Upstream - Documetary #4: The Solidarity Economy

Episode Date: January 13, 2017

In this episode we explore a phenomenon that has existed throughout centuries both within and alongside Capitalism. Wherever relationships have been based on reciprocity, sustainability, and democratic governance you'll find the Solidarity Economy. We learn of it's origin and about how it is strengthened by countermovements and during times of crisis. We follow its presence throughout the history of a particular marginalized community in the U.S., celebrating the courage of African American cooperative thought and practice. We then paint a picture of a modern solidarity response to economic austerity. And finally, we dream about it's potential in the face of ecological peril and plan for what it will take to grow the Solidarity Economy to serve as a movement of movements. Featuring: ​ Michael Ventura - Co-author with James Hillman of We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy – And the World's Getting Worse, columnist of Letters at 3AM with the Austin Chronicle Caroline Woolard - Artist & organizer whose work explores intersections between art and the solidarity economy Michael Lewis - Soildarity economy researcher; Co-author of The Resilience Imperative Pat Conaty - Research associate Cooperatives UK, Co-author of The Resilience Imperative Jessica Gordon Nembard - Professor of Community Justice and Social Economic Development, author of Collective Courage: A history of African-American Cooperative Economic Thought & Practice Biba Schoenmaker - Co-Founder of Broodfonds Makers Stuart Field - Founder of Breadfunds UK Jos Veldhuizen - Member of Broodfunds, Amsterdam Music: ​ Robert Raymond (witchdreammasion bandcamp) Lanterns (lanternsss.bandcamp.com) Chris Zabriskie (chriszabriskie.com) Jörgen UNOM JG (unomjg.nl) Cover image by Bethan Mure  This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

Ah Ah Ah Ah Ah Ah Ah Ah

Imagine that you're standing at the bank of a river. When you notice someone float by who's drowning, you immediately jump in to save them, but as soon as you pull them to safety, you notice another person who's also drowning. Pretty soon, the river is full of drowning people floating towards you. You yell for help help and you get other people to jump in with you to save them. But at some point, when the drowning people keep coming,

one of you has got to say, you know, I'm going to go upstream to find out why all these people are falling in in the first place. You're listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. Join us as we journey upstream to the heart of our economic system and discover cutting-edge stories of game-changing solutions based on connection, resilience, and prosperity for all. This Upstream episode was produced in partnership with Stir Magazine, the quarterly magazine for the new economy, and launched with their special solidarity economics issue in January 2017. Find out moreofglobal.com We're living in a dark age and we are not going to see the end of it

nor are our children or probably our children's children and our job every single one of us is to cherish whatever in the human heritage we love, defeat it, and keep it going, and pass it on, because this dark age isn't going to last forever. And when it stops, those people are going to need the pieces that we pass on.

They're not going to be able to build a new world without us passing on whatever we can. Ideas, art, knowledge, skills, or just plain old fragile love. How we treat people, how we help people, that's something to be passed on. That was Michael Ventura from his book We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World's Getting Worse, co-authored with James Hillman. Hi, this is Caroline Woolard. For me, the solidarity economy is the ways in which people can meet their needs together

without focusing on profit-making, but instead focusing on community, sustainability, social justice, and democracy. sustainability, social justice, and democracy. Caroline is an artist who co-creates projects and institutions to bring the solidarity economy to life. We met up with her in her studio in New York City. We're on the 24th floor of the Chase building in lower Manhattan, across the street from what was known and still is known by most activists as Zuccotti Park. I have a residency here through something called the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. They partner with landlords to provide free space to artists. So although I make all of my artwork about and for the solidarity economy, we are in the heart of capitalist enterprise at the moment, or the ghost of it. It's empty, except for the artists. There are no financial advisors or services in this building anymore. That's what I'm told.

I'm not allowed to go onto every floor, but when the elevator randomly opens, I see vacant space, sort of an abject, post-capitalist, post-capitalist, empty cubicles, wires jutting out from here and there, ripped up, faded, maroon carpeting, silence and HVAC sounds. I wake up every day in a HDFC. It's a kind of cooperative housing structure that was created in the U.S., which is a low-income cooperative. In the U.S., which is a low-income cooperative, you cannot buy a unit in that cooperative unless you make a certain income or less. And you can't sell to someone who makes a lot of money.

