense of self and mode of being in the world, while simultaneously cultivating new forms of sociability, visions of happiness, and economic capacities.5
For both Ethan Miller and Gibson-Graham, SE starts with the familiar “reluctant subject” – often, ourselves! – whose sense of self and agency is constricted by living inside stories fabricated by others. Its aim in this is to move us from pervasive but disempowering stories to ones which reveal previously hidden options and help us realize more of our own capabilities.6 Beyond this, approaches such as those of the Asset-Based Community Development method are utilized. These enable participants to reframe not only themselves but their neighborhoods and communities – to tell themselves different stories about these – from what is missing or defective to what can be identified as resources and strengths.
The assets-based portrayal invites communities to begin thinking about what they can do to mobilize what they already have. While assistance might be garnered from the outside, it is sought as a second, not a first resort, and only after community members have decided how they can manage additional resources themselves.7
Concretely, this constructivist first step has been an essential first step for most SE initiatives: for example, for a lone Basque priest and a few technical school students, faced with the devastation of a civil war, to reject both capitalist and communist frameworks and see themselves as “social inventors” of what has become the Mondragon enterprise system of inter-connected worker owned and run cooperatives, which now produces more durable goods than any other single Spanish manufacturer and has only lost two enterprises in its six decades.
It was also essential, in 1965, for a handful of Tokyo housewives distressed by the high prices and low quality of supermarket foods to reframe themselves as “organizers who could broker contracts” between households, neighborhoods, and small farmers for affordable and organic dairy products, grains, and produce. Calling themselves “Seikatsu” (roughly, “peoples lives”), their system of consumer and worker cooperatives now serves over 300,000 members in several Japanese cities. (http://www.seikatsuclub.coop/english/)
A second and related asset of SE initiatives is the (comparative) ease with which they can be started, at least within so-called liberal democracies. The growth in CSAs in the USA is just one example; by some estimates, there are now close to two thousand, up from only about sixty in 1990. (http://newfarm.rodaleinstitute.org/features
Of course, under repressive regimes, alternatives of any sort are never easy to introduce; here, civil disobedience and constructive non-violent resistance have often proved necessary. This is evidenced by the case of the MST (Movimento Sem Terra) in Brazil, a SE initiative which has forcefully occupied almost 20 million hectares of otherwise unutilized land and settled well over 1 million formerly landless people, helping them co-create housing, agriculturutal, and educational cooperatives. (For other similar cases, see Vandana Shiva’s Earth Democracy, esp. chapter 5.).
A third strength of SE is that several of its most prominent initiatives can be seen as pioneers of new, upscaled, and highly participatory forms of democracy. This includes, among others, the Brazilian participatory budget process, now exported widely across the world (information at www.participatorybudgeting.org
All of these, in strikingly different ways, are what workplace democracy and anarchist activist George Benello called “working models” of what democracy looks like when it is “upscaled” to enable meaningful participation (beyond occasional voting) for populations which number in the millions. That is, they have invented opportunities for all participants or stakeholders to shape the priorities and practices of large-sized communities; devolved authority to smaller or more local groups; and reframed the core task of larger units as that of facilitating leadership in and enabling collaboration among what emerges from below.
The range of these pioneering models is also worth noting; from landless peasants to middle class housewives, to university educated and computer-savvy worker owners and cooperative developers; and across national and continental borders. Moreover, they have achieved these goals and have been walking their reinvented democratic talk for multiple decades: they are here today, and for the long haul.
Fourth and finally, SE offers something unique to those joining its ranks: the opportunity to make, or begin making, a living, to share in the development and utilization of economically essential resources – while contributing to the creation of a genuinely new and better world.
Of course, not every SE initiative by itself can guarantee participants a living income, or a mortgage-free home with a computer or laptop in every room. Some come close; the Mondragon or the northern Italian cooperatives have standards of living above the European average. Others, such as local currencies, or housing cooperatives, may provide only a part of one’s economic needs; they must be supplemented to yield the missing components of economic security. A worker cooperative may offer a decent income, plus a portion of the enterprise’s surplus revenues, to all of its members, but they will still need a CSA and an energy coop….to combat inflated market prices of essential material goods.
Nonetheless, especially in these grim times of more than 10% unemployment, the co-op is still a good start.
These then make up some of what could be called the “SE Advantage”: its constructivist and “subject-focused” approach to understanding economic life; the relative ease with which its initiative can get started; its capacity to build and maintain working models of highly participatory democracy across both geographical, educational, and class boundaries; and its ability to sustain us as we attempt to build a new world for all of its inhabitants. In my own view, these are advantages over not only (what Thatcher and the like tell us is) the status quo, but in comparison with many more familiar forms of “social change”; e.g., those aimed at either reforming that status quo through conventional electoral politics or at overthrowing it by means of violent uprisings. Possibly, my suggestions for strengthening SE, which follow, may convince you of this.”