Archive for the 'Solidarity Economy' Category
Chávez’s Chief Legacy: Building, with People, an Alternative Society to Capitalism
By Marta Harnecker
SolidarityEconomy.net
When Hugo Chávez triumphed in the 1998 presidential elections, the neoliberal capitalist model was already floundering. The choice then was none other than whether to re-establish the neoliberal capitalist model -- clearly with some changes including greater concern for social issues, but still motivated by the same logic of profit seeking -- or to go ahead and try to build another model.
I believe that Chávez's chief legacy is having chosen the latter alternative. To name that alternative, he also chose to reclaim the word socialism, despite the negative baggage that the word had acquired, at the same time, however, clarifying that his was 21st-century socialism in order to distinguish it from Soviet socialism implemented during the 20th century, warning that we must not "fall into the errors of the past," into the "Stalinist deviation" that bureaucratized the party and ended up eliminating common people's protagonism, into state capitalism that put emphasis on state property rather than workers' own management of enterprises.
Chávez conceived of socialism as a new collective life in which equality, freedom, and real and deep democracy reign, and in which the people plays the role of protagonist; an economic system centered on human beings, not on profits; a pluralistic, anti-consumerist culture in which the act of living takes precedence over the act of owning.
(more...)Cooperatives Could Save Cuban Socialism
By Circles Robinson
Havana Times, Feb 26, 2013
Vicente Morin Aguado interviews non-Marxist US socialist Grady Ross Daugherty
HAVANA TIMES — Over several weeks of difficult back and forth emails (it’s hard to imagine the slow speed and high cost of Internet in Cuban hotels), I attempted to clarify the thinking of Grady Ross Daugherty [2], the leader and founder of the “modern cooperative socialist movement” in the United States and who is a regular reader of HT.
HT: What place do you see for cooperatives in the current reform process taking place within Cuba’s socialist experiment?
Grady Ross Daugherty: Thanks for characterizing Cuba’s half-century post-capitalist period as an “experiment.” An experiment is a way of testing a reasonable hypothesis. If we look at the Cuban model as an experiment, as a modifiable work in progress, its performance can be altered to achieve greater prosperity and progress.
In our discussion, we need to keep in mind that most types of cooperatives require a certain basis of legal private ownership, assuming we want them to be functional. For example, agricultural cooperatives require the ownership of cultivated land and the families homes — not usufruct rights — if we hope them to be effective and make Cuba self-sufficient in production.
HT: Regarding the issue of ownership, I began to understand your non-Marxist position prior to our exchange. It may seem like a digression, but it’s good to point out something as controversial as your self-declared non-Marxist yet socialist position.
GRD: Since its origins in the nineteenth century, the socialist movement was mutual and cooperative. This was something notable in France and England, where workers and farmers were eager to own land and the instruments of production as their property. They didn’t want ownership in the hands of private capitalists or government officials.
I think that if Cuba’s political leaders can clear their minds about the theory of state monopoly and its consequent personality cult, typical of the founders of Marxism during the nineteenth century, Cuba will be a socialist country in the long term.
Marx and Engels instilled prejudice against private property, pointing to it as a cause of society’s ills and as something antithetical to their aim of “scientific” socialism. Nevertheless, for cooperatives to be real they require ownership, which supposedly would be “capitalist” – as opposed to state-run or scientific forms like “socialist” ones.
Despite this, harsh reality has led Cuban politicians to take a fresh look at cooperatives. They’re beginning to look at socialism as an ongoing experiment.
HT: Of course Marx criticized Proudhon, the father of French cooperative and mutualist socialism, considering him petty bourgeois for all his vacillation and wavering, which is typical of his social class.
(more...)Worker Coops and Socialism’s Reform
New Cuba: Beachhead for Economic Democracy
Cuban Coop Workers
By Keith Harrington
SolidarityEconomy.net via Truthout
Jan 17, 2013 - The year 2012 may have been the United Nation's International Year of Cooperatives, but 2013 may turn out to be the more historic year for worker-ownership if the Cubans have anything to say about it.