You also cannot rent for long. You have to live there. It is a community. So I wake up in the solidarity economy. In this episode of Upstream, we'll explore a phenomenon that has existed throughout centuries, both within and alongside capitalism, whenever and wherever relationships have been based on reciprocity, sustainability, and democratic governance as opposed to competition, exploitation, and blind profit maximization. We'll learn of the origin of its name, about how it is strengthened and enlivened by counter-movements and during times of crisis. We'll follow the presence of

economic solidarity throughout the history of a particular marginalized community in the United States, celebrating the courage of African American cooperative thought and practice. We'll then paint a picture of a modern solidarity response to economic austerity and debate the role of the state. And finally, we'll dream about the potential of this alternative system as part of a larger paradigm shift in the face of ecological peril and plan for what it will take to grow the solidarity economy to global prominence and serve as a movement of movements. Here's Caroline with the rest of her day. Caroline with the rest of her day. And then let's say I make breakfast. I shop at the Park Slope Food Co-op, which is a worker-owned consumer cooperative because the labor is not profit

oriented. Everything's incredibly affordable. And then I often work for a worker-owned design firm called CoLab. And this is a worker-owned business that does design services for people all over the world. So if it's a day when I'm working for them, I continue to work in the solidarity economy where it's member-owned and member-run. And when I make art, I always make it open source. So I try to make some objects that are handmade and hard to replicate, but also variations on those objects, which anyone could reproduce if they had the open source tools that I have. And probably many of us use Mozilla, Firefox, or other open source commons-based software systems online. And then after work at night, I tend to go to meetings for organizing

or activism, often around community land trusts, which are property regimes where there's a deed restriction on the land, so it can't be sold to the highest bidder and there's a very clear governance structure. by living my values, by wanting to believe that people are not here on this earth to accumulate as much as possible. And that in fact, it's very expensive to be unhappy or depressed. And you often are unhappy and depressed in workplaces that don't respect your opinion, that constantly operate under the fear of being fired or ignored or harassed. And I live in the solidarity economy as much as possible in order to feel alive on a daily basis. dirty economy as much as possible in order to feel alive on a daily basis. I think we all know the feeling of dissociating or spacing out when given a task that you don't understand or feels meaningless, but having no recourse to ask for an explanation or reject the job. So that kind of futility in your labor is so mind-numbing. I can't accept that death

of my imagination on a daily basis. I'd rather have less money and work for something I believe in. So So how else could we define the solidarity economy? We made a call to Canada, to Michael Lewis, a well-known educator and practitioner in the field of community economic development, and the executive director for the Center for Economic Enterprise, to see what he would say. for the Center for Economic Enterprise to see what he would say. The meaning of solidarity is the community of being which binds humanity into one whole. Or, well, we can put it another way, a consciousness that each of us affects and is affected by all. So that's a very broad definition, but it captures the heart of the meaning of solidarity. Well, let's go to the second word, economy. If you go back to the root meaning of economics as articulated by Aristotle, it was the two originating words were oikos and nomos.

And what he was referring to was the management of the household resources or household benefits. Now, if you put the meaning of solidarity into the global context today, and that we are in fact bound by each other, and we are affected by and affect each other and how we carry on our day-to-day living and exchange and so on. And you combine that with the idea of managing resources for community benefit and with the community of living beings being part of that community, then it becomes a powerful way of conceptualizing the changes we need to make in our economic life. And it's not that complicated to understand why. The fact is the planetary climate system we exist within and the diverse ecosystems that the climate sustains

are in deep trouble and we all know that so if we want to survive with any measure of dignity through the end of this century we're going to have to manage our local and planetary resources for the benefit of all living beings. Because, in fact, we're in a bit of a pickle. And the global economy is essentially in overdrive. And whether we can navigate the transition we need to make or not is the issue of our time. We met up with Pat Conady while he was teaching at Schumacher College in England. Michael and Pat co-authored The Resilience Imperative, Cooperative Transitions to a Steady State Economy.

We asked him to describe how the solidarity economy differs from capitalism. It's trying to combat the adverse effects environmentally and socially of untrammeled free markets, you know, deregulated markets, which has been the recipe for success of the promoted recipe of success really, since the late 1970s, promoted by Reagan and Mrs. Thatcher. And now, it's almost gospel that you know free markets free people up but we saw in 2008 that free markets didn't do very well at all and since 2008 austerity has actually adversely impacted on the poorest people in society and middle classes as well so not working free markets aren't working. There's market failure. So solidarity economy is saying there's a different way of doing markets with cooperation, with

solidarity, with redistribution of wealth, with policies that are for people and planet, rather than from some unaccountable elite. So one of the key aspects of the solidarity economy is that it puts people and planet before profit. Yeah, it's for a living economy. It's for promoting not just something dead, some abstraction called money, which is just a bit of electronic numbers. There's no gold behind it. There never really was.

