Editorial

share this segment by right‑clicking icon to copy linkMove Fast and Repair Things

Elias Crim

Toward the end of Part Two of our interview with Arizmendi Association founder Tim Huet (to be published in the next issue), he makes a striking comment (my emphasis):

One of the things I’m hopeful about is the growing number of organizations who are looking at the “silver tsunami” of retiring CEOs scaling up to help them convert their businesses in a quick way. I think that’s a good strategy to be taking.

I also think it’s important because of my long-time belief that co-ops are not going to just gradually replace the existing economy. We are trying to build in recognition of the fact that there will be more and more economic crises. And when those crises come, we will have to have the capacity to rapidly expand.

Translation: we in the solidarity economy movement are building — as quickly as we can — alternative institutions, given that we have entered a new reality of cascading crises in which our old institutions are already failing us. As the work of the Arizmendi Association over the last quarter century shows, a crisis can generate creative responses within us if we allow it to do so.

The urgency in Tim’s tone also suggests a slogan, playing on the Silicon Valley mantra of moving fast and breaking things. Let’s move fast and repair things.

To do that, we will need to demystify and de-invisibilize all those protected fiefdoms of finance — venture capital, private equity, REITs, etc.

We’ll need to see “movement investing” — that’s already happening. (If you want an insider’s take on movement investing, don’t miss our upcoming conversation with Dan Fireside.)

We’ll need new B-school classes on “social finance.” (We also need new B schools, of course.) As part of community organizing, we want the rise of investor organizing.

We need to move fast — or better, as someone suggested, we need to move at the speed of community. 

share this segment by right‑clicking icon to copy linkTurning the Franchise Model Upside Down

A Conversation with Arizmendi Association of Cooperatives Co-founder Tim Huet

Elias Crim

Tim Huet is an attorney and community organizer whose work focuses on worker cooperatives. He is a founder and serves as in-house counsel for the Arizmendi Association of Cooperatives, an enterprise that replicates successful worker cooperatives, starting with a bakery model. He has published articles on worker cooperatives and self-management in Dollars & Sense, Stanford Law & Policy Review, and Peace Review, and at Grassroots Economic Organizing.

Books

share this segment by right‑clicking icon to copy linkThe Hopes for a Movement of Movements

Solidarity Economics: Why Mutuality and Movements Matter (2021) by Chris Benner and Manuel Pastor

The authors of this relatively short book manage to pack in a lot:

• a quick history of the dark opposite of solidarity economics and the force which brought it into prominence globally — i.e., neoliberal economics,
• a description of what solidarity economics actually means on the ground, and
• an overview of some key actors and movements in this global effort while attentive to the dimensions of racial capitalism at work today.

What are the major premises of the solidarity economy? According to Benner and Pastor, there are three, each of which requires some unpacking: 1) it’s our economy, not the economy; 2) we do better when we act together; 3) social movements will be crucial to change.

If the economy is something we all own, we’re saying it’s not an impersonal system over which no one has control. We empower ourselves to push back on the half-century of failed utopian thinking and societal damage done by the architects of neoliberal economics — the supply-siders, trickle-down theorists, and “shock therapy” adherents who have done so much to create the social collapse well underway in so many countries today. (If you wonder why Vladimir Putin has retained his popularity with many Russians, recall his arrival in 2000 as the guy who put the safety net back in place and pulled the country away from Yeltsin’s catastrophic free market “reforms.”)

Changing our thinking about our economy has important real world impacts. If your economics assumes a genetic disposition toward selfish behavior, you’ll find people advocating for policies that align with or even foster that behavior.

But our everyday experience disputes that false image of human nature. Take the social practice of tipping in restaurants.

Why, if we try to think like economists for a moment, do people tip? The research (cited in the book) shows it’s not from self-interest. You’ve already enjoyed the meal, so the exchange has happened. Nor does tipping seem correlated with better service on future visits or even repeat visits to a restaurant. In fact, standard economic analysis cannot account for tipping. The practice seems related to a shared social sense (a glimmer of solidarity, you might say) that the tip is an ethical way of recognizing the wait person and showing support for them.

The second premise — acting together — is a shorthand way of emphasizing the importance of a social economy, one in which the economy is embedded into society, not extracting (and not replacing) value from it. The authors cite Heather McGhee’s The Sum of Us for her point that mutuality, grounded in racial justice, creates broad-based prosperity. The pandemic has dramatically highlighted the difference between countries with a high degree of social solidarity — Vietnam, Korea, Japan, Taiwan — and the U.S. or Britain.

Covid’s impact as an international stress test of our societies has revealed much about the degree to which our communities practice solidarity economics, as in the definition the authors cite from Emily Kawano, Coordinator for the U.S. Solidarity Economy Network cooperation, mutualism, sharing, reciprocity, altruism, caring, gifting.

Finally, social movements are not typically thought of as economic actors — but that’s where the solidarity economy again is different. The authors cite the Living Wage movement from the 1990s which resulted in over 100 cities and jurisdictions (including Baltimore, Chicago, and Oakland) adopting living wage ordinances. In the wake of that effort, there followed the “Fight for $15,” instituted by the SEIU in 2012. The National Domestic Workers Alliance, led by Ai-Jen Poo, was created in 2007 as a network of 13 organizations and now comprises over 75 local affiliates with over 250,000 members in all fifty states.

Other examples include Reverend William Barber’s New Poor People’s Campaign, the Right to the City Alliance, the New Economy Coalition, and the Green New Deal.

Movements like these, the authors suggest, have certain shared characteristics when they succeed:

• A broad base beyond circles of experts;
• A focus on transformative change over tinkering with rules;
• Emphasis on shifting norms as part of inculcating new values;
• Focus on developing new narratives;
• Courage to scale in both organizing and systems impact;
• A framework for visible, tangible action;
• “A steely-eyed vision of who is opposed, distinguishing between those who can be persuaded and those who must be constrained.”

Highly recommended and let us stay steely-eyed.