Banker Ladies; DazzleCon; What's a Solidarity Economy?
These things all fit together...
Let’s start this issue at the grassroots level, with the Banker Ladies of Toronto. We know about the hidden work of these women, thanks to the research of the University of Toronto’s Dr. Caroline Shenaz Hossein, an expert on the social economy of the Black disapora, especially the diverse forms of community-based or informal economies in which you find ROSCAs.
The latter are rotating savings and credit associations, an ancient tool of mutual aid used today especially by immigrant communities who may not be able to access conventional sources of financing. Known by a variety of names—sousous, cheetus, boxes, kitties, tandas, chits—they are self-managed money collectives anchored in reciprocity and trust.
The above YouTube video is a short film about three Toronto-based Black women from the Caribbean, each of whom is a “banker lady” for her local community.
Such financial strategies are tied to the historic struggles of subaltern communities. In Canada, the legacy of the Desjardins credit unions in early 20th-century Quebec and the fisherman’s cooperatives born in the Antigonish movement of Nova Scotia during the Depression are two local examples. (For the U.S. context, see Collective Courage, Jessica Gordon Nembhard’s fascinating history of African-American economic resistance via strategies like mutual aid, burial associations, and co-op businesses.)
While ROSCAs are part of the world’s informal economies, they are very much part of the practices of the larger solidarity economy, a global movement which has roots in a general resistance to capitalistic practice.
Now let’s move from the grassroots to the city level and last week’s overlapping events devoted to the solidarity economy: the DazzleCon 2023 meetup of Zebras Unite, and D.C. Community Wealth Building Day, both here in my town of Washington D.C.
Community Wealth Building (CWB) is a framework term, originally developed by the Democracy Collaborative a little over a decade ago and now in common use. It describes a way of applying the principles of the solidarity economy to a local community—which could mean a large city like Chicago, or any of several other cities with CWB work underway—whether under that term or otherwise—including New York City, Cleveland OH, Richmond VA, Rochester NY, and numerous others.
Economic democracy is a hallmark of the solidarity economy and thus the latter is foundational to the rise of community wealth building initiatives in several major U.S. cities, including most recently Chicago’s remarkable ecosystem (you can download a vision doc for the project here), funded with $15 million by outgoing Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s administration:
Here in DC, Zebra visitors in town for DazzleCon may have been surprised to learn that the city of DC has a vibrant co-op history, going back to the late 19th century but then given a notable boost in the first years of Mayor Marion Barry’s administration. (A wonderful source for this co-op history is “Home Rule from Below” by Johanna Bockman of George Mason University.)
After declining quite a bit during the neoliberal heyday of the 1990s, we may be seeing a comeback for co-op culture: a group of activists and community leaders are attempting to revive DC’s former constellation of worker co-ops, low-equity housing co-ops, food co-ops, and land banks.
Finally, in hopes of clarifying things a bit at the global level…
What exactly is this solidarity economy we’re always talking about here? On the ground it looks like a bunch of different economic practices—localized, mostly smaller-scale, highly participatory—such as:
low-income credit unions,
housing cooperatives,
community land trusts,
food and consumer cooperatives,
community supported agriculture (CSA) programs,
worker and producer cooperatives,
fair trade networks,
community gardens,
susus, buying clubs, barter networks, timebanks, and even
complementary currencies and open source software.
As a term, Solidarity Economy (SE) came to the US primarily through the World Social Forum in Brazil, and throughout Latin America its practices are rooted in Indigenous ways of being and co-operative principles. As this excellent site points out, solidarity economies, in practice but under other names, have existed for thousands of years in our communities. It is the traditional way of creating sustainable livelihood before capitalism arrived to decimate most of those local, personalistic ecosystems.
The SE should be distinguished from the social economy (Quebec’s sector is a notable example) which includes nonprofits, co-ops, and social enterprises that, “seek to achieve limited, progressive change within the confines of the current social order by ameliorating the effects of market failure, unemployment and poverty,” as Michelle Williams puts it.
By comparison, the solidarity economy is a “transformative vision of society based on democratic self-management, redistribution, solidarity and reciprocity.” For more on this distinction see Michelle’s essay in the anthology The Solidarity Economy and Social Transformation.
Are you a Strong Towns fan? Or even a member? You may want to catch this Thursday’s webinar (at noon EST) called “The Stronger Towns Conversation.”
We’ve invited Allison Lirish Dean, author of the recent Current Affairs piece on Strong Towns—an excellent example of constructive criticism, in our view—to talk about the movement’s virtues and blind spots with our panel.
Here’s the Eventbrite registration page you’ll need in order to sign up for a Zoom link.
And big thanks here to some generous folks who became paid subscribers last week: Sarah Aguirre, Dan Misleh, Edgar Rivera Colon, Brian Corbin, C.R. Boardman, and my Aussie comrade Antony McMullen!
And if you haven’t made the leap to paid status quite yet, hope you’ll consider supporting Solidarity Hall. As people in my small Texas hometown used to say, we could sure use the rain.
See you next time—peace.
Thanks for the shout out 😀