But no, it's actually for a provisioning economy, an economy providing for the needs of people and protecting the planet and tackling climate change and tackling a whole range of injustices. So it's actually a positive, practical new economy where the operating principle is not kind of sharp elbows and vicious competition, but rather the opposite of that, mutual aid and cooperation. What about the background? Can you give us a historical context of the solidarity economy? It actually got going in the mid-1990s as part of the movement in Latin America, particularly in Peru,

against unjust trade policies and problems with the need for land reform and the development of fair trade. So actually in Western South America, Northwestern South America, particularly in Peru, there was this kind of liberation movement that actually picked up the term solidarity economy, began promoting it, and that then spread to parts of Europe and Quebec, actually. And it's begun spreading all over the world. So you find the solidarity economy movement in the Philippines, in Asia, in Africa, in the U.S. with the U.S. Solidarity Economy Network. You know, it's a spreading movement that's trying to build a

movement of movements. So we first hear about the solidarity economy in the 90s, but the roots, they go back even further. There have been historic solidarity economies in the 90s, but the roots, they go back even further. There have been historic solidarity economies in the past, in the Great Depression, in the 19th century, where times are hard and people feel that enough is enough, and they come together in a mutual aid type of way to try to support each other because there isn't enough to go around and austerity is typically biting and making times really tough. So there was an interesting, quite a famous historian who was working in England at the time. His name is Karl Polanyi.

And he wrote a famous book called The Great Transformation in 1944. And he reflected on a lot of his experience with the rise of fascism, the First World War, the movement in the 1920s in Austria to develop affordable housing and municipal socialism. And he began to look at this tension between the free market and a market that actually is protective of workers and people and provide services for them. So he wrote this book to describe this double movement between a movement that's actually trying to kind of basically quite extractive, quite exploitative, and the counter movement by trade unions, by people fighting for affordable housing or fighting for controls of the length of the working rate or the right to strike and things like that.

So in his book, The Great Transformation, he talks about historically this tension from the early days of industrial society from the 19th century. In fact, he even goes back to the late Middle Ages and describes this kind of constant tension between forces of exploitation and forces of actually mutual aid. That's the double movement. And that is basically the solidarity economy. It's always been this strand of history. And it becomes more evident that there is a counter movement when things just get so

bad, when markets fail and social conditions get really rough for millions of people, then you actually get the pushback. Pushback can come from environmental groups. Pushback can come from trade unions, can come from women's movement. There are many, many different sources of what he calls the counter-movement. Every period of our history, there was a role and there was cooperative activity. Almost from when we were on the boats, the horrible slaverships chained to one another and brought over forcibly. This is scholar and activist Jessica Gordon Nembhardt, author of Collective Courage,

a history of African American cooperative thought and practice. We met up with her in her office in the Department of Africana Studies at John Jay College in New York City. If you think about cooperatives the way Du Bois thought about it, which was economic cooperation, not necessarily an officially incorporated cooperative enterprise. And so if you think about ways to cooperate economically, then you can see that there's a long history from all kinds of informal people just helping each other out in a solidarity kind of economy to sharing farming, sharing farming tools, sharing food, pooling dues money to help bury each other when you needed to bury someone, family member, even if you were enslaved, that kind of thing. So we actually can see from the very beginning, there were all kinds

of ways to cooperate. And Du Bois even talks about the Underground Railroad, which I'll explain in a second as being a form of economic cooperation. The Underground Railroad was an informal, secret system for helping to harbor fugitive slaves and runaways to help them get from slavery to freedom. And mostly it was geographically from the southern United States to the north and then eventually to Canada. The Underground Railroad was a social system, but also an economic system because you had to share resources. People had to have food. There were wagons. People had to have big enough houses to have an underground place to hide people, that kind of thing. And so it was kind of a social and economic network of people, mostly barter and other kinds

