1 With, against and Beyond the State: A Solidarity Economy through a Movement of Movements1
The solidarity economy alternative has emerged in the post-apartheid context. It is an example of transformative politics, which is about constituting new forms of power, changing property relations and enabling counter-logics to private profiteering from below. Emancipatory and anti-capitalist in its orientation, it is new and post-neoliberal, post-social democratic and post-national liberation. The solidarity economy alternative is rooted in South African left thought and has been evolving its own theoretical framework while learning from international experiences, as it engages in grassroots practice.
Contrary to state-centric developmentalism, which controls grassroots logics, or market fundamentalism (neoliberalism), which seeks to subordinate the state to the market, the solidarity economy alternative has a more distinctive approach to the state. The notion of democratic systemic reform captures how solidarity economy agentic forces think about and approach the role of the state. Democratic systemic reform seeks to bring together democratic grassroots power, deep system transformation and embedded state reform into the process of building solidarity economy logics. This idea is clarified in this chapter, as part of characterising practice in South Africa, as it relates to how solidarity economy forces have been converging with the state from below.
In addition, this chapter highlights how solidarity economy forces have critiqued and distanced themselves from some of the practices of the South African state. The state’s hybridising of nationalism with discursive elements that skew cooperative development in the direction of market-centred accumulation, failed financing approaches and top-down movement building have been critically engaged within solidarity economy perspectives. Moreover, this chapter affirms the solidarity economy as a grassroots impulse championed by a movement of movements. The making of the solidarity economy as a movement of movements is historicised while mapping the variegated social forms leading this process from below. In this sense, the solidarity economy is beyond
1.1 The Solidarity Economy as Transformative Politics
The emergence of the solidarity economy in South Africa was facilitated by three important conditions: (1) the end of institutionalised and regulated apartheid, (2) the crisis of South Africa’s neoliberalised political economy and (3) grassroots anti-capitalist emancipatory organising (Satgar 2014b: 207–23). Juxtaposing it conceptually assists with understanding what it is: the solidarity economy is not a fixed and abstract definition mainly centred on particular enterprise forms – for instance, non-profit non-governmental organisations (ngos) or cooperatives. Institutional forms are important for the solidarity economy, but these do not in themselves clarify what it is. Moreover, the solidarity economy is not a residual third sector in a mixed economy in which small and medium enterprises have to find niches. It is not an add-on to the dominant capitalist logic. Finally, the solidarity economy is not a blueprint or ideal utopia. It does not have all the details worked out about how an alternative economy should work.
[The solidarity economy] is a collective humanist response and democratic alternative from below to the crisis we face. It draws on our common humanity as the basis for solidarity action. More concretely, the solidarity economy is a voluntary process organised through collective struggle and conscious choice to establish a new pattern of democratic production, consumption and living that promotes the realisation of human needs and environmental justice.
satgar 2009: 18
From this contingent and open-ended conception, we derive a process-centred vision, which is grounded in ongoing learning. The dialectic of practice and knowledge creation is constantly at work to learn from the past – successes, failures, innovation and problem-solving – to develop a shared knowledge commons to advance systemic transformation. Moreover, values and principles are
Beyond the contingent practices and vision-centred process of what constitutes the solidarity economy, it is also about a distinctive kind of politics. This is different from the twentieth-century instrumentalist politics of Soviet vanguardism, social democracy or even national liberation. In South Africa today, the utopian Marxist impulse of solidarity economy activism was inspired by the thought of Rick Turner, but has now grown beyond this (Satgar 2014b). Turner’s thought gave the emancipatory politics of the solidarity economy crucial elements. In Turner’s The Eye of the Needle, first published in 1972, the elements of a utopian Marxist method can be discerned (Turner 2015). It emphasised inspiring the imagination of the collective struggle, so as to dream a life beyond oppression. This is shared by contemporary solidarity economy forces, but the conception of a collective imagination is centred around three crucial ideas today: a solidarity society, democratic eco-socialism and deep just transition. This realisation out of collective struggle is reaching for a more holistic
