My day job is building a purchasing cooperative called the Community Purchasing Alliance of Massachusetts owned by the institutions who use our services.
We’re pretty cool (here are some details about our vision and the work ahead this year). The diagram below (designed by the wonderful Sus Conner) gives a nice visual of how our cooperative purchasing business model works.
CPA Massachusetts is a part of, and trying to advance, a revolutionary movement called the Solidarity Economy.
Emily Kawano and Julie Matthaei offered a helpful description of the solidarity economy in their 2020 Nonprofit Quarterly piece, explaining it as “a big tent, embracing many coexisting visions…of democratic post-capitalist economic systems. The SE framework for system change focuses on the process of building economic practices and institutions based on the values of equity in all dimensions (race, class, gender, sexuality, and so on), cooperation and solidarity, economic and political democracy, sustainability, and pluralism.”
They explain the solidarity economy as a direct repudiation of the logics of racial capitalism while also a rejection of the authoritarian forms of socialism that dominated 20th century alternatives to capitalism (and gave them a well-deserved bad name).
This simple chart is honestly one of the more helpful economic frameworks I’ve come across. Thank you Emily and Julie!
For those of you who come here for spiritual and theological content, I challenge you to stay with me. To me, the Solidarity Economy is a picture of the liberated, reconciled in a social communion rooted in love and justice, that recognizes all people and all creation possesses an inherent dignity, and that offers a preferential option for the poor by centering the leadership of those historically oppressed, dispossessed, marginalized and colonized. This is the kind of social system needed for shalom. I’m about it.
So what does this all this theoretical mess look like in practice? How would such an economy actually work as an economy?
This is where the language of “ecosystem” comes in—a word that immediately pushes our imagination of economics out the winner-take-all frameworks of capitalism into a landscape of mutualism.
To unpack Solidarity Economy Ecosystems, let’s turn to the wonderful Jessica Gordon Nembhard (whose book Collective Courage on the history of Black cooperatives is truly essential reading). She offers a brilliant breakdown with already-existing examples in this 9 minute talk.
Let’s pull a few terms and definitions Nembhard offers from her presentation:
Solidarity ecosystems: systems of interlocking support provided by civil, economic, and political enterprises that operate both informally and formally according to solidarity economy principles and values.
What are these solidarity economy principles & values? People centered, community centered, mutual aid, people over profits, equity, democracy, non-exploitation, racial and gender justice, reciprocity, caring and abundance, decolonization. (see another robust list expanded upon here from the International Network for the Promotion of Social Solidarity Economy)
Ecosystem: an infrastructure or milieu including physical, social, philosophical, and cultural dimensions that supports, supplies, connects, and interacts with other entities.
A community economics ecosystem is the organizational and institutional structures and assets (educational, health, civic, food, transportation, communication systems, and other economic exchanges) that serve and supply households, businesses, government, and other community institutions. In a solidarity economy, the above operates out of solidarity instead of capitalist values, including unofficial practices like bartering, gifting, and mutual aid.
Finally, the ecosystem is situated in a political environment of local, state and federal laws needed to enable, support, and encourage these ecosystems to thrive. (No natural ecosystem on Earth can survive on Mars. Read Nembhard’s book for the historical record of white supremacist terrorism and capitalism acting as a violently inhospitable environments to decades of Black solidarity economy resistance.)
To build on this, in systems thinking, we talk about nodes, networks, and nests.
Depending on the scale we’re discussing, a node could be a single business (ex: a worker-owned cooperative) or a region (Greater Boston, the Colorado Front Range, the DMV, the Bay Area, etc).
Networks are the interlocking clusters of relationships between nodes. Systems thinking helps us see that the most important part of an ecosystem are the relationships between agents (nodes) in the system. It is the dynamism, resiliency, and emergent properties created by our interconnectedness that makes us an ecosystem (CPA MA alone does not a solidarity economy ecosystem make!).
Finally, we recognize that multiple systems are nested in other systems and often have sub-systems nested in them. A single tree contains cellular-level systems. These cells make up a vastly complex organism-level system, nested in local bioregion and watershed ecosystems, nested in still larger environmental systems. Likewise, my co-op’s team forms a small social system, while our purchasing activity between vendors and members, in partnership with other community organizations, forms a small economic system in and of itself (see that first diagram in this post again).
The next-level challenge for us at CPA MA to consider is how to network and nest ourselves through forming mutual interrelationships into the broader cooperative solidarity economy systems of our region and beyond.
In our Greater Boston, Massachusetts, and New England regions (three nested geo-economic systems), we are fortunate to have an abundance of organizations and networks creating these relationships. For example, CPA MA is part of the Coalition for Worker Ownership and Power (COWOP), a member of the Greater Boston Chamber of Cooperatives, and a member of the Massachusetts Solidarity Economy Network. Parallel and interwoven to this, the solidarity economy isn’t what it says it is if it doesn’t bring about and practice racial equity and justice—so we’re also members of King Boston’s Reparations Coalition, the Black Economic Council of Massachusetts, among others.
Now, while all of these networks do build relationships and foster mutuality, they are not yet an economy. This requires taking the next step of finding ways to create, share, and equitably redistribute goods, services, land, labor, and other resources that people, communities, and institutions need to thrive and act freely in the world.
Think about the differences between a mono-crop tree farm that’s been replanted after clear cutting and the features of an old-growth forest.
The trees in the first picture are individuals, competing amidst an environment of scarcity. In a true forest ecosystem, the illusion of individuality breaks down as trees share resources between roots, communicate through mycelium networks, and host an abundance of mutually interdependent plant, moss, and animal species whose lives depend on one another. Even the death and decay of the old is a source of life for the new.
There can be a bunch of co-ops in a region, but if they aren’t working together and sharing resources in ways that lift the wellbeing of all, they aren’t yet an ecosystem.
As an individual leading a nascent cooperative, I find myself needing a smaller scale modeling that can better help organizers on the ground begin building the piece by piece connections that can be woven together with a broader movement’s work into something worth calling an ecosystem.
That’s why I increasingly appreciate the language some are using of “Solidarity Economy Value Chains.”
Thinking in terms of value chains brings me back to those classic diagrams from grade school science classes like the water cycle:
As organizers and community developers seeking to breathe life into a genuinely alternative and liberative paradigm, we have only begun to think critically around the many resources each of our institutions or projects need to thrive (just as oceans, forests, and mountains all need clean, sufficient water to be healthy) and how to get those resources circulating through our social movement ecosystems in ways that lead to shared abundance.
What’s our water? Our sunlight? Our air? Our heat? Our soil? Our carbon?
These organizers from Brooklyn and the Bronx offer an excellent explanation of what value chains are, how they form the connective tissue of solidarity economy ecosystems, and what several existing value chains between SE institutions look like in practice. Please watch!
This, friends, is what the work of weaving a solidarity economy looks like from the ground up.
It’s linking community and people centered finance, to worker-owned cooperatives, to consumer cooperatives, to housing co-ops and other so on to others who have mutual needs and gifts.
As a member of COWOP’s Resource Sharing Working Group, we are just at the beginning of mapping existing resources and creating the platforms to enable creative connections to unfold.
What does the future of this look like for the Community Purchasing Alliance of MA? What will it look like for our ecosystem to become a formidable force and true alternative to the neoliberal capitalism dominating Boston, Massachusetts and the planet?
I’m not sure. But I’m excited to do the work it’s going to take to find out.
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**Shoutout to Penn Loh of Tufts University who made his course on the solidarity economy open to folks in the community doing this work. His presentations helped me synthesize a lot of learnings from the past eight years and introduced me to some of the models in this post.