Caroline: “What’s the difference between the sharing economy and the solidarity economy?” Cheyenna: “It’s the difference between doing something that is good and doing something that is just. It’s the difference between friends helping each other and social justice.”
We all recognize that sharing is good. Sharing, lending, and borrowing help connect neighbors, encouraging isolated individuals to create community by consuming less. But most of the latest sharing projects focus on wealthy neighbors. What if I’ve never had too much? How do we address social inequity? How do we redistribute power to the majority who live without it? To transform an economic system which fails to meet community needs, we have to move from a sharing economy to a solidarity economy.
What's the difference? The solidarity economy is based on democratic control and social justice, not just cooperation and ecological sustainability. It's about sharing power. Solidarity means recognizing our global interdependence and addressing injustices in our communities by replacing dynamics of unequal power with grassroots, cooperative leadership. Take, for example, two food cooperatives in New York City--each concerned with remaining accessible for low-income people while also creating and participating in solidarity economics on a systemwide level. They're interested in justice, democracy, cooperation, and sustainability not only for their consumers, who become worker-owners, but also for the producers of their food, who are often organized into cooperatives too. Check them out:
Portraits of the Solidarity Economy: Food Cooperatives from Alex Mallis on Vimeo.
Collaborative consumption can help us use fewer resources and save money, but the solidarity economy connects us across race and class, often in ways that build a more just system for all. Community development credit unions, for example, are cooperative financial institutions, with charters that require them to provide financial services for marginalized communities. Then there are some businesses, like Third Root Community Health Center in Brooklyn, NY, that are worker-owned cooperatives that also provide sliding scale pricing and actively seek ways to bring health care to low-income people. When we support this kind of grassroots economic justice we move from sharing to solidarity, fully acknowledging our interdependence and taking action in ways that reverberate far beyond our own circle of friends.
In New York City we are lucky to have hundreds of examples of these practices. Sometimes they are new, utilizing economic innovations, and other times they are a return to traditions for collective well-being. Together they touch every sector of economic activity and make up a dynamic alternative to an economy based solely on profit and greed. (You can view a map of NYC's solidarity economy enterprises and intiatives here.)
Recently, SolidarityNYC produced a series of short film portraits of solidarity economy leaders, like those listed above. These films include people's stories from food and worker cooperatives, intentional communities, credit unions, community gardens, barter networks, and participatory budgeting. Each person is empowering specific NYC communities and in turn creating a solidarity alternative to the destructive economic transactions that dominant our daily lives.
We believe that in building networks of solidarity economy practices within and among our communities we can empower ourselves (and each other) to bring new forms of grassroots-led economic development to our neighborhoods. In doing so we'll not only do something good for each of us, but we'll bring greater justice to our city.
Want to do something similar in your community? We'd love to hear from you. Email us at info (at) solidaritynyc (dot) org.
Special thanks to Caroline Woolard of OurGoods.org and SolidarityNYC for co-authoring this post!
Comments
Neal Gorenflo wrote on 10.10.11, 1:58pm:
Cameron, very insightful comment. I see "The Sharing Economy" as a potential middle ground too as well as the need for a framework or meaning making review of the space. We hadn't had to do that because we were pretty obscure just a year ago. Seems time is ripe though.
I see the various monikers across a spectrum where the most shareable enterprises or informal community projects are democratically financed, owned, and managed that help people share assets are on one end of the spectrum. And at the other end are privately financed, owned and managed product service systems where the service owns all the assets but manages shared use by the public. That leaves a huge middle ground with all kinds of variations and combinations possible.
And while you could moralize about this spectrum saying coops are more just, you could also say that different situations require different forms of organizations. Full blown coops or community projects whether open source online or an offline enterprise are rarely good at innovating new business models or disruptive products (like the iPhone). Usually coops organize around well established business models and products. And I can't think of one open source product that doesn't have a private enterprise precursor. But coops are exceptionally good at stabilizing jobs and the local economy while creating a more inclusive economy.
On the other hand, truly disruptive businesses tend to result from a small group of people working closely together. This is the entrepreneur / VC model. These are great at creating and scaling disruptive businesses and products. They also create jobs but most of the wealth created goes to a small number of people. However, while the rewards can be out-sized, they tend to be based on merit - those who risk the most gain the most.
This is not to put either of these on a pedestal. Maybe rather than judge and moralize, we should just recognize that the economy is an ecosystem and there's a variety of organisms each with different purposes. That said, I think it's clear we need much more of the former (coops, commons) than the later right now. The ecosystem is deeply out of balance and thus vulnerable to huge and destructive disruptions which are not good for anyone.
Last Friday night, Juliet Schor spoke at the BMW Guggenheim Lab about 'Connected Consumption.' The term was a little too self-consciously trying to differentiate itself from 'Collaborative Consumption.' (Juliet never cited Rachel Botsman's and Roo Roger's book, or Lisa Gansky's "Mesh," which was, academically, a bit disingenuous.) So the conceptual scene is getting crowded.
There is nevertheless a very urgent need to bring some conceptual and political clarity to the rapid expansion of the sharing economy, especially right now given #Occupy.
Certainly there seems to be a continuum between the Solidarity Economy (on the left) and Collaborative Consumption (on the venture capital startup 'future of business' right). If the Sharing Economy names 'community-based' initiatives, which may be B-corp social enterprises, placing at least equal value on (measurable) social benefit as on financial viability (and even profitability), then it might name a messy middle ground.
There are lots of questions however. Are we talking about economic and/or political power? (Enabling) Power to and/or (Autonomy) Power from? What is the difference between the 'democratic' that this article claims for the Solidarity Economy, and the 'democracy' that the #Occupy movement is declaring is irredeemably broken? Does Solidarity mean getting into, or at least being explicit about, a wider, formal politics (whether representational or resistant), or is it enough to be developing (smaller scale) systems that empower this or that group of people suffering injustice?
And who gets to decide on these terms and how? Should the Solidarity Economy for example show solidarity with the Sharing Economy and even Collaborative Consumption, or is now the time for, in the terms of the political theory of Carl Schmitt, a clear identification of friends and enemies, naming names?
Perhaps Shareable should add to its job of reporting on sharing economy initiatives, some kind of critical review space, in which contributors and readers can debate whether this or that venture is political enough, and in the right way...
Cameron