Last week I went to this
event – a discussion about the solidarity economy. I’ve been thinking about
this a lot lately. Partly in response to the Westminster political situation,
where the Labour leadership is weakly held by a left social democrat with a
touching faith in the ability of Parliamentary politics to bring about real and
lasting social, economic and political change, despite all the historical
evidence to the contrary. It seems to me that it’s unlikely that a Corbyn-led
Labour Party can win a majority in Parliament; but even if it does, I find it
hard to be optimistic that the ability to legislate will translate into actual
power. That quote of Gramsci’s about the state being just the forward trench of
capitalist power (which unfortunately I can't find at the moment) seems appropriate.
And I’ve also been reading lots of stuff that points in the
direction of solidarity economics – Paul Mason’s Post-Capitalism, various
things by Michel Bauwens, and this rather good digest (Techno-Utopianism, Counterfeit and Real)
by Kevin Carson. I’ve had the tiniest dip into Negri and his ideas about
‘Exodus’, which are at once intriguing and semi-incomprehensible – other
people’s paraphrases are easier to understand.
It seems to point in
the direction of a future socialism growing within the body of capitalism, just
as capitalism grew within the body of “feudal society” until it was ready to
take political power. Mason, and Carson, and several others, seem to be arguing
that the power of technology (3D-printing, the internet, smartphones, etc.) makes
this possible in a way that it hasn’t been before. Maybe building things –
specifically, economic entities like co-ops and exchanges and so on – is a
better place to put energy, because it they do get built they’ll be there
whoever wins the next election and the one after.
The evening was nice enough. There were some cheerful upbeat
presentations of nice projects that were doing well, or were just starting out
but sounded like they deserved to do well. Community Land Trusts, community
benefit companies, and shared-ownership goats, multi-stakeholder co-ops, and so
on.
Things that I noted were:
- Solidarity Purchasing Groups in Italy – see here and here
- The Open Food Network
- Business and Employment Cooperatives in Belgium
- The Buurtzog social care model and CASA carers social enterprise in the North East of England
- The Social Procurement Directive in Spain
- The Solid Fund Worker Coop fund
- The ‘Not Alone’ report about co-ops for self-employed workers
One of the speakers – (Tony
Greenham, Director of Economy, Enterprise and Manufacturing Programme at
the Royal Society of Arts) wondered aloud if it mattered what this fuzzy-edged
phenomenon was called. Would ‘solidarity economy’ sound too…left-wing, and put
off some people who might be otherwise enthusiastic? Like Transition Town
types, for example, who like resilience and localism but are put off by all
those clenched fists and red flags?
It was only a passing comment, and it wasn’t at all
representative of the tenor of the meeting – other speakers were insistent that
this emerging movement was a political thing – but I think it goes to the heart
of one of the essential ambiguities in ‘solidarity economy’ and also the heart
of my uncertainty about it.
What we call this thing will shape it. ‘Sharing Economy’ and
‘Collaborative Consumption’ are now, I think, irretrievably lost. They now
refer to platform capitalism and ‘servitization’, not anything outside or
antagonistic to capitalism. If we use another term that’s more palatable for
‘solidarity economy’ then it will be extended and shifted to include other
stuff like that. This is similar to the mechanism whereby, if briefly, David
Cameron managed to co-opt civil society support groups into a substitute for
and assault on the welfare state.
I have a more serious concern than the name, though. I can’t
help wondering whether the ‘solidarity economy’ will become a pit-prop for
capitalism rather than something that will undermine, grow within and
ultimately supersede it. After all, capitalism has always managed to sit next
to non-capitalist forms of production. The most glaring example, to which
socialist-feminists drew attention, was the way in which the ‘social
reproduction of labour’ – getting the workers fed and cleaned and ready to go
back to work again – was carried out in the sphere of the household/family,
outside the terms of capitalist value creation. There were no wages for
housework. Something similar happens in some places (Thailand, for example) with
subsistence farming alongside capitalist industry. Workers can grow some food
for themselves and thus the wage rate that the market will bear can be lower,
because it doesn’t need to cover the full cost of feeding those workers. The
relationship between the non-capitalist slave-traders of Africa and the
Atlantic economy of capitalist agriculture might be another example.
So the solidarity economy could be more of a
sticking-plaster or a safety-valve for capitalism, rather than the seeds of
something that will eat it from within. Co-ops and community benefit companies
can take over the labour-intensive, low-margin activities that capitalism can’t
do all that well or all that profitably – social care, domestic work and
‘tasks’, car-washing without machines. Capitalism can keep high-tech manufacturing,
and finance.
Does this really matter, if at least some people get to run
their own decently managed employment? Yes, it does. Capitalism inherently
makes for a more unequal society, and that makes everyone more miserable.
Capitalism thrives and depends on the creation of unmet desires – unhappiness.
And its financial model absolutely requires growth without end, which is in
principle incompatible with a finite planet and in practice undermining the
chances that humanity will ever find a way to leave within the constraints of
our environment. We really do need to put an end to it and replace it with
something better, not save it from itself.
I think what follows from this is that, as a minimum,
solidarity economy activities need to be consciously about something bigger
than themselves. They ought to be
located within the fabric and the context of a wider movement for social change
that’s about equality, empowerment, democracy and sustainability.
Worker-managers in the solidarity-economy organisations ought to know why what
they are doing is important, so that they can do the things that matter better.
If the wider movement is going to support them, with our wallets and with our
campaigns (for example, for something like that Spanish social procurement
directive), then we have a right to expect something more than a new generation
of small business entrepreneurs.