To listen to the mainstream American media, however, you'd never know it. As a video supplement to a recent New York Times article makes clear, the corporate press has already made up its mind on how the story of Cuba's economic liberalization is bound to end:
"In a state defined by all-consuming communism for the past 50 years, capitalist change comes in fits and starts, and only at the pace that the government is willing to allow."[Emphasis added]
In other words, Cuba's post-communist story ends just like China's - in capitalism, because according to orthodox dogma, there's nowhere else to go. Trapped by the limited possibilities of this dichotomist capitalism-or-communism mentality, mainstream commentators lack the perspective needed to appreciate (much less inform others) that a transition away from a state-dominated command economy might conceivably lead to a type of market that is very distinct from our elite-shareholder-dominated and profit-fixated capitalist model.
But that is precisely the nuanced story we find in Cuba when we dig just below the surface and consider the very guidelines the Cuban government has adopted to steer the transition process. Since the state unveiled its nuevos lineamientos or new guidelines for economic development in 2010, the easing of government restrictions on private entrepreneurial activity has only constituted a single aspect of a much broader picture of change.
Unfortunately, The New York Times and its ilk have gotten so hung up on the privatization shift, that they've left out crucial details about the types of private enterprises the Cuban government is attempting to foster.
Specifically, the government is placing high priority on the development of worker-owned-and-managed firms and has recently passed a law intended to launch an experimental cadre of 200 such firms. Under the law, workers - rather than government bureaucrats or elite boards of directors - will democratically run the businesses, set their own competitive prices, determine wages and salaries and decide what to do with the profits they generate. In other words, Cuba's new worker cooperatives will operate pretty much along the same lines as their successful cousins in the capitalist world, including Spain's Mondragon Cooperative Corporation.
(more...)Solidarity Economy in Guatemala
Turning to Mutual Aid to Overcome Poverty
By Danilo Valladares
SolidarityEconomy.net via IPS
GUATEMALA CITY, Oct 8 2012 (IPS) - “Our economic situation improved a great deal because we obtained more income for our families” as a result of setting up a social enterprise, Matilde García, who makes fashion jewellery in the municipality of Pastores, 60 km west of the capital of Guatemala, told IPS.
“Now we send our children to school in the urban area and we can pay for their transport and food,” said this proud mother of three, who gave up working as a domestic employee with a monthly wage of about 40 dollars to set up a small-scale factory of necklaces, bracelets and fashion accessories employing 25 women.
Social entrepreneurship and cooperatives are offering rural families the opportunity to generate income in Guatemala, where 54 percent of the country’s 15 million people live in poverty and 13 percent in extreme poverty, especially in areas where most of the population is indigenous, according to the state National Survey of Living Conditions of 2011.
(more...)Mondragon Coops Make Waves All the Way to California
When the Workers Run the Show
By April Dembosky
SolidarityEconomy.net via Financial Times
Business cycle: co-op member Brian Drayton mends a bike at Spokes, one of the co-operatives setting up in the Californian city of Richmond, home of the second world war’s emblematic ‘Rosie the Riveter’
August 27, 2012 - James Johnson’s father was a garbage collector. His mother worked in the cafeteria of the local school. They now are both unemployed, making ends meet through government subsidy programmes. Mr Johnson, 21, has different plans for his career, building a business where he can never be laid off.
Richmond Spokes, the bike shop where he works, has no boss and no owner. It is just months away from becoming a fully-fledged worker-owned co-operative, where all six employees have an equal share in the company and an equal say in how it is run. That sense of power and purpose is something Mr Johnson never had at his previous job doing computer repairs. “The computer store was just another job,” he says. “Every day when I was going to work for the man, I had to keep repairing my bike just to get to the job. I thought, why not just focus on fixing the bikes.”
The shop is one of several co-operatives in the early stages of forming in Richmond, California, a city suffering from high crime and poverty rates. Unemployment among the population of just over 100,000 people has hovered around 18 per cent this year, well above the current national average of 8.3 per cent. City officials have recently pinned their hopes on co-ops as a key strategy for shifting the local economy and stemming social problems. They believe co-ops can create more, better jobs and stimulate spending at other local businesses.
“It’s really about creating democracy in the workplace and giving workers a sense that they own their own jobs,” says Marilyn Langlois, a former assistant to the city mayor who is now running for city council. “They can collectively make decisions that will benefit the business, and keep the money in the local community.”