of support. In your book, you give us an example of something called the freedom quilting bee. Can you tell us a little bit about it and how it could be seen as part of solidarity economics? The Quilting Bee is made up of women whose families were sharecroppers. And just quickly, what is sharecropping? Sharecropping is the system actually that happened right after emancipation, and it turned out to be a new version of slavery, but it was supposed to be a new way to do wage work and what you did was you allowed families african-american families who had been slaves on a property to now rent that property from a landowner who had probably been

their master or maybe had been the master down the street or whatever and it's sharecropping because you get to use the land and then you share the profits from the crop to pay for the land. And of course, the notion is if you had been enslaved, then you had no way to pay rent or anything, but you still needed to work the land. So you work the land, pay the rent back once you had a profit, but the profit came from the landowner buying the crops from you and deciding how much the crops were. But also between the time when you plant the crops and the time you harvest, you also needed to borrow seed, plows, work animals, food for your family, etc. So you end up owing the landowner almost everything because you don't have any money at all until the crop comes in. So you end up basically at the behest of the landowner once again, because they can decide how much to pay you for the crop, they can decide how much to

charge you for the land and for all the materials you bought. So by the time you finish each year, you actually come out in debt. And then the debt carries over to the next year. So that's sharecropping. So the women, especially in the winter, made quilts. And one year a priest realized he could take their quilts and sell them up north, and he did and brought them back some money, and they thought, oh, this could be a great extra salary. So they started a quilting bee, formed it officially as a cooperative, so they started a quilting bee, formed it officially as a cooperative,

and within several years made enough money so they could buy land, they could build an actual sewing factory so they weren't sewing out of their homes, they made enough money so some of the families didn't have to share crop anymore. And what was really fascinating was the fact that the co-op really gave them economic independence, which changed the whole nature of their lives and often the lives of their communities for several reasons. The first thing is what started out to be augmenting their sharecropping could then turn out to be a full-time work for the women, and they could even get their families out of sharecropping in some cases, not always, but some cases. So that was one thing. Two, the camaraderie and sense of solidarity.

Freedom Quilting Bee is also a founding member of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives. They saw themselves as part of this developing a regional organization, being connected to a movement, that kind of thing. The third thing is because they made money separately from the white man that they could control themselves, they then learned a lot of financial literacy because you have to learn that kind of stuff to run your own business. They also made enough money, they bought 23 acres of land in their town, which then gave them control over land that no one could take away from them. So that this was also a period of civil rights registering to vote. Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana had very strict voting registration

laws that pretty much precluded blacks from registering. And then if they did register, they often were receiving violence against them, like they would be evicted from their sharecropping house and land. Sometimes they were put in jail. Fannie Lou Hamer was actually beaten almost to death for registering and for teaching other people how to register. So the quilting bee now had 23 acres of land and a factory, so they could put people to work. They also could lend out their land to families that had been thrown off of the sharecropping land when they registered to vote. So now they were actually participating in the civil rights movement, not just trying to vote, but in supporting people to vote to give them economic independence

so that they weren't dependent on the whites who could then retaliate against them. So there was that connection. They ended up, by 1992, being the largest employer in their town. They employed about 150 people between the quilters themselves, who were basically owners. They also had an after-school program, a daycare center, and some other small projects going on in their complex. I love to use that example because it's an example of so many different ways that co-ops help women, that co-ops help a political movement, the economics of it, and the solidarity and independence that gets created. and actually even African American communities today,

and you go upstream, what do you see as the root causes of these challenges, of these struggles? So for me, and this is actually why I became an economist, to try to deal with some of these, racialized capitalism. So capitalism and racial injustice, which really go to me, go hand in hand. Like I don't I believe they're so intertwined. We can't even say which came first or whatever. They develop together and develop to support each other. So to me, those are the real root causes that we have a racialized capitalist system that believes that only a certain group and number of people should get ahead and that nobody else

deserves to and that some of that is based on race and a lot of it is connected to using race to divide people and that we have a system that definitely believes in allowing plunder and exploitation and then rewarding that and that's willing to leave people behind and so I got excited about co-ops because I saw it as a place to start for people who are left behind where you don't necessarily have to claw your way back in or you're not even necessarily trying to claw your way back in or you're not even you're not banging on the door to get back in now some people and some co-ops even some of the examples i have in the book actually used a co-op to get back into the capitalist system right so they're outside and they use the co-op to position themselves and

stabilize their selves enough to then enter capitalist system but most of the time they were either surviving and just kept trying to survive or surviving and then realizing that they actually needed this independent, separate system to live the kind of lives they wanted for themselves and their children and their community and that kind of thing. I feel like if African Americans can establish themselves as equal partners with some of their own economic prosperity and independence, that then integration makes sense. But integration until now has been,

we've integrated from a position of inequality and a subaltern position. So integration has been false for us. It hasn't really, it helped a few of us to get ahead, but the rest of us actually have been worse off since integration, unfortunately. So we can't even end racism and really integrate until we can enter as equals. And part of that entering as equals is having control over our own economics and having some prosperity and stability and that kind of thing. So that's part of the racism thing, but also we can't undo racism if we don't undo capitalism. It feels good. It feels good to be united in a mutual goal.