Turner’s method also emphasised that the ‘present was history’, which meant that it was socially constructed and could be remade. For Turner, social analysis was crucial for understanding the social and power relations that came together in the apartheid social order. The present had to be historicised, so as to understand that it was not naturalised. Today, solidarity economy activism has developed a conception of the political economy of a neoliberalised South Africa, and its articulation with global crisis dynamics, of the globalised industrial food system, seed systems and water. This is a work in progress, but it is about understanding how the development of capitalism in South Africa, including the deepening of neoliberalisation through financial and market power in the post-apartheid period, has created a crisis of production and social reproduction in the present. Unemployment, hunger, water challenges, systemic crises (including the climate crisis) and capitalist power are now increasingly within the political economy perspectives of solidarity economy activism, so as to understand these contradictions and how to develop activist responses for solidarity economy alternatives.3
Finally, in the application of his utopian Marxist approach, Turner envisaged alternatives. From his normative and historical social analysis of society, he affirmed a crucial connection between consciousness, human values and social institutions. He believed strongly in the values of non-racialism, non-sexism, human freedom, equality, participatory democracy and ecological justice. Such values had to be reflected in the alternative mechanisms and institutions that could reconstitute society. This included participatory planning and worker control, for instance. However, in contemporary South Africa, two crucial breakthroughs have been made that take us beyond Turner. The first is the issue of solidarity economy pathways from below to realise processes, values-centred visions and institutional forms. The grounding of these pathways in everyday lived realities, conditions of oppression and conscious activism to overcome the socially constructed contradictions of South African and global
The second issue relates to anti-authoritarian and transformative movement building from below to advance the solidarity economy. Compared to trade unions that were central to Turner’s practice, emerging solidarity economy institutional forms are advancing values-centred practices, visions and pathways, which are more complex. These are taking the form of networked relations between solidarity economy enterprises, households, support organisations and movements around solidarity economy practices. These relations in power terms are symbiotic, platform-based and horizontal. Moreover, movement building cannot be understood in the singular, but rather in terms of a plurality of convergent and networked forms. In many ways, the solidarity economy is emerging as a movement of movements. This expression of self-agency for emancipation is consistent with Turner’s rejection of political vanguard parties, such as communist parties, but it is emerging as unique institutional forms in contemporary South Africa. This is developed further below.
1.2 The Solidarity Economy and the State: The Challenge of Democratic Systemic Reform
The modern history of the solidarity economy locates its emergence in the first half of the nineteenth century at a time when workers were searching for alternatives to the brutalising and super exploitative conditions of industrial capitalism. It was a context that also gave rise to socialism and communism as modern ideologies, alongside liberalism. Capitalism was also experiencing boom and bust cycles, with workers bearing the brunt. It is in the midst of this experience that workers also occupied factories, attempted takeovers and inaugurated modern cooperativism. Since its inception, modern cooperativism has bifurcated either into a more reformist or ameliorative approach regarding the negative impacts of capitalism and a more transformative approach seeking to transform capitalism and go beyond it interstitially. The solidarity economy impulse has its roots in this history and transformative approach. However, into the twentieth century, the solidarity economy and bottom-up cooperative development was overtaken by state-led development (Williams 2014). This expressed itself in modernising state socialism, social democracy and revolutionary nationalism in the peripheries of capitalism. States used cooperatives as part of top-down instrumentalised change and,
Over the past three decades of neoliberalisation in the global political economy, market imperatives to shore up the power of financial and transnational capital has taken root. Old forms of embedded regulation have been jettisoned and in their place market regulation and reform have emerged. In this process state-economy relations have been remade, so that the state has been reconstructed to merely limit risk to capital (Satgar 2014a). Market regulation is always about ensuring the state has a minimal role, while capital is incentivised to ensure seamless integration with global markets for trade, finance and production. Capital’s structural power has been increased relative to states and other economic forces in this process. This has also had an impact on cooperative regulation, so that heavy state-directed cooperative development has been rolled back and, instead, cooperatives have now been positioned in relation to market relations and treated like any other competitive enterprise. While member-driven cooperatives have emerged in this context, their survival challenges have been exacerbated by deep globalisation into markets. Cooperative forms are crucial for the solidarity economy, given the socialised power and property relations in such institutions. However, market regulation approaches to cooperatives undermine their capacity to secure an alternative logic to meet social needs.
