Reinventing Social Care; Edgar Colon on Soul Power; Preview: Marjorie Kelly interview
How Can We Re-humanize Social Care?
About a year ago, I was struck by a question: Many of us yearn for a social economy, one which recognizes social values—not market values only—and valorizes work which is relational, not merely transactional.
So how do social values get designed into the ownership and control structures of production systems so as to transform the current economic paradigm?
The person asking this provocative question (in his book Civilizing the State) was Canadian cooperativist John Restakis, a co-founder of the Synergia Institute, among many other projects.
Thinking of the enormous care economy in North America, Restakis reiterated warnings we’ve heard about how automation is making the conditions of precarity and mass unemployment into permanent conditions for most of these workers. Further, he warned, “As consumer buying power is eliminated through precarity, low wages, and unemployment, the very basis of the global economy is undermined.”
Restakis suggests two possible responses to this grim scenario which is already underway:
The state becomes the guarantor of social welfare and subsidizes a workforce that has lost its productive function. This strategy is a last gasp effort to preserve a capitalist system that is socially and economically unsustainable.
The system is reconstructed by re-socializing the meaning and purpose of work. This is revolutionary and requires a complete re-thinking of value and the ultimate purpose of the economy. I think this is the job we solidarity-minded folks have already taken on.
He adds strikingly:
If it is anywhere that work retains its social meaning it is in the field of social care. Social care is a relational good (a good or a service that is embedded in an actual relationship among persons). It is the relationship itself that carries value. Relational goods acquire value through sincerity, or genuineness—they cannot be bought or sold. Friendship and caring are relational goods. They are things whose sale would destroy both their character and their worth. When social care is an instrument for something other than the relationship itself (like profit)—it ceases to be care. The regression of social care into a system for the provision of social commodities (goods translated into monetary value) is the death of care.
Restakis further believes that the collapse of productive labor is creating a class of people—eventually constituting a majority in the industrialized world—whose worth can only be reclaimed in the domain of human—not market—relations. This is the field of the social/solidarity economy and requires the emergence of a new kind of market—a social reciprocity market.
I found this analysis a bit dizzying and very inspiring. But there was more.
Restakis went on to describe “the most promising attempt to re-humanize care in our economies today—the social cooperatives which emerged from Northern Italy in the late ‘70s and are now found all over Europe, in Quebec, South Korea and elsewhere.”
I discovered that this multistakeholder business model has succeeded because it ensures that social relations are the basis of its value creation process. Co-op ownership enables the powerful bottom-up co-creation of care among care givers and care recipients as well as their wider local community—not the bottom line of corporations.
The data show that social co-ops deliver 1) meaningful, dignified work at a decent wage; 2) services which are rated top-level in terms of quality; 3) the opportunity of ownership; 4) community and volunteer engagement in the processes.
Social co-ops globally now cover a wide range of offerings: child care, eldercare, disabled care, immigrant services, youth enrichment, recovering citizens (formerly incarcerated, substance abuse, mental illness), and more.
For an insightful interview with economist Vera Zamagni about the history of Italian social co-ops, see this video from the Platform Cooperative Consortium.
Finally, I’m using this description of social co-ops in order to announce the release of a new study of this topic, undertaken over the last six months by Minsun Ji (Rocky Mountain Employee Ownership Center), Matthew Epperson (Savvy Co-op) and myself. Our team has now added Rebecca Matthew (University of Georgia), Genevieve Sheridan (Childcare for Regenerative Economies), Rebecca Mqamelo (city3, Xerion), and Garrett Blaize (Appalachian Community Fund).
Our report compares social co-ops in three regions: Italy’s Emilia-Romagna, Quebec, and South Korea. We also want to explore how we might import this model into the U.S., where we have worker co-ops which provide social care but no Italian-style multistakeholder social co-ops with memberships for volunteers, family members and local funders.
Here’s the Executive Summary.
Let us know your thoughts!
These Are the Times That Grow Our Souls
My friend, the genial and brilliant Edgar Rivera Colon, is a medical anthropologist at the Keck School of Medicine at USC, the proud uncle of Olivia and Luna Rivera-Vasquez, a resident of East L.A., and the host of the remarkable (if too short-lived) podcast, Karl Marx Ate My Field Notes. (Hoping he’ll resume!)
Edgar is also a spiritual director to both individuals and social movements. And he’s a new minister in the Fellowship of Affirming Ministries, coming out of his background of Jesuit training. (A fellow member and a bishop in Edgar’s new denomination is Rev. Dr. William Barber of “Moral Mondays” fame.)
Inspired by the late Grace Lee Boggs, Edgar has noted that the most important form of revolutionary labor is love. He also agrees with Bogg’s wonderful exhortation, “These are the times that grow our souls.”
In his counseling practice, Edgar helps his participants understand that we’re all not quite human yet: we’re in a process to become more human. Which makes growing our souls nothing less than a freedom project. As he puts it, the return of Soul Power.
Edgar suggests we consider, by comparison, Trump World: a soulless, lonely, alienating landscape of late capitalism and unfreedom. Observe the gloom and aggressiveness of many depressed young people today, selling their labor power and their bodies, cheaply. And the risk of a new fascism from the implosion of desire as we can no longer keep our panic under control.
In this context we need nothing less than a collective discernment of spirits, he argues. We should be looking for “that moment when you realize your individual spiritual journey is actually a mass pilgrimage on your way to becoming an ancestor yourself.”
He recently preached his first sermon on the theme of “Catastrophe as Our Daily Bread.” Here’s the audio version—you won’t hear too many other preachers like Edgar:
Coming Soon: Our Interview with Author Marjorie Kelly
A few years ago, my interest in Mondragon and solidarity economics led me to pick up Owning Our Future by Marjorie Kelly, now a senior fellow at the Democracy Collaborative. The author set forth brilliantly the five essential patterns of ownership design—essentially, the architecture of ownership—which define the business purpose of an enterprise and whether it will operate in an extractive or generative mode. (The patterns are purpose, membership, governance, capital and networks.)
Kelly saw that ownership is the ultimate realm of economic power and then offered a blueprint for reinventing it for “living purpose”—which includes being of service to the community as a way to feed the self.
Now just out, Kelly’s Wealth Supremacy begins by “naming the unnamed,” since we cannot fix a problem we cannot name. She identifies wealth supremacy as the hidden force driving much of our polycrisis today and (entangled with white supremacy) a modern-day colonizing force.
I’ve invited my friend and occasional collaborator Elizabeth Garlow to co-host a podcast interview with Marjorie Kelly about her new book in the coming weeks. Watch for it in the next installment here!
See you next time—peace.
Add the e make no place a good place.
I never got around to reading Marjorie's first book, and now she has another one? Man, I'm never going to catch up.