(more...)Green Energy Partners: Farmers Coop & Hospital Wind Turbines Power Community
Wisconsin's First Community Wind Farm Up and Running
SolidarityEconomy.net via LaCrosse Tribune
CASHTON, WIS. — Wisconsin’s first community wind project is now up and running in Cashton.
A joint project of Organic Valley and Gundersen Lutheran’s Envision program, the Cashton Greens Wind Farm features two wind turbines expected to generate nearly 5 megawatts of energy for Cashton’s power grid — enough to power 1,000 homes each year.
The energy produced with the $10.5 million project will more than offset electricity used at Organic Valley’s Cashton Distribution Center and its La Farge headquarters facilities, and it represents about five percent of Gundersen’s energy independence goal.
As developers and owners of the wind farm, Organic Valley and Gundersen will receive income per kilowatt hour generated. Organic Valley will buy back its portion of energy to offset its footprint through a renewable energy contract with the villages of Cashton and La Farge.
(more...)Cuba’s Coming Co-operative Economy?
Reflections From
Two Recent Field Trips
Marcelo Vieta
SolidarityEconomy.net
Socialist Project
The Bullet
E-Bulletin No. 667
July 18, 2012
In 2011, I made two trips to Cuba to study the new co-operatives.
In June I was kindly invited by Camila Piñeiro Harnecker, a professor at the University of Havana and one of the country's leading experts on its co-operative movement, to participate in two conferences.
In December, Wendy Holm (Canadian agronomist and co-operative facilitator working in Cuba for the last dozen years) extended an invitation to participate in the “Walking the Walk: Cuba's path to a more co-operative and sustainable economy” workshops, again in Havana.
Both trips had international guests share experiences and knowledge of the co-operative organizational model with our Cuban hosts. The backdrop was, on both occasions, the recently proposed economic reforms coming out of los nuevos lineamientos (the new guidelines) of the Sixth Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba, completed and released on April 18, 2011.
Both of these experiences were eye opening and inspirational, and full of promise for a possible broadening of the co-operative movement in Cuba, while building lasting transnational networks of co-op practitioners and researchers from Cuba and afar. In a nutshell, these trips suggest that Cuba stands on the brink of making a major effort to build a co-operative-based sector. This recalls some of the classic thinking of Robert Owen, William King, George Holyoake, and even Karl Marx, on a co-operative based society. But, undoubtedly, major challenges along this path remain for Cuba, as they have for other state-centred command economies as they entered a period of structural transformation. The following is a report from these field trips and the discussions at the conferences.
Almost instantly upon arriving in Cuba in late June of 2011 I noticed the wherewithal of its people, especially their tenacity to get by on little. In many ways, I discovered, Cubans have already been forging an alternative socio-economic reality for decades now. For instance, we can think of how they revolutionized their agricultural sector during and after the Special Period, making Cuba the first nation to adopt a predominantly organic farming sector rooted in agricultural co-ops and the notion of subsidiarity (i.e., economic activity with a strong focus on the local and managed by local people).
The Potential for a Boom in Co-operatives
Havana billboard: “We are working – and you?”
The two conferences I presented at in June 2011 were exceptional, if ultimately a bit surprising for me in ways.
(more...)Privatization in Reverse: Texas Town’s Solidarity Economy
Abandoned Walmart Recycled As Public Library
By Beth Buczynski
SolidarityEconomy.net via Common Dreams
The news that a city will be getting a new Walmart often evokes a mixture of dread, anger, and apathy from its residents.
The global giant has captured a huge portion of the discount retail market share, claiming it helps people "live better" thanks to absurdly low prices. Of course, Walmart's low prices are only possible because of low standards of living, low wages paid to those in its supply chain, and low levels of concern for it own employees, but I digress.
In recent years, there's been something of a grassroots backlash against Wal-Mart Inc., as people have started to realize the damage a single Walmart can do to the small businesses that make up a local economy. In a few cases, there's even been news of Walmart stores closing, effectively run out of town by citizens strongly opposed to its economic, environmental, and social practices.
While this represents a win for the citizens who organized the ouster, it creates an equally big challenge. Namely, what does one do with the cavernous commercial space left behind by an abandoned Walmart?
