Solidarity economy: from economic framework to worlding politics

Solidarity economy is at once an economic framework, a social movement, and an intervention into and away from the ontological foundations of colonial capitalism. This short essay briefly outlines and traces the history and development of solidarity economy as a formal, named project. Drawing from fifteen years of engaged activist ethnography in Massachusetts, the essay then explores the expansion of solidarity economy discourse in the United States and beyond, concomitant with the violence of neoliberalism and the increasing incoherence and unraveling of the dominant order. Amidst a precarious political-historical terrain, intensifying capital accumulation, and the realizations of ecological catastrophe; communities, policy makers, activists, and academics are making competing claims on solidarity economy as a solution to social and ecological problems. The essay surfaces key tensions in the solidarity economy movement that reveal the differing world-making possibilities of solidarity economy.