Copenhagen, 1910. Here, at the bare beginnings of social democracy’s ascent in Europe, the socialist Second International passed a resolution supporting cooperatives. 

While acknowledging that cooperation alone was “incapable of realizing the aim of socialism,” the International nonetheless urged “all socialists and all members of trade-unions” to take part in the cooperative movement. Supporting such enterprises, they argued, would not only help roll back the evils of private commercial firms, but they would better the condition of the working classes, educate workers in economic democracy, and furnish much-needed revenue on behalf of socialist unions and labor parties. In summary, the International declared that “(T)rades unions, cooperative societies, and the socialist party, while preserving each its own unity and autonomy, should enter into relations more and more intimate with one another.”

Fast forward to 2024. Once again the left is discussing strategies for political advancement. Once again we are realizing that electoral campaigns and short-lived protests are not enough to win durable victories. 

But unlike past socialists, our discussions ignore the strategic role that cooperatives—and the solidarity economy more generally—can play in building up the left’s power.  

This, I want to argue, is a mistake. History shows that a flourishing solidarity economy can provide irreplicable material and social benefits for the left—benefits that have and will play a key role in its broader political revival. 

This is not, of course, to say that economic mutualism must supplant our other political tactics—but neither should it be ignored.  Rather, mutualism can and must complement the left’s strategic efforts as the Second International recognized long ago, and as we should recognize today.

Mutualism’s place in the struggle  

The idea that economic mutualism can support electoral work, union campaigns, or other socialist campaigns is relatively unfamiliar to many leftists. But it wasn’t always. 

The American Populist Party of the 1890s, we should remember, was “prefigured” by the 334 worker-owned cooperatives established in the U.S. during the previous decade by the Grange and the Knights of Labor. Trade-unions like the ILGWU, as Sarah Horowitz has written, expanded through mutual aid among their members, particularly in their early years. The mass parties of Social Democracy, from the Labour Party to the Scandinavian Social Democrats, built upon the solidaristic ties established through cooperatives.  Even the Italian Communist Party was later able to extend and consolidate its hegemony in Emilia-Romagna by supporting cooperatives. 

This kind of complementarity continues today. We cannot understand South America’s Pink Tide during the 1990s without appreciating the growth of the solidarity economy within that continent decade for decades prior. Brazil’s Lula certainly appreciated this: he established a National Secretariat of the Solidarity Economy shortly after his first election in 2003. More recently, Barcelona’s radical Barcelona et Comu party and Preston’s Labour government came to victory through similar ties with the solidarity economy, and similarly rewarded it through public policies.

How is the solidarity economy able to accomplish this political work? 

The solidarity economy can accomplish political work partly through the economic benefits it provides to the electorate. Cooperatives, for example, typically offer longer-term jobs with higher pay (for workers) and higher-quality goods and lower prices (for consumers) than their conventional counterparts. As Ethan Miller has written, such firms “demonstrate(d) that it is possible to build real livelihoods while also building another paradigm of social values.” This ability to provide “real livelihoods” under democratic conditions is difficult for other left strategies to replicate, and is key to the distinct value the solidarity economy adds to the left’s strategic repertoire. 

Providing for voter livelihoods, in turn, provides the left with political leverage. Partly this occurs by making workers receptive to the material benefits of democratic ownership and the policies (and parties) who might advance them. But it also provides the left with fiscal leverage—and hence political leverage—within communities as a whole. 

As instruments of community economic development, cooperatives can provide quality employment and tax revenue to struggling cities: indeed, they are often superior to the private sector in doing so. Insofar as securing economic development is a key issue for winning and keeping office, supporting such firms is of political advantage to left political operations. And by shifting their economic “base” to the solidarity economy, left administrations can become less vulnerable to business opposition or disinvestment.

Mutualism can accomplish this work indirectly as well. For example, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America was able to build up revenue, loyalty, and political heft  during the 1920s and 30s partly by providing services to its members, ranging from healthcare and housing to banking. 

And the same promises to be true today.zt he Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW), a union of 100,000 healthcare workers in California, recently established a unionized healthcare cooperative providing both service to clients and meaningful employment to workers. 

Unionized lobstermen have formed a marketing cooperative to help members collectively sell their catch, allowing them to increase their income by cutting out middlemen. These kinds of mutualistic practices can bolster both the numbers and material standing of unions—and, by extension, their political power.

But is it practical?

But how practical is it to build a new economy in the shell of the old? Won’t it take more resources than other left strategies? Not necessarily. The Democratic Socialists for America (DSA), for example, already has the organizational infrastructure to carry out complex and long-range initiatives like tenant strikes. If they can do that, argues Evan Caspar-Futterman, Senior Director of Planning for the Bronx Cooperative Development Initiative (and no stranger to rent strikes), they already have the “organizational infrastructure” needed to begin building solidarity-enterprises in their districts. 