The citizens of McAllen, Texas, a city of about 130,000 located in the southernmost tip of the state, experienced just such a vaccum after Walmart closed and then abandoned a 124,500 sq. foot space. Instead of searching for another big box retailer to take it's place, the City decided to reclaim the space as a public library.
Meyer, Scherer & Rockcastle, Ltd. of Minneapolis were selected to design the interior of the building which is about the size of 2 1/2 football fields. After stripping out all the old walls, shelves, and ceiling tiles, the space was given a fresh coat of paint and major upgrade.
The cavernous space now houses an auditorium, computers lab, classrooms and meeting rooms, and adult and teen reading lounges — not to mention hundreds of thousands of books -- earning it the title of the largest single-story library location in the U.S.
The best part of this entire transformation story is that following the re-launch of the library, new user registration increased by 23 percent. That means a lot of people were talking, learning, sharing, and supporting their community instead of simply buying a giant box of laundry soap or cheap patio furniture made in China. And that's what I call upcycling for the win. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License
Beth Buczynski is a freelance writer and editor living in the Rocky Mountain West. Stay in touch with Beth on Twitter as @ecosphericblog and @GoneCoworking
Argentina’s 200+ ‘Recovered’ Factories – A New Global Trend?
Can co-operatives crowd out capitalism?
Co-ops – democratic, community-focused – offer an egalitarian way out of our current mess.
By Wayne Ellwood
SolidarityEconomy.net via The New Internationalist
In the eyes of the mainstream media and the high priests of the free market, Argentina just doesn’t get it.
This past May, the country was savaged by the international business press for nationalizing the Spanish-owned oil company, YPF. Scarcely mentioned was the fact that Argentina’s oil and gas industry was only ‘privatized’ in the late-1990s under pressure from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other hardline enforcers of then fashionable neoliberal economic policies. Like many countries around the world, Argentina’s oil industry used to be state-owned.
Back in 2001, the knives were out again. After years of enforced austerity and ‘structural adjustment’ the resource-rich South American country was awash in debt, crippling inflation, staggering unemployment and negative economic growth. (Notice any parallels with present day Greece and Spain?)
The IMF’s prescription for setting the economy right – ‘flexible’ labour conditions, deregulation, loosening of capital controls, privatization of state-owned assets, devaluation of the national currency – only made things worse.
With inflation raging and tens of thousands of workers on the streets, the government finally called it quits, defaulting on its debt and devaluing its currency. Predictably, the kingpins of global finance went ballistic, warning that Argentina would sink into penury and chaos.
It didn’t happen. Over the next decade the country’s GDP grew by nearly 90 per cent, the fastest in Latin America. Poverty fell and employment rose steadily while government spending on social services slowly increased.
Many factors contributed to this astounding turnaround, including the determination of Argentineans to strike an independent economic course not reliant on the whims of foreign capital.
But a significant part of its success is rooted in Argentina’s rich history of co-operatives. Waves of Jewish and Italian immigrants brought the co-operative vision with them during the early 20th century. Co-ops were well established, especially in agriculture, prior to the financial and political meltdown in 2001. According to the International Co-operative Association (ICA), nearly a quarter of the South American country’s 40 million people are linked directly or indirectly to co-operatives and mutual societies.
(more...)The ‘Jackson Plan’: Solidarity Economy and Popular Power In the South
A Struggle for Self-Determination,
Participatory Democracy, and Economic Justice
Written by Kali Akuno
For the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement
Wednesday, July 4, 2012
A major progressive initiative is underway in Jackson, Mississippi. This initiative demonstrates tremendous promise and potential in making a major contribution towards improving the overall quality of life of the people of Jackson, Mississippi, particularly people of African descent. This initiative is the Jackson Plan and it is being spearheaded by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM) and the Jackson People’s Assembly.
The Jackson Plan is an initiative to apply many of the best practices in the promotion of participatory democracy, solidarity economy, and sustainable development and combine them with progressive community organizing and electoral politics. The objectives of the Jackson Plan are to deepen democracy in Mississippi and to build a vibrant, people centered solidarity economy in Jackson and throughout the state of Mississippi that empowers Black and other oppressed peoples in the state.