And it's right there. You can look it in the face. It's you and me. That's wonderful. Hello. Yes. Hi. Hi. Welcome. Thank you. My name is Jos. Come in. This is my place. Thank you so much. We're on the top floor, aren't we? Yeah, this is my beautiful apartment.

My name is Jos, Jos Veldhagen, and I'm 58 years old. I live in Amsterdam. I'm an actor. And you are self-employed? Yes. And would you mind telling us about your accident? Well, you just arrived here with the elevator and there's also a stairs. And three years ago,

the elevator was blocked or used or it took too long to my... And I took the stairs and I was in a hurry and everything, lots of was in a hurry. And everything, lots of stuff in a bag. And then I fell. I fell off the stairs. A classic accident.

And I broke my right shoulder. At least, well, that's what I found out two days later when I was in hospital. My wife sent me to the hospital that's the way that's the way it goes wife sends husband to hospital or to doctor go get yourself looked at and they took a photo and and well the shoulder appeared to be broken it had to be operated upon a few weeks later it was around Christmas. I couldn't believe that I couldn't work in here. I was looking at my agenda, I said to the doctor, I said, I have to be there tomorrow

and in Rotterdam the day after tomorrow. And he said, Mene Felthuizen, Mr. Felthuizen, you are not going anywhere for the coming four weeks at least. And then it slowly, I slowly realized that it was really serious and I had to stay home for about four to six weeks. And after that, so I called in sick to the Roodfonds. Roodfonds is an example of the solidarity economy in institutional form. It is an insurance-like program for self-employed individuals in the Netherlands. And the idea is simple. Freelancers get together in small groups and put money aside each month. And if any of the members are unable

to work for an extended period of time, usually more than 30 days, they are then supported by the rest of the group. So I called in sick, and then everything you talked about and reasoned about, at that moment it became true. The miracle became true. I really was touched by it, I remember. The first time I looked in my computer, I looked at my bank account and there was about 38 small amounts of euros was transferred to my bank account. And that was, you see all the names? So it's really personal.

You see like 38 times 35 euros. And that's your money. That is given to you to use to pay for your bread and butter so to speak or to to to go and get your shopping or pay part of the mortgage or whatever you have to whatever you need to survive or to well to continue your profession that's basically the the idea hello, welcome to the Broodfonds. I'm Biba Schoenmaker, one of the co-founders of Broodfondsmakers. Before visiting Jos, we took the train to meet Biba in the headquarters of Broodfonds in Utrecht. We asked her how Broodfonds differs from an insurance company.

I think a lot of self-employed people and also a lot of people in general find it important that you have influence on the things you are connecting with. And in this case, your Broadbonds group is a minimum of 20 people to a maximum of 50 people. But you're all together are an association and everybody has something to say.

So if you have a meeting, you can give your comments on things and you will be heard. That's different, of course, in an insurance company. You're one of the thousands of people and you don't have to say anything about what they are doing or how they're handling the money. But in this case, you have a lot of influence. And we're hearing from people that they really find it important and nice. You call in sick. When you decide, you for yourself, that's the responsibility we give each other. When you decide, I am not able to act out my profession, that's all. And if you decide whether it's a burnout, a heart attack, a depression,

well, I can continue forever. Because in the beginning, we announced to each other, we trust each other in that. So if you call in sick, you call in sick and that's it. We believe you, we trust you. It doesn't matter if you had some kind of illnesses in the past. If you're now working again, if you're now healthy and recovered, you can just join.

The past is not interesting. Everyone is treated equally. Yeah, yeah. And the way how insurance companies look at people is like they are kind of a walking risks. And we don't find that ethical okay, because you should not categorize people in risk categories, but people, like how we see it in the Broadfonds, is you can become ill as a self-employed person, and then you have an income problem, and then we're all going to help you to solve that income problem. Like what is happening to you can also all happen to us. My sister-in-law, she had cancer.

