There are growing calls around the world to opt-out of the current capitalist system, from the US and Cuba, to Greece and Serbia and many more in between. We love to see resistance, but it’s also only half of the equation. It’s not enough to just resist, we must build too. But what does ‘building’ look like in reality? After all, theory and ideas are nice but fascism is here now. The good news is that there are lots of people around the world already working to build a post-capitalist vision of society. We want to focus on one that we think has a lot of potential: solidarity economies.
As we discussed above, a solidarity economy is an alternative economic system than our current capitalist systems; one that places just as much value on social development as economic development. The term gained popularity in the 1980s throughout Latin America and Europe as a way to better describe a network of practices that were already existing within society. When the State abandons their responsibility to their citizens, especially marginalized communities, the people have always found ways to take care of and protect each other through the free exchange of time, labor, and resources - essentially building mini autonomous economies based on cooperation, mutualism, reciprocity, and altruism instead of profit. These practices exist today in all parts of our society. The primary issue is that they are typically separated from each other. As Emily Kawano, Director of the US Solidarity Economy Network, says, the goal is to “connect these siloed practices in order to build an alternative economic system, broadly defined, for people and the planet.”
