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by Matt Broomfield
The UK’s Solidarity Economy Association (SEA) is launching a series of online conversations with radical grass-roots solidarity economy organisations across the world – each one on a different continent, with contributions from North and South America, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Europe.
The series, entitled ‘Conversations with Game-changers: Solidarity Economy Strategies for a New and Better World’, will this October feature a contribution from the women’s movement in north and east Syria, focusing on their attempts to build a radically inclusive economy there from the grassroots up.
SEA representative Jo spoke with Medya News to describe how they hope to foster conversations between Rojava, Mississippi, Kenya, India, and other communities across the globe. Each discussion will be translated into seven languages including English, Kurdish, Turkish and Arabic.
She explained the SEA attempts to “bring back up an economy which is actually much older than capitalism, because we think that cooperation, working together, mutual aid, and all these kinds of values are as old as humanity. What’s actually new is capitalism, and the repression of our ability to meet our own needs collectively.”
Working with this aim, the SEA will launch their new discussion series this Saturday 10 September. The first discussion features Cooperation Jackson, an emerging cooperative network situated firmly within the struggle for Black liberation and self-determination. Its mission is to advance the development of economic democracy in Jackson, Mississippi, the poorest state in the union of the United States, whose majority Black population face chronic unemployment and impoverishment. Cooperation Jackson are building a solidarity economy anchored by a network of cooperatives and other types of worker-owned and democratically self-managed enterprises that are rooted in social movements and people’s assemblies.
“They’re building a solidarity economy, including cooperatives, that are really rooted in the local working-class black community,” Jo said. “They’re trying to connect them through the supply chain and provide skills that the community is lacking.” Projects range from technical skills training to a 3D printing lab to a working farm to a network of squatted shelters for homeless people, Jo added, highlighting the extent to which the project was rooted in the local community and based on many decades of black power political movements and organising there.
Likewise, Jo described the way she had witnessed the reemergence and revitalisation of a solidarity economy during her visits to Bakur (Turkish Kurdistan) and Rojava (Syrian Kurdistan.) SEA has been working with Rojava’s Aboriya Jin (Women’s Economy) since 2016, facilitating discussions as well as directly supporting projects including the supply of water for a cooperative village housing women and children who lost relatives during the Syrian conflict.
Asked what linked these diverse projects, Jo said: “The title of the project is Conversations with Game-changers. It’s about who is coming up with groundbreaking new ways of organising, in a broader strategy of liberation for society. The other thing they have in common is a solidarity economy approach – meeting the needs of society, food, shelter, water.”
Within the scope of these webinars, besides Cooperative Jackson, the SEA will also be speaking with Aboriya Jin, part of the Kongra Star women’s movement in north and east Syria (Rojava); Grassroots Liberation, a movement organising in the ghettos of Nairobi, Kenya; Zameen Prapti Sangharsh Committee, organising Dalit landless farmers in the Punjab region of India, and Guerrilla Translation, building a new democratic economy model of cooperatives for translation workers to sustain themselves while internationalising knowledge produced for liberation.
The discussion with Cooperation Jackson is on Saturday 10 September at 16.00pm UK time, and you can register here. Full details of all the events in the series are available online here.