After she luckily was cured, she had big problems getting herself reinsured. So that's really rude, I would say, and that's why I like this system so much, because you can come in. Because we know you and we trust you, and that's why it's there. Because if anything happens to you, we will help. We will help you out.

We help each other out. That's the idea. Ja det är det. Bread Funds is very much about how people relate to each other, about how people feel about things. This is Stuart Field, community development finance expert. It's very much about how people relate to each other, about how people feel about things. This is Stuart Field, community development finance expert. He's in the process of bringing bread funds, or in this case, bread funds, to the UK. It's not just the money thing. You pay money in, and if you're ill, you get money out.

It's far more than that, because it's actually a group of people who know each other, who get to know each other, and are all self-employed. It's quite a revolutionary thing in the sense that self-employed people are supposed to compete with one another, but in a bread fund, they cooperate with one another to support each other if they become unable to work through illness or injury. We asked Stuart to tell us the history of bread funds. In the Netherlands, up until 2004, it was possible to get sick pay if you were self-employed as well as if you're employed. But it was then abolished and the government told people to take out private insurance instead. The private insurance there was very expensive. We were talking of premiums of 600 euros a month for builders, for example, being quite possible.

So a group of people that I was working with there called Solidair, they set up the first bread fund for their members. So people who were already involved in cooperative initiatives or part of a network, a cooperative network, who were self-employed then got together put money aside each month and if anyone was ill they got some money from it that's how it was set up and they ran it successfully for a few years and then actually decided well they could expand this to any self-employed people in the Netherlands so they set up what is now the blood funds Marcus corporates, literally the bread fund makers cooperative, to then enable other groups to set up bread funds. And then in the UK, we've never been able to have sick pay as self-employed

people, but the need is still there. So if you're sick, you still need an income. There is insurance, but the take-up for the insurance is something like 9% or something, or self-employed people take it up. It's clearly not something that people do as a matter of course, as they, for example, would insure their home or their car or whatever. So we're looking into the possibility of getting bread funds set up in the UK. fund set up in the UK. We asked Stuart if he thought that programs like bread funds, along with other forms of solidarity economics, stood a chance at actually taking over the current economic system. It's like the main economy rushes out there and the solidarity economy is providing the care that the main economy is not providing to sort of look after what's happening. But yeah, I mean, there are areas of the world, there's not many of them,

but there are a few places where from that economy has grown something that's become fairly dominant. So in Mondragon, in the Basque country in Spain, the network of cooperatives there have become the dominant force in the local economy. And they are, you know, one of the largest conglomerates in Spain but they are run quite differently from a typical capitalist business and so people for

example don't have any work in their own cooperative they are then found work in another cooperative that is short of labor and things like that so hardly ever is anyone actually unemployed so you can in certain small areas of the world, there's actually working models of how they've broadened out from the solidarity economy to make something that takes on the dominant economy. But in Britain in the 21st century, that's not the situation we're in now. We're in a situation where the finance-based capitalist economy is dominant and the pursuit of shareholder value, the pursuit of profit and those sort of conventional neoliberal market ideas are

dominant. So at the moment you know it's only a few small places where the economy of solidarity and cooperation has really got close to or has challenged the dominant economy. So we've heard about collectively created and directed institutions like cooperatives, worker associations, and land trusts. But what should be the role of the state? How could we scale up this solidarity economy and out? Here's Pat Conaty again. There is the need to actually democratize forms of production. So things like worker co-ops, warehousing co-ops, credit unions, community land trusts, things that actually tackle, you know, to take people and land out of the market to

achieve affordability is part of the practical strategy. But most important, there's a need to actually change public policy so that politicians see the solidarity economy as part of a more human and social and ecological and democratic future we need to develop what i would call public social partnerships so how can the state work with grassroots organizations to co-develop services? How can existing monies that are there and allocated to the corporate sector actually be partnerships to develop cooperative housing, for example, or to develop municipal banks that would maybe work hand-in-glove with credit unions or community finance organizations?

Polanyi saw this as a kind of a great transition. How do we transition to a new society where the economy is not destroying the ecology and the society because it's unregulated, but a kind of way of re-regulating the market. And so money becomes something like a servant rather than a master. It's something that is supporting a good economy. So we need a new accountancy to guide the planning and the development of the social and solidarity economy. But we must work very, very closely with the state. The problem is a systemic problem.