The Jackson Plan has many local, national and international antecedents, but it is fundamentally the brain child of the Jackson People’s Assembly. The Jackson People’s Assembly is the product of the Mississippi Disaster Relief Coalition (MSDRC) that was spearheaded by MXGM in 2005 in the wake of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of Gulf Coast communities in Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama and Texas. Between 2006 and 2008, this coalition expanded and transformed itself into the Jackson People’s Assembly. In 2009, MXGM and the People’s Assembly were able to elect human rights lawyer and MXGM co-founder Chokwe Lumumba to the Jackson City Council representing Ward 2.
What follows is a brief presentation of the Jackson Plan as an initiative to build a base of autonomous power in Jackson that can serve as a catalyst for the attainment of Black self-determination and the democratic transformation of the economy.
Program or Pillars
The J – K Plan has three fundamental programmatic components that are designed to build a mass base with the political clarity, organizational capacity, and material self-sufficiency to advance core objectives of the plan. The three fundamental programmatic components are:
Building People’s Assemblies Building a Network of Progressive Political Candidates Building a broad based Solidarity Economy
(more...)Put Public Ownership ‘On the Table’
Beyond Corporate Capitalism: Not So Wild a Dream
Gar Alperovitz and Thomas M. Hanna
SolidarityEconomy.net via The Nation
May 22, 2012 - It’s time to put the taboo subject of public ownership back on the progressive agenda. It is the only way to solve some of the most serious problems facing the nation. We contend that it is possible not only to talk about this once forbidden subject but to begin to build a serious politics that can do what needs to be done in key sectors.
Proposals for public ownership will of course be attacked as “socialism,” but conservatives call any progressive program—to say nothing of the modest economic policies of the Obama administration—“socialist.”
However, many Americans are increasingly skeptical about the claims made for the corporate-dominated “free” enterprise system by its propagandists. A recent Pew Research Center poll found that a majority of Americans have an unfavorable view of corporations—a significant shift from only twelve years ago, when nearly three-quarters held a favorable view.
At the same time, two recent Rasmussen surveys found Americans under 30—the people who will build the next politics—almost equally divided as to whether capitalism or socialism is preferable. Another Pew survey found that 18- to 29-year-olds have a favorable reaction to the term “socialism” by a margin of 49 to 43 percent.
Public ownership in certain sectors of the economy is the only way to solve some of America’s most pressing problems. Take the financial arena, where the current recession was hatched. Today, five giant banks control more than one-third of all deposits. Wall Street claims this makes it more efficient; but even if the Big Five banks were efficient (which is open to question—how “efficient” are institutions that didn’t know they were carrying a huge backlog of underwater loans?), they were all deeply involved in creating the meltdown that cost taxpayers billions in bailouts, and the overall economy trillions. Numerous economists, left and right, believe that these unbridled operations will inevitably lead to another crisis. JPMorgan Chase’s recent speculative loss of at least $2 billion should be fair warning.
(more...)Anti-Capitalist Meet-up’s Mondragon Series—All Three Parts
Mondragon Miracle, Part 1 of 3:
Building the Road We Travel
by TPauFollow
SolidarityEconomy.net via DailyKOS
1941, Office of the Archbishop of Spain:
"They just released you?" Archbishop Balbino Oliver eyed the priest standing before his desk with suspicion. Something about the young man unsettled him.
"I believe it was in error. They did not realize I had written so much against Franco. When God spared my life, I enrolled in the seminary."
He possessed humility. Good. Yet something about the eyes... "Even under the care of the church, Franco may not let you go so easily."
"Yes, it is best if I left Spain. I could continue my writing in Belgium. I think I can..."
"God granted you a precious gift, my son." The Bishop leaned back, considering. His left eye. That was it. "It would be unwise to waste the gift with further agitation of forces beyond your control." Yes, his left eye stared back slightly wider, giving him a permanently quizzical expression. Father Bertolli had mentioned him losing his eye in an accident.
"But the work I've been doing..."
"Is against Church official policy." The Archbishop leaned forward to study the documents the priest had presented him. "You are Basque, no?"
"Yes, but in Belgium..."
"Father Tillous requested an assistant in Mondragon, only 50 miles from where you grew up. Franco is unlikely to bother you, there."
"Out there, he is unlikely to need to." The young man bowed his head curtly, murmuring the obligatory goodbye.