Post-apartheid South Africa’s approach to cooperative regulation did not escape market-centred regulation and reform. This is because the state in post-apartheid South Africa embraced neoliberal economic policy and has maintained this for over twenty years of African National Congress (anc) rule (Satgar and Williams 2011a). This is despite an attempt by cooperatives and broader progressive civil society to ensure that cooperative reform is about democratic systemic reform. Such a form of reform ensures the impulse of cooperative development and solidarity economy is driven from below, while the state plays an enabling role. Put differently, democratic systemic reform is about creating the conditions for the state to protect, enable and strategically support cooperatives and ultimately a solidarity economy logic driven from below. In practice, this would mean the state responds to the initiatives,
In 2001, this was largely the vision and thrust of the cooperative and progressive civil society engagement with the state at the first conference convened by these forces (copac 2001). It built on the people-driven emphasis in the Reconstruction and Development Programme of the ruling anc and it managed to secure a cooperative reform consistent with international standards and norms, but the emphasis on deepening democratic systemic reform was undermined. Instead of the state agreeing to a dedicated cooperative ministry, operationalising the participatory council (also known as the Cooperatives Board in the Act of 2005) and ensuring cooperative movement development happens from below, it has chosen to instrumentalise cooperative development. There have been at least three failed attempts at state-led movement building thus far. Millions of rands of taxpayers’ money have been lost and are not fully accounted for. The current amendments to the Cooperatives Act No. 6 of 2013, further entrench this approach to movement building, bolstered by the provision for one legally sanctioned cooperative apex structure in South Africa.
Moreover, the Cooperative Banks Act of 2008 is also an attempt at democratic systemic reform. This Act attempts to structurally diversify the financial system in South Africa, which is currently held hostage by four big banks. It is a crucial democratic systemic reform to counter the financialisation of the South African economy and to ensure citizens have an alternative institutional option for their incomes and savings. This Act largely emanates from the efforts of the South African Communist Party to promote democratisation of the financial sector.4 Important institutional and regulatory progress has been taken forward in this regard (see De Jong and Kuhlengisa in this volume). However, the potential of this democratic systemic reform has not been fully explored. This is largely a function of the location of the Cooperative Banks Development Agency (cbda) within the Treasury, which is extremely conservative and merely concerned about limiting systemic threats to the corporate banking system and not wanting cooperative banks to really take off. As a result, the cbda is constrained in how it proactively promotes cooperative banks as a democratic systemic alternative. The challenge for the cbda is to reach out to small-scale farmers, trade unions, communities requiring housing,
The South African Food Sovereignty Campaign (safsc) has been at the forefront of championing a pathway for food sovereignty. This is a direct challenge to the corporate-controlled and globalised food system, which is both causing and failing to address the food crisis. Part of the innovation regarding food sovereignty in the South African context has been the connection made with solidarity economy. In this regard, the People’s Food Sovereignty Act, adopted at a People’s Parliament, is a crucial example of a democratic systemic reform that would require the state to play a role in enabling the systemic diversification of the food system, so that citizens’ power from below could be constituted for land, seeds, water, production, consumption and democratic planning of the food system (safsc 2018). The People’s Act envisages a transformative role for the state, which would create conditions, institutions and mechanisms to deepen democratic systemic reform of the food system. As it stands, the South African state is locked into a pathological and globalised food system, while ignoring the importance of food sovereignty pathways to feed households, communities, villages, towns and cities. Nonetheless, the food sovereignty alternative is taking root from below and is linked to advancing the solidarity economy.
The emerging solidarity economy alternative in South Africa envisages and in fact requires a role for the state. It seeks to work with the state, but not on terms that are controlling and instrumentalising. Moreover, this is contrary to market reform and instead is about a democratic approach to regulation. Transformative solidarity economy activism is positing democratic systemic reform that would reclaim, transform and redirect the state from below. This is consistent with the deep just transition, solidarity society and democratic ecosocialist imagination informing the solidarity economy forces and their transformative struggles.