So we need to do things at the local level, very local level, like the neighborhood level or the small town level. But we also need to do it at the city level and the regional level. And we have to do things at the national level. And of course, we need to have a movement at the international level. So on the one hand, it's a kind of a horizontal connectivity

so that the fragments come together. And they're clear that they're kind of going in a shared direction and they're clear as to what that direction is, but they also are clear as to where they need to coordinate and animate and encourage action at the local microeconomic level, mesoeconomic level, macroeconomic level. So it's a way of evolving and reconstructing the entire economy. It's a new economy. It's a complete paradigm shift.

That's the vision of the social and the solidarity economy. Here's Michael Lewis again on how he would describe the potential and future of the solidarity economy. Well, it is a bridge. It is a transition. It is a contending within a sea of capitalism. It is seeking to build alternatives on the one hand and resist the trend lines that are being created that are

putting us all in danger, that are being generated by the current way of being in the world, which capitalism represents. So it is a bridge. It is a transition. And it is, though, not something that is seeking just to be an accommodation within the capitalist system. That certainly would not be the vision of many, although you will find people and organizations of many kinds who would not define it the same way I am at this particular moment. They would see it as potentially a way of humanizing capitalism. I think that really what it is is a system in the making that is characterized by what I would call a pedagogy of resist and build

and focus on reclaiming the common good from the powers that have a twisted and distorted economics into a vehicle for accumulation of private power and profit. That's clearly not going to enable us as a species to make the transition we make. So we're in this complicated space of resisting some pretty destructive features of what is. We're trying to build alternatives in different sectors, in localities, through broad movements of different kinds. We're trying to build a basis for building the road as we travel it within a very hazardous terrain. So it's all those things. So it's all those things. It's a bridge, it's transition, and it's an incarnation being built as we travel the road with all the uncertainty travel along that road represents. Here's Caroline Willard again with her take. Some people would say the solidarity economy is a bridge toward democratic socialism.

bridge toward democratic socialism. Some people would say the solidarity economy is a bridge toward anarcho-syndicalism. We have all kinds of people in this movement. Some people would say it's a bridge toward equitable capitalism, which still looks a lot like neoliberalism. capitalism, which still looks a lot like neoliberalism. So I think it's not always clear, and it's very important for people to talk about what their bigger aim is. So in the U.S., it's incredibly stifled. You know, we don't have municipal government funding to research and develop our investment cooperatives as they do in Alberta, Canada. We don't have the social movements that have created the kind of initiatives that you see, even just, I keep thinking of Canada because we always are in dialogue. They've been very helpful. It's a very different thing where you know that every initiative, whether it's a credit union or a worker-owned business, comes out of a powerful

solidarity amongst workers or students or mothers that's visible in the street. And so if you think of something like the landless workers movement or even the wages for housework movement in Iceland where all the mothers went on the street, went on strike. Imagine first having this sense of collective power and then creating these business entities that are economically and socially just. There's a very different order of operation. Here we have to continuously reinvent the wheel because we don't have that backing of social solidarity on the street, even a sense of safety on the street and having each other's backs,

or the money from the government to support it and also procure it, purchase it to sustain us. So it's very limited here. But I think with the movement for black lives and the sudden realization in this country that white supremacy is a public health threat, we now have a more radicalized group who cannot believe what we're about to endure. And people are ready to act in profoundly different ways than they were in the past, myself included. different ways than they were in the past, myself included. So although it's a terrifying time, I think we'll see that kind of social solidarity because people already are forming networks to call each other to make sure that they're safe on a daily basis and marching in the streets

in outrage. And from that sense of connectivity, these initiatives can form. I actually believe that the act of participating in cooperative economics and solidarity economics helps to chisel away the power of capitalism. Here's Jessica Gordon-Nemhard again. I think one possible scenario is that eventually we have so many interlocking co-ops and solidarity economic structures that we don't really need capitalism anymore and we undermine it. But I think that's a long-term strategy. So I don't have a lot of hope for it in my lifetime, but I do think it's possible because of all the ways that I've seen co-ops transforming people, that it's possible if we can just get more and more of them happening, that we can create a more transformative, liberatory economy and world. Since the 70s, many foundations supporting these free market ideas have captured the narrative.