Arguments that supporting these enterprises requires more time and energy than other strategies are similarly misguided, according to former DSA national political committee member  Brandon Payton-Carrillo. Supporting such enterprises can be as simple as deciding where to spend our money, our savings, and even (if we are so lucky) our retirement accounts. Our ability to get public funding for such enterprises is also easier than it might seem: less a matter of furnishing new spending than redistricting existing subsidies and contracts to new players. We’ve seen this work in Preston and more recently Colombia, which has recently agreed to shift 30 percent of all state contracts to cooperatives.

Above all, we need to compare the costs of building up the solidarity economy to the costs of more mainstream left strategies. Brandon notes that if it is hard to sustain the energy for running mutualistic enterprises, it is equally hard to sustain the energy for campaigns like lower rents over long periods of time. The difference is that where the latter is temporary and primarily “defensive” in nature, the other is an “offensive” maneuver that builds durable livelihoods while expanding our political imagination.  

This is not to argue that rent strikes are any less strategically important than building an alternative economy, of course. It’s only to argue that we need to recognize how rent strikes, union drives, and electoral campaigns can be complemented by the solidarity economy. 

With that in mind, we can turn to another distinctive advantage of building alternative economic institutions: rebuilding the solidarity upon which left victory depends.

Rebuilding solidarity 

The atomization of modern society, many of us now recognize, has jeopardized the left’s ability to win elections. Without a sense that our well-being depends on the well-being of others, not only is it harder to mobilize the votes needed for left candidates to win, it’s harder to convince voters that left policies are even desirable. As Gabe Winant has lamented, “Eugene Debs could rise from the dead and would get little traction.”

But to build the solidarity we need to win, we need to identify the strongest materials needed to build it: not bowling leagues or debating clubs, but the material benefits of cooperation. 

It was economic practices, after all, which undergirded the growth of civil society in the first place. Medieval communes, Black churches, the innumerable benefit societies that Robert Putnam idolizes: all were built around practices of mutual aid within their membership and communities. During the mid-nineteenth century, worker-owned cooperatives demonstrated how economic practices could be directly “embedded” (to reference Polanyi) within the values and practices of solidarity. And it was this economic mutualism that undergirded the growth of unions and socialist political parties in the modern era.  

Seen from this perspective, modern society’s fragmentation isn’t just due to “neoliberalism” or the internet—it is because socializing institutions no longer provide the economic benefits that would make them worth joining. This process has been centuries in the making, from the early modern State taking over the political functions of free communes, to the dis-embedded Market taking over the economic functions of guilds, to elite non-profits (with money gained through the private market) taking over the social welfare functions of local benefit societies. 

And the result is where we are now: a hollow, desiccated civil society which serves no economic or material function to citizens–and certainly not in ways that reinforce solidarity.

And yet there is a thriving source of being formed under our eyes. We’ve seen it in the flourishing of mutual aid since COVID-19, in the revival of mutualistic practices among trade unions, and in the expansion of the social and solidarity economy (SSE) across the world. Such firms are growing fastest, moreover, among groups the left most needs to reach, such as service employees, immigrants, and non-white workers.

And we know that such enterprises are remarkably successful in helping build social capital: a recent largestudy found that participation in worker cooperatives promoted higher rates of civic engagement among their members—including those less ideologically-inclined—than those in conventional firms.  The ligaments of a new “civic economy,”organizations devoted to rebuilding civil society through their material and economic practices,are being born. 

And yet the organized left is, for the most part, not taking advantage of this development. We are failing to engage with the solidarity economy sufficiently because we fail to see how the solidarity economy can help address the crises of civil society, the insufficiencies of electoralism, and our own demographic narrowness. There are, to be sure exceptions: dozens of DSA branches contain their own mutual aid and solidarity economy working groups, and the Labor Party has its own Community Wealth Building Unit. But we aren’t anywhere close to fully leveraging mutualism as a tool of building left power.

Bringing them together

So, how do we do this? 

We could, on the one hand, try to formally align solidarity economy practitioners with other left movements. But I’d recommend drawing from the wisdom of the Second Internationale: that (T)rades unions, cooperative societies, and the socialist party, while preserving each its own unity and autonomy (italics added), should enter into relations more and more intimate with one another.” What matters here is less a matter of alliances than a matter of alignment. We must pursue our separate actions with an eye towards what the other is doing— and what they can make possible for us. 

In the case of the solidarity economy, electorally-minded leftists should consider what kind of economic organizations, benefitting what constituencies, would help them build the kind of material and civic leverage required to win elections. They should partner with solidarity economy practitioners to consider what kind of policy stratagems, such as community wealth building, might help amplify these organizations. And they should do all this in the spirit of deepest humility and respect. 

Precisely what kind of alliances might form from these discussions, or what kind of political strategies and opportunities might make available, I cannot answer in advance. Theory and history can provide some guides, as I have tried to do here. But the most important thing is to begin: to begin building bridges between economic mutualists and the left, to identify common goals, and to identify shared strategies that can achieve them. 

Are we willing to have these conversations? Are we willing to incorporate the solidarity economy into our political praxis,for electoral victory, if nothing else? And if not now, when?