1.2.1 The Solidarity Economy Critique of the Government’s Approach to Cooperative Development
The solidarity economy critique of the government’s approach to cooperative development is still evolving. Many of the concerns relating to realising democratic systemic reform, raised above, echo in sharper differences in terms of the state’s ideological and practical policy approaches to cooperative development. These practices have been critiqued and solidarity economy forces have also kept distance from such state approaches. These include the ideological conflation of cooperatives with a capitalist approach to nation building. This undermines the social character and member-driven and constitutive power
In addition, central to post-apartheid nation building has been the two economies discourse. Introduced by Thabo Mbeki, this top-down perspective and metaphor was used to locate cooperatives into a fast-track incubation approach to take ‘cooperative beneficiaries’ from the underdeveloped ‘second economy’ into the globally competitive ‘first economy’. This was consistent with the neoliberalisation of African nationalism and its attempts to deregulate small business development. Cooperatives were to be treated like any other business. This has proved disastrous, with a number of cooperatives being easily registered and the government boasting quantitative growth, while most people involved in these institutions did not even know what cooperatives are. Financing was a challenge, there was a lack of proper groundwork planning (such as education, model design, feasibility assessments, cooperative business planning and constitution development) and general capacity building to develop viable member-driven cooperatives was absent.
Another crucial factor in the state’s involvement is how cooperative development finance has been channelled to cooperatives. There are two important institutional financing options that can enable cooperatives to control finance. The first is through internal mechanisms to build up internal capital pools. This includes share equity, reinvestment of surplus and member loans. The second is through external sources, but based on a clearly defined cooperative business plan. Such a plan recognises how income generation in the cooperative, supported by external financing, will strengthen its capacities. External sources can include state finance for start-up and working capital, loans from financing institutions and donor support. The South African state has not encouraged cooperatives to build internal capital pools and neither
Finally, the South African government has entrenched a top down movement-building approach, including through the 2013 amendments to the Cooperatives Act of 2005. This challenge was alluded to above, but it is an important issue and has prompted solidarity economy forces to debate very seriously how to find their own way from below, while engaging the state on their own terms, without getting co-opted, corrupted or controlled.6 The push from the government, as part of the 2013 amendments to the Cooperatives Act of 2005, provides for only one national apex structure for cooperatives. Such a structure would also be driven by state regulations. This is the worst kind of instrumentalisation of cooperatives and is contrary to freedom of association guaranteed by the Constitution. Moreover, it denies the organic aggregating and networking capacities of cooperatives themselves. In short, the state has closed off its practice from recognising alternative modes of organising from below, including various solidarity economy networks and movements. The top-down logic of state-led cooperative movement building fails to be responsive to alternative approaches that could emanate from community organisations, campaigns, grassroots ngos and other movements such as trade unions.
1.3 Advancing the Solidarity Economy through a Movement of Movements
Despite the anti-democratic, instrumentalising and top-down logic of state cooperative movement building, solidarity economy processes and practices have been evolving at the grassroots in South Africa. Such processes of variegated movement building have been advancing solidarity economy practices at the frontlines of community development processes, through cooperatives,
1.3.1 Moment 1 (2007–10): Learning from International Experiences and Ivory Park
The first crucial experience of pioneering and developing solidarity economy practices built on the momentum coming out of joint efforts to advance a participatory approach to build an eco-city in Ivory Park township centred on an eco-village, cooperatives and transformative community organising (Satgar 2014b). This involved the community of Ivory Park, the Eco-City Trust and copac. copac has worked with the community since 1999 and established several cooperatives in the first wave of cooperative development, prior to the Cooperatives Act of 2005 and other state cooperative policy. Important successes and failures were experienced as part of developing organic farming, waste recycling, construction, consumer and bicycle cooperatives. The first wave of cooperative development pivoted on the eco-village. This was complicated by the controlling role of the anc in the community. Nonetheless, a second wave of organic cooperative development took place in Ivory Park. Cooperatives emerged in poultry, bakeries and other activities.
