The following is a transcript of the video above from our webinar “Remaking the Economy: Building Regional Solidarity Economies.” View the full webinar here.
We talk about cooperation as basically the Black and Indigenous practice of meeting each other’s collective needs. These are things that communities of color have been doing for centuries to care for one another. On [an] everyday level, [that] can look like daycare with your neighbors, pooling resources to have a cookout, things we see in post-disaster, post-hurricane mutual aid. When I think about and talk about solidarity, I…[mean] entering a consistent or everyday practice of cooperation with one another, understanding that working to meet my needs in this neighborhood or community or home that we share, I’m meeting my own needs by working for yours. Our joy is linked, our survival is linked, our liberation is linked.
We know our current capitalist paradigm chokes and undervalues these systems of care. That is what this movement work is about. We’re here today to celebrate and understand the translation of these Black and Indigenous practices around care into an economy that is for us, that is here to support and uplift us—and not exploit us. That is people- and planet-centered. We have an economy right now that is designed to exploit the unmet needs of its workers and of our communities in order to stay on top and to thrive. [Cooperation] stays vital to our survival, but…it’s out of reach for us often as participants.
To me, solidarity economy is about using one another and our collective wisdom to really snatch the economy back…making it really work for us, using all of these practices that are already inherent to us, that we already embody day to day with one another, to really make it a space where we own our work and get to thrive.