supporting these free market ideas have captured the narrative. They have influenced what is taught in universities in terms of economics and politics. Sociology, for example, has become very marginalized. So the free market and compete and, you know, the free market is the most efficient way, it's the natural way. I mean, that's just not true. It's a complete myth. But there's been so much money put into the marketing of that effectively kind of false-headed way of looking at the world

that we need a new narrative, or we need to recover a narrative which is actually much more about self-help and mutual aid. Okay, yeah, fine. Nothing wrong with individualism within limits. But human beings tend to actually have both an I and a we. There's a tension there between those two elements of what we are as a species. But if the emphasis is only on the selfish gene, when in fact history shows that mutuality is there. It's like yin-yang,

but we're just looking at the yin and ignoring the yang. I mean, there's a dynamic relationship between I and we. And we need a set of property rights that respects a certain amount of individual ownership, that's fine. But there needs to be some beneficial constraints because if too much individual ownership excludes people from having any ownership or any access to housing or a job or whatever then you get this split between the haves and the have-nots which is dangerously polarized at the moment and it's mad it doesn't i mean how many yachts does, you know, Philip Green actually require? So there are plenty of kind of alternative solutions that people have written about. It's how do we actually bring them together so that the jigsaw pieces can be fitted and people can actually see, aha, I see what you're talking about. Now it's all joined up.

That makes sense to me. Tell me more about that you know so so it we have to actually not only find common cause but most importantly we have to find a common narrative you know a common vision a common kind of morality you know that you know for some people they'll see it in terms of religious sense other people will see it in terms of religious sense. Other people will see it in terms of humanistic sense. Other people just see it as common sense. But we do need to actually kind of connect the dots here between what is the vision, what are the common values, what sort of infrastructure do we need to put in place

to enable this new economy to be built on solid foundations rather than on sandy ones. We need to make hope more concrete and despair less convincing. When the penny dropped for me, it's when I took my first grandchild down to a river near the farm where we lived, where the salmon returned every year by the thousands and thousands. And there's these falls called stamp falls where we could watch the salmon jump in the air and hit the rocks and bounce back and keep doing that until they finally figure out there's a ladder that's been put up there that they can get up a lot more easily. So we'd go down there every fall.

Just her and I went in October. And you know, when you're with the child who is kind of seen through these things for the first time and the delight and the wonder of it all that gets expressed in that process it's a pretty amazing gift that reminds one of what's precious i had read a scientific journal article related to famine and climate change two days before related to famine and climate change two days before. And in this article, the scientists were essentially talking about what the temperature range is within which salmon could survive. It's a small range, two degrees Celsius. And their prognostication in 2003 was that salmon would no longer exist in 40 years if current trends then maintained.

Well, that hit me like a ton of bricks. You know, finally, that's where the emotional crisis kind of came for me that little girl may be in a position that she will never be able to take her grandchildren to see those fish so that's the motivation it's a combination of love of creation and the wonder of it all and that we're here at all. And being pretty heavily invested through a lot of grandchildren. And, you know, a lot of people that I work with around the world who are fighting the same battles. And, you know, a lot of people that I work with around the world who are fighting the same battles.

So I guess, in summary, we're living in a place and a time that's unprecedented in human history. We have to live with the uncertainty. We have to organize across sectors and movements, build common tables and coalitions, and we need to understand that if we don't shift the paradigm sufficiently to reduce the most potentially damaging consequences of climate change and ecological overshoot. A lot of other issues will be rendered much lower priority because people will be focused just on mere survival. So I think, yeah, there's reason to fear, but there's reasons to celebrate. And we need to carry on.

And it's a question of whether one accepts destruction or chooses life. You've been listening to Upstream. To find out more about the solidarity economy and to continue conversations from this episode, check out Stir Magazine's Solidarity Economic Special Edition issue or subscribe to receive Stir Magazine's quarterly issues. Thank you. workshops this year in partnership with the Bristol Pound, the Dartington Estate, the Red Brick, and the Institute for Solidarity Economics. Find out more at stir2action.com. This collaboration has been supported by the Oxford-based Institute for Solidarity Economics, a charity working to promote the solidarity economy in the UK and beyond. For more Upstream episodes and interviews, visit upstreampodcast.org or subscribe to us on iTunes.

We're also on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at Upstream Podcast. Thank you to Chris Zabriskie and Jorgen Junom-JG for the music. Yeah. And who are these? These cuties. These are our cats. This is Mouse and this is Cole. Oh yeah. She offers me her belly. That's really... Eh, Mouse?