In the meantime, copac invested in learning from international experiences of cooperative development and the solidarity economy. This began intensively in 2007 after it was recognised that the state was going down a disastrous path for cooperative development. copac conducted study tours to different parts of the continent, participated in World Social Forum processes dealing with the solidarity economy and researched experiences in Italy, Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina and the United States.7 This produced valuable research and activist tools to translate the solidarity economy into South African conditions. Ivory Park became a crucial learning space, with a pilot process to test solidarity economy mapping, institutional tools and dialogic practice (copac 2011). This yielded important momentum, but was arrested by the destructive role of the anc in the area. In 2010 copac made a call for convergence among progressive social forces to advance the solidarity economy and movement in South Africa.
1.3.2
copac created the first learning and conversation platform through a conference in 2011. Valuable perspectives, conceptual ideas and debates ensued. A publication was also produced, drawing on international and South African insights, titled The Solidarity Economy Alternative: Emerging Theory and Practice. This volume theorises, through a comparative dialogue, solidarity economy practices and potential pathways in South Africa.
copac has been very conscious of not pushing a top down movement-building approach. Instead, together with others converging in the solidarity economy space, the emphasis has been on creating a knowledge commons to share experiences, innovative practices, popular consciousness raising and developing participatory tools for grassroots transformative organising. In this regard, four solidarity economy assemblies were hosted with movements and grassroots forces from 2011 till 2016, three dedicated activist schools were hosted on the solidarity economy and worker cooperatives, an activist-driven newsletter, Solidarity Economy News, was established,8 site work took place in fifteen communities in partnership with organisations and movements, and the Worker Cooperative Campaign – including a crucial tool for establishing worker cooperatives (copac 2015) – and the safsc were launched.
In this bottom-up transformative organising process, the solidarity economy impulse found its place in various struggles and among various social forces. First, among community-based movements, the examples that stand out are the various unemployed people’s movements in Gauteng, North West, KwaZulu-Natal and Grahamstown. Training took place with these movements on solidarity economy process building and worker cooperative development. Second, trade unions played an important role in championing solidarity economy practices, particularly worker cooperative development. In this regard, the efforts by the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (numsa) to buy out a recycling plant in 2009, when workers were facing retrenchment, are instructive. While the worker takeover failed, numsa ended up establishing a worker cooperative for retrenched workers called Sihlahla Muri (Satgar and Williams 2011b). This built on numsa’s experience of supporting worker cooperative development as part of union strategy in the 1980s. However, this post-apartheid experiment was short-lived because of the lack of support from local government for a recycling space, the theft of the workers’ truck used for waste
Third was the development of community-led approaches to the solidarity economy. In this regard, the work of a community ngo called Ntaba ka Ndoda Heritage and Development Centre stands out, as well as the Bulungula Incubator.9 Both these organisations are in the rural Eastern Cape and pioneered their own approaches to community development, but also adopted elements of the solidarity economy. In the case of Ntaba ka Ndoda, they have developed a cultural programme, engaged in community planning and introduced solidarity economy and food sovereignty into their transformative practices. A lot of learning from Ntaba ka Ndoda practice has been crucial for community approaches to solidarity economy development in the Eastern Cape and beyond. Fourth has been the role of education and support organisations that have embraced solidarity economy approaches. The role of the Workers’ College in Durban has been crucial. It has trained a number of students, across various communities in Durban, to advance solidarity economy theory and practices.10 The other crucial organisation has been the Ecumenical Service for Socio-Economic Transformation (esset), which works with informal trade organisations. In 2013–14 esset introduced a programme to improve the livelihoods of informal women traders through cooperatives (Steyn 2015). Today, esset is poised to develop an informal women traders’ network based on solidarity economy approaches in Lesotho, Swaziland, Zambia and South Africa. The University of Pretoria also launched the Human Economy Programme during this period and has also focused on solidarity approaches. The Human Economy Programme has continued to engage with solidarity economy approaches.11
1.3.3
In this moment, solidarity economy approaches evolved to deepen contributions from copac, community-based movements, trade unions, community-led approaches and education and support organisations. In addition, the role of campaigns, such as the safsc, and cooperatives themselves in promoting the solidarity economy are crucial dimensions in the variegated grassroots impulses championing the solidarity economy. In this regard, the role of the Fingerprint Worker Cooperative is extremely important (see Satgar’s ‘From National Liberation Struggle to Fingerprint Worker Cooperative’ in this volume).
