Solidarity Economics

“A daring hypothesis: there is a global revolution underway. It is not led by any political party or vanguard. It has no military bases and its strategy is anti-belligerent. It mobilises millions of people all over the world. We know little about it. What we do know is that at the grassroots level of its mobilisations, organisation and popular education, there are thousands of movements and millions of people who have begun weaving collaborative networks of economic solidarity, creating channels and connections with the potential to bring together and strengthen local and global struggles. They are working collectively, from the bottom up, and democratically, building consensus while respecting reasoned dissent. We see these movements and their achievements everywhere, yet we know little about the power of this phenomenon, for at first they seem insufficient in number and size to change the world. And yet, I maintain: there is a global revolution underway.

“The great political discovery of the 1990s was the idea of weaving collaborative networks among groups, movements and organisations through which to coordinate and share, not only our solutions and victories, but also our problems and challenges, our strategies and everyday practices. We were creating axes of struggle capable of bringing together the local and the global, the long and short term, as well as diversity and unity. However, while these collaborative networks were crucial, we had not understood their full potential.

“Take the example of the World Social Forums; the WSF process is the tip of a giant iceberg hiding myriad collaborative networks and processes. The limit of the WSF process is that it has not gone nearly far enough in developing world social networks. The forums are important moments connecting thousands of actors, opening up a significant flow of communication of the diversities that are inherent to these networks. Afterwards, even if participants are somehow informed by the new, collectively acquired experience, the flows of communication and actions essentially return to the previously existing plateaus.

“While clearly important, processes and spaces such as social forums are not enough. Taking the global construction of collaborative solidarity networks as our strategic horizon means finding ways of promoting, reinforcing and expanding on such moments in more spheres of life and struggle. More than simply spreading information about proposals, and thus acting on the level of ideological debate, it is necessary to operate on political and economic planes, putting some of the proposals into practice. In other words, our daily economic practices must be part of the work of transforming global economic structures.”

@turbulence.org.uk