The Diversity of Solidarity Economies: A View from Danish Minority Gangs

Christina Jerne

The term “solidarity economy” is most commonly deployed to describe altruistic and socially beneficial ways of doingbusiness, often in opposition to ones that are less so. Drawing on a year and a half of ethnographic fieldwork among Danish minority gangs, this article seeks to open the discussion on solidarity economies beyond these traditional understandings by addingthe perspective of gangs. It explores the more exclusive and violent aspects of solidarity economies, drawing on the analytical lenses of reciprocity and pooling.

Fight and Build: Solidarity Economy as Ontological Politics

Penn Loh and Boone W. Shear

This essay explores the potential of solidarity economy (SE) as theory, practice, and movement, to engender an ontological politics to create and sustain other worlds that can resolve the existential crises of ecological destruction and historic inequalities. We argue that such a politics is necessary to go beyond the world as it is and exceed the dictates of a dominant modernity—capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy -- that positions itself as the only singular reality -- or One World World (Law 2011).

Conjunctural Politics, Cultural Struggle, and Solidarity Economy: A Conversation with Kali Akuno

Boone W. Shear

In this expansive conversation, we explore the current political-cultural conjuncture in the United States. Thinking through the responses to the pandemic and the Floyd Rebellion, Akuno analyzes the violence of and tensions between an escalating white supremacy, on one hand, and an intractable (neo)liberalism that is attempting to capture and channel the energies and ideas of the Left, on the other.

From Worker Self-Directed Enterprise Analysis to Solidarity Economy Movement

Boone W. Shear

In Transcending Capitalism Through Cooperative Practices, Mulder shows how exploitation, and non-exploitation, can be analytically discerned, and she describes some various contexts in which non-exploitation exists. Mulder's analysis, analytical approach, and contextual descriptions, surface and prompt important questions around the conditions of possibility for imagining and actualizing economic difference and transformation.