copac played an essential role in 2014, as part of a coalition of organisations concerned with the food crisis in South Africa. This culminated in a conference centred on the right to food in late 2014, which laid the basis for the formation of the safsc. For copac and other solidarity economy partners, this campaign was consistent with a commitment to marrying the solidarity economy with food sovereignty since the first international solidarity economy conference hosted in 2011. copac served as the secretariat to the safsc national co-ordinating committee from 2015 to 2017. In addition, copac has continued supporting the solidarity economy through maintaining the newsletter Solidarity Economy News, hosting safsc News, developing numerous activist tools (such as a food sovereignty guide, a seed guide, a People’s Food Sovereignty Act and a Water Sovereignty Guide),12 working with partners at Wits University to promote food sovereignty and the solidarity economy to achieve an ecocentric university and establishing a solidarity economy movements’ webpage for grassroots-driven cooperatives.13 Furthermore, copac has pursued a transformative politics research agenda, producing this volume; a book on the climate crisis, which features food sovereignty and the solidarity economy as a crucial systemic alternative for the deep, just transition (Satgar 2018; Bennie and Satgoor 2018); a planned book on food sovereignty; a third book envisaged on the solidarity economy and transformative politics and has been making international links (including in the United States, Italy, Spain and Argentina) with regard to worker cooperative development through the Real Utopias project headed by Professor Erik Olin Wright.
In terms of community-based movements, the South African Waste Pickers Association (sawpa) has also taken forward solidarity economy approaches
Trade unions have continued to support solidarity economy approaches in response to the informalisation and precariousness of work. The newly formed South African Federation of Trade Unions has had dialogue with various organisations committed to alternative economy approaches, including copac, informal traders and Street-Net International. The South African Federation of Trade Unions has publicly called for community mining cooperatives, as part of nationalisation, to support small-scale informal miners (Mokati 2017). Education and support organisations have also increasingly placed the solidarity economy on their agendas. The Global Labour University Programme at Wits University offers a social theory course to all trade unions in South Africa. Since 2017, there has been a dedicated focus on systemic alternatives, including the solidarity economy.
Moreover, the Centre for Education Rights and Transformation at the University of Johannesburg has done research on grassroots alternatives and has connected this with thinking about the commons, living well and the solidarity economy (dvv International 2017). Oxfam South Africa has a dedicated programme elaborating on the notion of the ‘people’s economy’. This includes a focus on the solidarity economy. In early 2018 Oxfam South Africa hosted a workshop with a dedicated focus on cooperatives and the solidarity economy as part of developing a concerted strategy and programme. Various cooperatives, education and support ngos are involved.
Community-led approaches to solidarity economy development have continued to produce innovative attempts at aggregating solidarity economy with other transformative practices to create grassroots logics for change. The Kwazakhele Township transition initiative, in the Eastern Cape, is another important example. It brings together a focus on the climate crisis, the needs of the community and the importance of systemic alternatives. Similarly, the
Finally, the safsc has innovatively brought together the idea of food sovereignty and the solidarity economy in its intellectual discourses and practices (Bennie and Satgoor 2018). As a campaigning platform, the safsc is a loose alliance of organisations from the agrarian sector, climate justice, food justice and solidarity economy movements. Launched in 2015, the safsc has consistently translated and given substance to a South African approach to food sovereignty. Through its hunger tribunal, drought speak-outs, bread marches, food sovereignty festivals, water sovereignty dialogues and activist schools, it has evolved an alternative perspective on land and agricultural transformation. This is encapsulated in the People’s Food Sovereignty Act, shared with several government ministries in 2017 and, in early 2018, handed over to a representative of Parliament at a people’s dialogue in Cape Town. The safsc orientation and the People’s Food Sovereignty Act are about advancing a democratically controlled food system from below through households, communities, villages, towns and cities as part of the deep, just transition to survive climate shocks. The bottom-up pathways it envisages link food sovereignty, solidarity economy, water sovereignty, control of seeds and small-scale farming and democratic planning. Various pilot pathways are underway in urban and rural spaces.15
1.4 Challenges for Solidarity Economy as a Movement of Movements
As a movement of movements, with different grassroots approaches and institutional forms championing the solidarity economy, there are also various challenges. Plurality is an advantage, but it also imposes limits.
