What is a Solidarity Economy Anyway?

While there are too many candidates for this election season to count, a few (see here and here) have raised the profile of a particularly obscure and little-understood framework for economic transformation: the solidarity economy. If you’re like most New Yorkers you probably don’t know what this means or have never heard of this before.

As someone who has been studying and working to advance the solidarity economy in NYC for the past decade, the emerging prominence of a pretty obscure phrase like solidarity economy from local candidates is both exciting and a little bewildering. Without strong and organized movements with transformative visions, political visions can be diluted or co-opted into meaninglessness. If anything can be solidarity economy, then the concept is not very useful. So before that happens, (and hoping it doesn’t!) New Yorkers deserve more clarity about what exactly “solidarity economy” means — or could mean — for our city.

The phrase itself is decades old, and by most accounts traveled to the United States through the US Social Forum in 2007 from social movements in South America that had been organizing against US-backed austerity and structural adjustment programs from institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Today it is a global movement with a dedicated research unit at the United Nations. But solidarity economy isn’t really a “thing” so much as a process and a set of relationships: to each other, to the land and ecology, and to politics. Rather than basing society around our subservience to the mythology of the self-regulating market and private property (many call this capitalism or racial capitalism), on individualism and relationships that center hierarchy, whiteness, and domination, solidarity economy is grounded in values and practices of mutuality, solidarity, cooperation, democracy, and justice.

The people, politics, and projects that fall under this umbrella term are incredibly diverse, and exist in the narrow space between survival and transformation. They range from mutual aid projects to microenterprises, social enterprises, and informal loan societies such as sou sous, pardnas, and sociedades, cooperatives owned by workers and communities for housing, food, work, and finance, and larger networks and political projects that contain these enterprises and that are connected to, or grown from, social movements for communal survival and economic transformation. When you hear slogans that demand “defund the police, invest in community”, or “divest, reinvest” (from fossil fuels or police), the “community” and “reinvestment” in such slogans is more likely than not about ensuring survival, care, and safety grounded in solidarity economy values and practices.

Aside from a few long-standing community gardens, cooperative housing or credit unions scattered across the city, a lot of it is informal and invisible because it was created to meet a need of survival, not market share, profit or scale. As invisible and informal as it may be, these practices and the relationships are also the foundation of the social and economic infrastructure that has allowed oppressed people to survive in this place for hundreds of years — to meet basic needs of shelter, care, community, food, and work.

In so doing, while often emerging out of necessity due to exclusion and oppression, the enduring existence of these practices, projects, and institutions around the world point to the possibility that we are not, in the words of Eduardo Galeano, “condemned” to the crime of our current economic system. We are not only the self-interested, utility-minded being we have been told that we are. As anthropologists and economists have been arguing for years, human beings are not solely driven by greed and self-regard: we are quite capable of creating and sustaining institutions that support care, cooperation, and a diversity of forms of ownership and stewardship of common resources. You don’t even have to take my word for it — you can ask Nobel Prize winning economist Elinor Ostrom (among others).

Despite these overlaps with larger movements for climate justice and abolition, in New York City, the solidarity economy movement is small and not yet in full possession of its collective identity and power. But its leaders, its innovators, its stewards, are the people who are most oppressed by the current economic system in our city and our world: immigrants, queer and trans folks, people of color, the disabled, and Black and Indigenous people.

So what would a city that supported the solidarity economy look like? There is no one recipe. But there are some things that tend to correlate with social and solidarity economies that have reached substantial scale, and anyone who even pretends to care about fostering solidarity economies in New York City from a position of local government has some examples to look to.

• Frameworks and Charters. When South Africa emerged from Apartheid, the new government drafted a new constitution — one more befitting a new and transformed multi-racial society. Because they arise from social movements articulating a transformed relationship between economy and society, solidarity economies are often underpinned by an enabling legislative framework or charter either at the national or local levels (or both). These charters sometimes are non-binding and symbolic, but are often connected to more binding legal frameworks that allow for pluralistic ownership and stewardship rights that are typically undermined by legal frameworks that resort to binaries which serve narrow economic interests rather than the cause of freedom and human flourishing.
• Mapping and Census. Once you begin to build a new world, it’s really important to be able to count and map that world. Mapping initiatives and census projects for the solidarity economy are essential because in the eyes of a modern government or society there is no such thing as a solidarity economy if it cannot be counted and measured. Despite the known existence of thousands of cooperatives, social enterprises, collectives, and mutual aid projects in our city, there is almost zero verifiable knowledge of the solidarity economy because the solidarity economy has not been defined and therefore, has not been measured. This unglamorous but essential work lies ahead of us.

• Participatory Planning. Because solidarity economies aren’t just an endpoint but also a process, they have to emerge from participatory planning and co-governance, or the “co-construction of public policy,” which is a process by which diverse stakeholders in civil society craft solutions based on relationships of shared authority, rather than our more superficial “input” approach. A solidarity economy infrastructure in our city would mean a legally binding popular planning assembly model in boroughs that would push far beyond current proposals for equitable comprehensive planning, or the current limitations of resources allocated to participatory budgeting, and move from the current low millions into the low billions of dollars being co-determined. To accomplish such feats, these efforts would also require in the tens of millions for administrative and program dollars to support grassroots groups to drive the planning processes, as currently happens through participatory budgeting. Barcelona’s “Impetus Plan” would be a good template to start from for a city of the size and diversity of ours.
• Financial infrastructure. Solidarity economies require a complementary or parallel financial structure that is non-extractive and also supported by the public sector commensurate with the kinds of public subsidies available to traditional economic development portfolios. A real public bank and public finance would be very helpful, as would a greater degree of investment in cooperative enterprise from existing community development financial institutions (CDFIs). These cooperative financial institutions already exist in bits and pieces in the tens of millions of dollars, but their efforts are undermined again by the illegibility of shared ownership cultures and structures.

We are a long way off from having a big beautiful solidarity economy movement in New York City. Our next mayor, comptroller, and city council will hopefully play a role in advancing it. But a solidarity economy can only be built through the leadership and economic and political power of its protagonists. As with all social change, when the movement leads, the leaders will follow.

Evan Casper-Futterman, PhD is a member of the SolidarityNYC collective, and a co-founder of the Cooperative Economics Alliance of New York City. He has served on the board since 2016 and will be departing in June 2021.