Title: The%20Social%20Economy%20as%20the%20Economics%20of%20Liberation
1The Social Economy as the Economics of Liberation
2The four oppressions!
- Capitalismsource of oppression overwhelming
rights of capital - Colonialismsource of oppression global
extension of capitalism - Communismsource of oppression excessive power
of the state - Patriarchysource of oppression unequal
relationships between sexes
3World Social Forum, Porto Alegre
4Liberation from capitalism
- This is where co-operation started
- The Webbs and the Miners next step
- Reclaiming surplus value
- Challenging the power of capital to buy labour
- Robert Owen, William Morris and the utopian
community - Guild socialism
5Liberation from colonialism
- Imperialism as a global extension of capitalism
- Colonialism as the institutionalisation of global
capitalism - Challenge engendered inferiority
- Ghandis ideas of Swaraj
- Vandana Shiva and the subsistence perspective
6From Medellin to Porto Alegre
- Latin bishops conference, Medellin, 1968,
created the term institutionalised violence - Comunidades eclesiales de base (CEBs local
church communities) - Gustavo Gutierrez Merino (born 1928, Lima, Peru),
A Theology of Liberation (1972) - Leonardo Boff (born 1938, Concórdia, Brazil),
Church Charism and Power Liberation Theology
and the Institutional Church - Eliminated by JPII and Cardinal Ratzinger
7The concept of emancipatory praxis
- Everyday experience of poverty mutualism as a
practical rather than ideologically driven
response - Uses a radical reintepretation of the Bible.
Jesus as revolutionary. Marxist ideas of class
struggle - Deeply rooted in the local Church importance of
mutualism as local solutions - Change grows out of meetings to discuss
scripture community involvement - Realisation of the Kingdom of God on earth
importance of utopian project coops as real
change agents rather than the lottery
mentality, living on dreams, encouraged by the
conventional economy
8Social economy in the poor countries
- Social economy grew under the Pinochet
dictatorship in Chile, as a source of resistance
and mutual support from 15 of the workforce in
Santiago in 1970 to some 20 by 1982. Provides
around a third of jobs in the poorer quarters of
Santiago. - MST in Brazil and the peasant challenge to state
support for neoliberal, neocolonial land
ownership patterns - Case-study from Argentina The Take, taking over
factories left idle because of financial collapse - Côte d'Ivoire 827,000 small farmers are
co-operative members - Nicaragua 78 per cent of maize and 59 per cent
of beans are cooperatively marketed
9Liberation from communism
- Concentration of state power loss of initiative
- Issue of scale one bicycle factory
- Party replaces community
- Bureaucracy creates inefficiency
10Co-operatives in Central and Eastern Europe
- Gorbachev hoped to liberalise via co-ops
- Lost history of co-operation in Czech Republic
in 1994 new agricultural coops operated on 47 per
cent of cultivated land and controlled 67 per
cent of production - Cooperative is frequently co-opted by the state
and now not trusted
11Liberation from patriarchy
- Sisterhood is powerful
- Womens strength in community
- Reproductive labour
- A different attitude to resources ecofeminism
12The Holy Family
13- Extended by Engels in his The Origin of the
Family, Private Property and the State (1942) - In communal economies women are equal or more
powerful (matrilineality) - The growth in private property undermines the
role of women - Men's ability to generate a surplus creates
patriarchy where women (and slaves) become
themselves the property of father and husband.
14Feminist views of patriarchy
- Feminists focus on women's work as reproductive
rather than productive labour - The invisible nature of women's work
- The iceberg model (Maria Mies)
- Ecofeminists argue that loss of embeddedness is
source of spiritual and environmental alienation
15(No Transcript)
16Are women natural co-operators?
- Ease of access to finance
- Sharing of skills and building of confidence
- Micro-finance developed in womens co-ops and
businesses - Could this idea be based on stereotyping?
17What do the four have in common?
- Concentration of power democratisation
- Inequality of access to resources equality
- Alienation empowerment
- Self-delusion self-realisation
- Isolation mutuality, reciprocity, sharing
18Assess the four concepts in terms of the three
organisational forms
- Democratisation
- Equality
- Empowerment
- Self-realisation
- Mutuality
- Social firm
- Social enterprise
- Co-operative