First, solidarity economy practices and pathways from below provide a crucial strength, but such networked connections must be deepened. Embedded and localised linkages between production, consumption, finance
A second important challenge is ongoing learning and sharing through the solidarity economy knowledge commons. The case studies in this volume illustrate this and face-to-face sharing in activist schools, learning exchanges, documentaries, online sharing and learning tools, such as newsletters, are all crucial.16 Such practices construct a collective intellectual knowledge, produced in innovative transformative practices and mutual learning loops. This enables various pathways to emerge among small-scale farmers, waste pickers, trade unions, cooperatives and ngos, for instance. All these variegated social forces need to deepen solidarity relations to share and diffuse their practices for others to learn from, as they meet various social needs at the frontlines of struggle.
A third challenge is how solidarity economy forces ensure more effective engagement with the state. Currently capitalist states merely meet the needs of capital through protecting private ownership, providing risk-free investment conditions, building infrastructure, deregulation and even financial incentives, for instance. The stick is bent too much towards corporate interests and market regulation, even in South Africa. For solidarity economy movements, this poses various challenges in the state relationship. Thus far solidarity economy movements’ engagement with the state has been with, against and beyond. But each of these thrusts need to be deepened where necessary. It is essential to ensure recognition from the state, so as to work with it to deepen democratic systemic reform, such as cooperative banking or developing a worker cooperatives act and policy, for instance. Also participatory mechanisms in current cooperative legislation, such as the Cooperative Council provided for to replace the Cooperative Board in the Cooperatives Act of 2005, need to be driven from
References
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Source: Chapter in: Cooperatives in South Africa – Advancing Solidarity Economy Pathways from Below, edited by Vishwas Satgar, Pietermaritzburg: ukzn Press, 2019.
See Satgar (2009). At the first International Solidarity Economy conference convened in South Africa these values and principles were engaged with as part of visioning exercises done in groups. These workshop groups generated a gallery of artwork highlighting the various possibilities and ways in which these values can be realised at the grassroots (see copac 2012).
In this regard, see various solidarity economy activist tools with this emphasis (Satgar 2009; copac 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017).
See Satgar (2000), which contributed to the debate in the South African Communist Party on the role of cooperative banks.
Over the years, copac has researched the deleterious impacts of these policy thrusts on cooperatives (see copac 2005, 2006, 2010).
copac has facilitated four national assemblies of movements, community organisations and solidarity economy forces to engage with relevant issues, such as their practices, including their relationships with the state. These assemblies occurred in 2011, 2013, 2014 and 2016. The outcomes from these assemblies are available at
In this regard, see copac (2008), which discusses successful cooperatives in South Africa and elsewhere on the continent.
The first Solidarity Economy News was produced in 2012 and it has continued, with eighteen issues having been produced at the time of writing. See
See Solidarity Economy News 1 (2012).
See Solidarity Economy News 8 (2014).
A draft version of this chapter was shared with a workshop titled ‘The Struggle for Economic Democracy in Africa’, hosted by the Human Economy Programme, 7–9 March 2018, at the University of Pretoria.
These tools are all available at
See
Interview with Gino Govender, trustee of Earthrise Trust, 10 December 2017.
See safsc News 9 (2017): 8–15.
Online resources include the safsc webpage at