The Solidarity Economy North and South: Grassroots solutions for social change. The social and solidarity economies The problem: how to provide enjoyable, vibrant diverse low carbon livelihoods. Alternatives to carbon intensive growth Social economy: using business skills and techniques to meet needs and to generate a profit for social good. Solidarity economy: how do we want to live and work? How can we provide that? How do we share any surplus. Nobody is in possession of the revealed truth today, neither in the North nor in the South. We all catch glimpses of the truth, we have carried out analyses, some of them promising, but we cannot accept what the North thinks is the revealed truth. I have every respect for the ideas of the North, but they must not necessarily be taken at their face value. It is essential that some day all of us, those of the North and South together, set ourselves to explore the nature of our problems, discarding dogmas and preconceived ideas, until we reach a measure of common ground. Unsustainable? the irresponsible face of capitalism? OK so what would YOU do different????? You can call it liberalism. You can call it empowerment. You can call it freedom. You can call it responsibility. I call it the Big Society. The Big Society is about a huge culture change where people... don't always turn to officials, local authorities or central government for answers to the problems they face but instead feel both free and powerful enough to help themselves and their own communities. (David Cameron, 19th July 2010). "Irresponsibility. Selfishness. Behaving as if your choices have no consequences. Children without fathers. Schools without discipline. Reward without effort. Crime without punishment. Rights without responsibilities. Communities without control. Some of the worst aspects of human nature tolerated, indulged sometimes even incentivised by a state and its agencies that in parts have become literally de-moralised. In the case of nutrition and health, just as in the case of education, the gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves. Douglas Jay. Being English means having the liberty to have a home of your own, to do what you like in your spare time, to choose your own amusements instead of having them chosen for you from above. George Orwell. as a set of roughly sketched ideas, the Big Society predates the Coalitions plans for public spending cuts. But it makes the scale, speed and manner of deficit reduction politically possible. The Government could not have taken up its axe with such composed ruthlessness without a story to tell about how to fill the gaps left by a retreating state. Anna Coote (2011:82) "To put it bluntly, the workers and academics of the CDPs found that working with local people did not remove local poverty because the causes of that poverty lay elsewhere in economic trends and social politics; and their outspoken and public repetition of this message led to the closure of the programme by the government." We need to create communities with oomph neighbourhoods who are in charge of their own destiny, who feel if they club together and get involved they can shape the world around them. I like the way the people are, we are like a large solidaristic family, yes, it is wonderful, we talk and talk, ideas are exchanged and friendships are made. Charly, before you came we used to greet each other; now we know each other I have lived solidarity here you choose what you consume; the encounter with things is different; Im taking [home] things made with love Its a matter of changing peoples way of thinking from that of an employee to that of a businessperson who runs a micro enterprise, a producer. All this means changing peoples ways of thinking. They say: there are no jobs. I respond: there is no employment, but there is work (...) and there is work, because there are needs to be met; and some of these we can cover with work, no? Lift the spirits; stimulate production, services, the added value of recycled goods. To see abundance where another sees poverty or nothing at all. It upset me dark, airless, poorly presented a bad environment, very expensive. I got scared; there were so many people; you couldnt walk and you couldnt breathe, people used to fight; they killed each other for a rag or for food. People were grabbing; poor people taking advantage of poor people is the worst of crimes. there are people without shame. We try to be solidaristic, but there are always infiltrators. We have quite a few people in the movement who fought for 10 years during the military period and they are reflecting on their experiences, and they are saying ok, weve fought so much, and ok weve fought against capitalism, but while weve fought against capitalism, we havent fought against the root of capitalism, and the same with other processes of domination. And so one of our objectives now is to fight the roots of capitalism and to work on social relations. You can try to destroy an institution, you can try to destroy the heads of an institution, but if you as a society are reproducing what this institution is about, it wont get you anywhere, so we are about a change of society, of culture.MTD Solano "there is no single locus of great refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellions, or pure law of the revolutionary. Instead there is a plurality of resistances, each of them a special case. resistances that are possible, necessary, improbable; others that are spontaneous, savage, solitary, concerted, rampant or violent; still others that are quick to compromise, interested or sacrificial. (Foucault 1990:95-6) "The unity of scream against and power-to can perhaps be referred to as dignity, following the language of the Zapatista uprising. Dignity is the refusal to accept humiliation, oppression, exploitation, dehumanisation. .This means a politics that projects as it refuses, refuses as it rejects: a politics dense with the dream of creating a world with mutual respect and dignity, filled with the knowledge that this dream involves the destruction of capitalism, of everything that dehumanises and de-subjectifies us." Holloway (2002):154 How we can create enjoyable, socially- inclusive, democratically managed jobs, enterprises, co-operatives and other forms of formal and informal economic organisation in a climate and resource constrained world? How do we define what it means to live the sort of life we want to live, while understanding that climate change and resource constraint issues need to be recognised? How do we identify what we need and what we should produce? What is enjoyable, convivial, democratically- controlled work, as opposed to exploitative useless toil? How do we maintain and enable to flourish that which we hold in common and all depend on: wider ecosystems, social services, civic life, community? What does it mean to create wealth, to be entrepreneurial? How can we develop new, social and collective understandings of wealth creation? Are markets always capitalist, always illogical, prone to crisis and unequal rewards or good allocation mechanisms? Can we reconfigure markets so they work to different rhythms? Can we change the world without taking power? What are the possibilities and limits of grassroots action? Is this a nave suggestion? What is the role of the state? Can the state facilitate, rather than co-opt, grassroots action? Should we change the world by taking power, as Chavez would argue? Are social democratic governments better or worse at working with civil society, without co-opting them? Paradoxically, are there more opportunities for grassroots change under neoliberal governments where citizens are expected to fend for themselves more? Or is this just a cover for privatisation, with social/solidarity economy organisations being set up to fail? What are the best conceptual and theoretical tools for thinking these issues through?