Chlorophyll

(Cross-posted from my other blog and partly inspired a recent blog post on Green Commons)

Kevin Carson links to a great article in the magazine Dollars and Sense called Other Economies are Possible! It discusses at length the slow but steady growth of small, local businesses that play by their own rules, not those of classical economics.

I call this a counter-economy, because while a counter-culture is fun, what it will really take to change the world is a counter-economy. That's where the rubber really hits the road. In the article, it's referred to as a "solidarity economy," but the name isn't what's important.

What's important is that we find and support each other. There isn't one single criterion that decides whether an enterprise qualifies as part of the solidarity economy, except perhaps that it operates on logic other than maximizing the bottom line.

The article talks at some length about how there isn't a unifying ideology, or for that matter, even economic theory. We are doing what works for us -- and for our communities. However, this only constitutes a movement to the extent that the people doing all this work together. It's easy to get bogged down in our own tasks and lose sight of the bigger picture. If that happens, however, then we are working against our own declared purposes.

There is no "ism" for this movement. It's not capitalist, because it puts other priorities above the return on investment. In some cases, it has no investors at all. A great many of the organizations involved are cooperatives, so there is no distinction between labor and capital.

Is it socialist? Most people think that socialism means state ownership, or at least control, and this is the farthest thing from that definition. It could accurately be described as libertarian socialism, but it would be a huge distraction to have to explain that phrase over and over, and hold endless debates about it. In the end, I think our time is better spent practicing this model than trying to settle on a name for it.

The article makes a good point about the relationship between the solidarity economy and classical economics: it seems logical to think that the solidarity economy is some sort of aberrant subset of market economics, practiced by the soft of heart and soft of head. In fact, it's just the opposite. The solidarity economy takes in far more of human relations than classical economics, and sees trade as one activity among many -- important, to be sure, but hardly paramount. Seen this way, it is classical economics (and particularly its modern neoliberal strain) that is the subset and the aberration.