(more...)Dynamic Duo: Green Energy and Cooperatives
Renewables Rise at the Grassroots
By Aaron Bartley
SolidarityEconomy.net via Huffington Post
May 7, 2012 - While the oil and gas lobby dominates at the federal level, communities across the United States are making great strides in gaining control of energy production.
They are doing so by advancing an impressive range of commercial-scale renewable projects that are heating homes and powering local businesses from Massachusetts to Oregon.
Municipal utilities, community-based co-ops, universities and other nonprofit institutions in both rural and urban settings are executing wind, solar, geothermal and biomass developments.
When combined with the innovative grassroots efforts to retrofit existing buildings for conservation purposes, these renewable energy production programs are placing community-led efforts at the forefront of American innovation. In the process, they are creating a blueprint that could be used to scale-up nationally when and if we develop a rational Federal energy policy fostering both the growth of the renewable sector and democratization of production on the German model.
In Hull, Mass., residents began a campaign to build large-scale wind turbines in 1996. The first turbine was completed in late 2001 and has produced more than 12 million kilowatts to date. A second, larger turbine, known as Hull II, was erected on top of the town's former landfill in 2006 and in its first year produced enough electricity to power all of the Hull's street lights while providing the town with an additional $150,000 from the sale of excess electricity. Hull's two turbines now generate enough electricity to power 1,100 homes as well as the town's street and traffic lights.
Similar community-controlled wind projects have sprouted up across the state of Iowa, placing seven municipalities and about a dozen school districts in control of their energy destinies. The 1.65 megawatt wind farm at Iowa Lakes Community College is among the largest of these community-developed projects, built in conjunction with the ILCC's launch of the first accredited wind turbine training program in the nation.
The Iowa Lakes Electric Cooperative, which operates independently of the college, provides power to more than 12,000 member-owners in eight rural Iowa counties and has developed two wind farms that generate more than 21 megawatts, projects for which it was named wind cooperative of the year by the DOE.
Noam Chomsky on the Tasks Ahead
Working Toward Factory Takeovers:
Plutonomy and the Precariat
By Noam Chomsky
SolidarityEconomy.net via The Nation
May 8, 2012 - The Occupy movement has been an extremely exciting development. Unprecedented, in fact. There’s never been anything like it that I can think of. If the bonds and associations it has established can be sustained through a long, dark period ahead—because victory won’t come quickly—it could prove a significant moment in American history.
The fact that the Occupy movement is unprecedented is quite appropriate. After all, it’s an unprecedented era and has been so since the 1970s, which marked a major turning point in American history. For centuries, since the country began, it had been a developing society, and not always in very pretty ways. That’s another story, but the general progress was toward wealth, industrialization, development and hope. There was a pretty constant expectation that it was going to go on like this. That was true even in very dark times.
I’m just old enough to remember the Great Depression. After the first few years, by the mid-1930s—although the situation was objectively much harsher than it is today—nevertheless, the spirit was quite different. There was a sense that “we’re gonna get out of it,” even among unemployed people, including a lot of my relatives, a sense that “it will get better.”
There was militant labor union organizing going on, especially from the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations). It was getting to the point of sit-down strikes, which are frightening to the business world—you could see it in the business press at the time—because a sit-down strike is just a step before taking over the factory and running it yourself. The idea of worker takeovers is something which is, incidentally, very much on the agenda today, and we should keep it in mind. Also New Deal legislation was beginning to come in as a result of popular pressure. Despite the hard times, there was a sense that, somehow, “we’re gonna get out of it.”
It’s quite different now. For many people in the United States, there’s a pervasive sense of hopelessness, sometimes despair. I think it’s quite new in American history. And it has an objective basis.
On the Working Class
In the 1930s, unemployed working people could anticipate that their jobs would come back. If you’re a worker in manufacturing today—the current level of unemployment there is approximately like the Depression—and current tendencies persist, those jobs aren’t going to come back.
The change took place in the 1970s. There are a lot of reasons for it. One of the underlying factors, discussed mainly by economic historian Robert Brenner, was the falling rate of profit in manufacturing. There were other factors. It led to major changes in the economy—a reversal of several hundred years of progress towards industrialization and development that turned into a process of de-industrialization and de-development. Of course, manufacturing production continued overseas very profitably, but it’s no good for the work force.
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