http://stores.lulu.com/changemaker
Building Alternatives
for People and Planet
Edited by Jenna Allard,
Carl Davidson and Julie Matthaei,
ChangeMaker Publications.
pp. 427, $25.00.
http://stores.lulu.com/changemaker
Review by Jerry Harris
We finally have a book that gives a clear and partisan voice to the solidarity economy. While not so widely known within the continental U.S., this important and growing movement has deep historic roots in the international experience of cooperative economics, especially in the third world. It has especially gained in strength and depth over the last two decades.
The movement covers a broad range of alternatives in the realm of political economy that promote the social control of capital. It has no one platform or framework; rather, it has grown in opposition to the hardships caused by neoliberalism and "low road, race-to-the-bottom" capitalism.
This book grew out of the 2007 World Social Forum in Atlanta. Nearly 100 solidarity economy activists came together for their first real national exchange of experience and ideas. They had a track of about 30 sessions of their own, allied with another 60 workshops.
The book's chapters are organized around those panels and workshops that took place during the WSF, presenting all the diversity of the movement. Many chapters consist of a speaker's comments followed by the actual workshop discussion. Here are the debates between the anarchist ' participatory economics' theorist, Michael Albert, and the market socialist advocate, David Schweickart. It also includes accounts of the exciting work of groups such as the Center for Labor and Community Research, as well as the practical experiences of dozens of activists. The book takes the big tent approach by giving space to everyone from Marxists to those taking a spiritual path.
But "Building the Solidarity Economy" is the basic orientation, through various means that include: social movements with diverse practices; cooperatives and socially responsible businesses; networking and community organizing; public policy and daily 'case-in-point' reports.
Each person reading the book will find some chapters more interesting and helpful than others. So in this review I'll focus on some of my favorites.
Although Solidarity Economy is careful to be non-sectarian, there are still a number of lively debates that invigorate the book and the movement it reflects. Perhaps the best known is the exchange between Albert and Schweickart, an earlier version of which many people followed on Z-Net's web site.
Schweickart is one of the best known advocates of market socialism or what he prefers to call Economic Democracy. He promotes the wide scale development of worker-controlled cooperatives, replacing the market for labor through public and worker ownership. Schweickart also does away with the market for capital through the establishment of regional government banks and the social control of investment. But he does advocate a market economy for goods and services and room for entrepreneurial firms. He argues the market can best resolve the very complex problem of what to produce and in what quantities, while collective ownership undercuts capitalism's grow or die imperative. Schweickart's ideas may not produce the perfect equalitarian world, but as a working strategy it has the strength of looking at existing conditions and proposing a society we can actual envision building in the not too distant future. Is some important ways Schweickart's basic framework, based in part of the Mondragon Cooperatives in Spain, is already under construction in Venezuela, Brazil and other countries.
Albert advocates what he terms ParEcon. Both authors agree that capitalism needs to be replaced with a system of participatory democracy, and that the Soviet model of central planning is not viable. But Albert sees markets as "the single most horrendous and destructive creation of humanity in all history." (p. 60) That's a rather sweeping statement that condemns markets as a form of exchange over the entire period of civilization. Albert tries to reduce the definition of markets to simply capitalist markets, thereby conveniently closing the discussion to any alternatives or historical analysis. But in building Albert's revolutionary society, ParEcon would need to eliminate markets by administrative fiat. In other words, some national or federated governmental committee invested with legal power and the means to enforce it would make the decision to do away with competitive exchange. Ironically, this is not unlike Stalin's attack on markets through bureaucratic and state repression. Albert and Stalin? Well politics do make for strange bedfellows. The point is that markets, the state and civil society are all linked institutions of human creation, all with positive and negative aspects, none that can be eliminated simply through subjective social engineering.
Abstract idealism also permeates Albert's belief that wages should be determined by "how long people work, how hard people work and for the onerousness of the conditions in which they work." (p. 63) Now this would be an interesting committee to serve on, overseeing and judging everyone's effort in your office or factory. When I worked in the blast furnace at US Steel I did a particularly heavy physical job. Someone bigger and stronger could have done my work in a shorter period of time with less effort. According to Albert, I would get paid more. Or will the committee figure out a compensation level that creates a ratio between height, weight, muscle mass and time spent doing the job? Is this going to be established for every job category in the country? Will each firm have their own standards, or do we invest a national committee to figure it out? Or is it all just a huge bureaucratic waste of time?
Moreover, how do we judge time and effort when it's intellectual labor? Today as a teacher I may sit down to do a lesson plan and stare at my computer for 20 minutes without typing. Am I thinking about my curriculum or what the Bulls will do with their number one pick in this year's draft? And more importantly, how will the committee judge my efforts since they can't see into my mind? Albert's ParEcon society is literally stacked with such committees creating the seemingly impossible, a system of bureaucratic anarchism.
Social Economy, Solidarity Economy
Another interesting debate along these lines is raised by Michael Lewis and Dan Swinney. Lewis and Swinney distinguish between the social economy and the solidarity economy. The economy as defined by John Restakis consists of the private, public and social economy sectors. Restakis argues that a different logic permeates each sector, the social economy imbued with reciprocity rather than commercial gain.
But Lewis and Swinney argue that the solidarity economy is "located at the intersection of all three." (p35) This makes both the private sector and government partners with labor and the community, based on whether or not a "low road" or "high road" economic strategy is followed. The question of institutional structure becomes secondary to the social aims and goals of the project.
Lewis and Swinney base their arguments on their own practice in Montreal and Chicago. Both cities were battered by the loss of manufacturing jobs. In Montreal RESO was formed consisting of unions, business and community movements developing job services for up to 1500 people a year and specific projects that helped bring 40 social enterprises into being creating 500 jobs. In Chicago, Swinney helped form a partnership between the Illinois Manufacturer's Association, labor, city government and community groups to create Chicago Manufacturing Renaissance that links education with well paid skilled manufacturing jobs. The program is centered in a impoverished Black neighborhood that partners 24 companies with Austin Polytechnical Academy and is expected to grow to over 500 students. Now three more schools are being proposed.
In reading through the book I found most experiences reflected working in the real economy. Therefore no matter the internal organization of the co-ops and groups, there tended to be consistent interface with government and the business community. The debate revolves over whether these are part of a strategic relationship in building a high road economy, or dangerous entanglements impeding the creation of an alternative society.
As part of this dilemma, the question most often asked by solidarity activists was how to express their political goals and social values inside their work. No one answer was put forward, but activists certainly see a long struggle in which the solidarity economy occupies greater ground until achieving cultural and political hegemony over neoliberalism. This is discussed at some length in the final section of the book as participants decide to officially create a new federation, the U.S. Solidarity Economy Network, to further their common efforts.
In summary, this work is a fascinating view of a movement defining itself and coming into being. It works as an excellent primer good for global and social justice activists, study groups or classrooms. No matter their diverse individual perspectives, the energy, excitement and commitment of the activists are evident on every page.
[Jerry Harris teaches history at the Devry University in Chicago, and writes on political economy. He is the author of Dialectics of Globalization, and chairs the Global Studies Association of North America, http://www.net4dem.org/mayglobal ]
