This paper examines how social movement actors wishing to progress the transition to a socially inclusive sustainable post-growth economy are enacting resistant conceptions of what Polanyi called the 'fictitious commodities' of capital, land and labour by bringing them into common ownership and control as part of an active struggle against neoliberal conceptions of economies (Cato and North 2016).
The paper is built on a conceptualisation of solidarity and antagonistic economies. While the social entrepreneur uses what are commonly identified as business skills and generates a surplus, but for ‘good’; and the ‘social economy’ aims to help the excluded join the market economy, our focus is on the ‘solidarity economy’, whereby activists start with ‘how we want to live with dignity and justice in sustainable ways’, and then create an economy to realise their aims. Secondly, we develop conceptions of what we call the ‘antagonistic economy’, where grassroots economic activities consciously aim to challenge pathological elements of capitalist markets, developing new conceptions of how economies should be run that nod more to Polanyi’s conceptualisation of re-moralised and re-embedded substantive, and to Gibson-Graham’s diverse economies.
Empirically, the paper draws on research on how alternative currencies, recoveredfactories and Community Land Trusts aim to socialise and reconfigure money, labour andland through acts of commoning for a more socially just, sustainable and expansiveconception of the ‘real’ economy. Specifically, the paper draws on the findings of BritishAcademy-funded research project The Solidarity Economy North and South: Energy,Livelihood and the transition to a low carbon economy, which connected social andsolidarity economy activists from the UK and Argentina (see North and Cato 2017,forthcoming), research on alternative currencies (North 2007) and particularlyTransition currencies (North and Longhurst 2013), and on Community Land Trusts(Engelsman, Rowe, & Southern, 2016; Thompson, 2015).
The paper argues that while subaltern actors have been able to produce commonly-owned and enacted forms of money relatively easily, the extent that they can enact the sustainable livelihoods they wish to materialise is limited firstly by their capacity to envisage and value the resources they have to hand, resources that substantivist andDiverse Economies perspectives make more visible. Secondly, their usefulness can be limited by the extent that activists can produce the things they need to live their preferred lifestyle, the resources for which may be in private hands. The Transition currencies have attempted to address this issue by becoming more ‘business friendly’, but this may be at the cost of limiting their ability to create commonly created forms of capital. A second solution has been to expand the landscape of commonly-held forms of production - again by envisioning the extent that there are more actually-existing diverse forms of economic practices, and by generating solidarity and co-operative enterprises, and by recovering factories abandoned by their owners. A third solution has been for subaltern groups to take land out of the realm of exchange and speculation and re-appropriate it as urban commons through Community Land Trusts. These institutional innovations for democratically-governed and community-owned affordable housing have been mobilised in diverse urban contexts by activists seeking to contest gentrification driven by financial speculation, inner-city deprivation and inequality in the US (Engelsman et al.,2016), and by long-term urban decline, market failure, and public mismanagement andneglect in contexts of capital flight and abandonment, particularly in Liverpool(Thompson, 2015).
Commoning money, land and labour has provided access to greater resources for theproject of constructing socially just, sustainable economies built on conceptions of howwe want to live sustainably with dignity and justice, as opposed to capacity-building the ability of socially-excluded actors to be included in (perhaps unequal and exploitative)market economies, or using business skills to solve problems. It enables the social and solidarity economies to be actively antagonistic to elements of market economies that are unjust: for example, moving production to places were labour and environmental standards are lower. This, we argue, adds to our conceptions of solidarity economy-based social change models, going beyond using business skills to do good.
References:
Engelsman, E., Rowe, M., & Southern, A. (2016). Community Land Trusts - a radical orreformist response to The Housing Question today? ACME: An International Journal forCritical Geographies, 15 (3), 590-615
North, P. and Longhurst, N. (2013). 'Grassroots localisation: the scalar potential of andlimits of the ‘Transition’ approach to climate change and resource constraint’. UrbanStudies, 50 (7), 1421-1436
North, P. (2007). Money and Liberation: the micropolitics of alternative currencymovements. Minneapolis, USA: University of Minnesota Press
North, P. & Cato, M.S. (Eds). (2017, forthcoming). Towards Just and Sustainable Economies:The Social and Solidarity Economies North and South. Bristol, UK: The Policy Press
Thompson, M. (2015). Between Boundaries: from commoning and guerrilla gardening to community land trust development in Liverpool. Antipode, 47(4), 1021–1042
8. Social enterprises, sustainable transition and common goods
