A decade of building the Massachusetts solidarity economy

In Building the Solidarity Economy: A Decade’s Assessment, educator, researcher, and activist Penn Loh takes stock of the past decade of effort to build a solidarity economy in the Boston area and Massachusetts. While I had heard about many of these projects and organizations from Penn’s Solidarity Economy Movements course which I audited, I hadn’t realized how so many of these organizations had been created in the past ten years.

The article describes:

• New entities in the realms of food and land, such as new land trusts organized within the Greater Boston Community Land Trust Network, the Dorchester Food Co-op, and CERO composting.
• New funding support through Boston Impact Initiative and Boston Ujima Project, as well as $2M in participatory budgeting in Boston.
• The founding of a state office to support worker ownership: Massachusetts Center for Employee Ownership (MassCEO), which was likely to receive funding in the state budget, last I had seen.
• Efforts to fight the harms of the dominant economic system through the creation of permanently affordable housing. And while several groups have made impressive gains, I find the relatively small number of units sobering as to the level of work it takes to move housing out of the speculative market.

The second half of the article looks at the challenges posed by the mindset and thought patterns embedded in the interconnected systems of oppression of “capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and imperialism”. For example, funders had hoped that projects would be ready to fund in a linear fashion, which didn’t happen at first, and there is a broader need to shift culture, learn to make decisions together non-hierarchically, and cultivate solidarity in all relations. The way forward will include cooperatives, but as Aaron Tanaka says, “we can’t ‘co-op our way out of capitalism’ because the problems are not just economic.”

The article closes with a quote from Jasmine Gomez (which references Audre Lorde’s essay “The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House”) describing how the resources of the dominant system can be used to break down that system, reduce the harms of that system, or build a new system:

[T]he master’s tools … are what we have. Some people use them to try and dismantle. Some people use them to try and extend the life of systems so that they don’t hurt our communities as much as they can, and I think some people use those tools to try and build something completely new. Whether or not we can is the experiment. And in that process, the healing and the relationship building is something that will come, that are not the tools of the masters.