Solidarity & Mutual Aid are integral to our collective liberation.

Solidarity Economy | Cooperative Economics

Solidarity economy includes a wide array of economic practices and initiatives that share common values—cooperation and sharing, social responsibility, sustainability, equity and justice. Instead of enforcing a culture of cutthroat competition, it builds cultures and communities of cooperation.
– Kali Akuno, Casting Shadows

The goal of syndicalism is traditionally worker control over production, and its classic model is for the workers to simply take over their workplaces in a revolutionary situation. But short of that, what can radical workers do in the meantime? And are there potentially piecemeal, legal ways that workers can wrest control over their jobs?

Solidarity Economy initiatives are dedicated to seeding worker-owned cooperatives, economic democracy projects, time banking, community land trusts, publicly owned and democratically self-managed socialist enterprises, and a variety of cooperative economic endeavors federated throughout the country & internationally. Dual power organizing includes creating and networking alternative libertarian socialist enterprises that are rooted in principles of economic justice, worker control, and internal direct democracy. Worker-owned cooperatives, committed to increasing democracy within the economy begin in the workplace. Worker ownership and control is a principal objective of dual power.

Cooperatives by themselves however, are not enough. It is necessary to bring a socialist vision to any economic enterprise, and that these enterprises are intrinsically tied directly to our communities in need, ensuring a larger vision of ecological and communal health. Cooperativist movements have sprung up in many of the most neglected communities in the United States often led by working-class people of color seeking to revitalize neighborhoods and cities left completely desolate by deindustrialization, white flight, and systemic disinvestment. In this context, cooperatives are a way not only of putting power in the hands of workers, but of creating a new ecosystem of interdependent enterprises and financial institutions, all of them under democratic control.

Everywhere, the capitalist structure of society imposes on people an organization of their lives that is external to them. It organizes things in the absence of those most directly concerned and often against their aspirations and interests. This is but another way of saying that capitalism divides society into a narrow stratum of order-givers (whose function is to decide and organize everything) and the vast majority of the population who are reduced to carrying out (executing) the decisions of those in power. As a result of this very fact, most people experience their own lives as something alien to them.
– Cornelius Castoriadis

These cooperative endeavors can get a dead economy moving again, create employment which transcends the wages system through worker-ownership, build sustainable food and energy sovereignty, and lay the groundwork for a just transition into ecological sustainability. The Working World and the Bronx Cooperative Development Initiative are two examples of organizations that support this work on a mass scale. In Cooperation Jackson, a radical movement openly attempting to build dual power in Mississippi, such economic development through creating a solidarity economy is explicitly tied to a revolutionary political program directed by ongoing people’s assemblies.

We also need to establish standards for how cooperatives are run internally. In order for our vision to remain committed to building these as socialist institutions, we must not emulate the traditional capitalist firm, which is highly competitive and extracts wealth to the top while reproducing the social, political, and economic hierarchy of owner and bosses over laborers. We must remain committed to the immediate benefit of our communities within a larger ecosystem of a cooperative commonwealth. The basis of our larger socialist vision must be firmly situated in community- and worker-management of our own social, economic, and political institutions of direct democracy, solidarity, and mutual aid. Therefore, in order to ensure the socialist nature of a solidarity economy network, these cooperative enterprises must be tied to direct-democratic community councils and assemblies and play a redistributive or social role in any given community, laying the foundations for the revolutionary transition toward a bottom-up, libertarian socialist world.

Mutual Aid Not Charity

Practicing mutual aid is the surest means for giving each other and to all the greatest safety, the best guarantee of existence and progress, bodily, intellectual and moral.
– Peter Kroptkin

Providing for the immediate needs of people in our communities can also act as a support system for our on-the-ground organizing. Mutual aid is an essential aspect to our biological species and promotes the positive flourishing of our collective humanity. Our best instincts are those which serve others, helping each other wherever and however we can, organizing consciously for what is best for our species and our common ecology. Mutual aid institutions, practices and networks raise material goods and services for the entire working class while contributing to other organizing endeavors. Providing material aid for striking workers, clothes and food for those facing houselessness, bail bond funds for marginalized communities who are targeted by the police and the criminal justice system, material aid for teachers and students who are facing austerity measures, and disaster relief for those affected by climate change and natural disasters, are all ways in which we can organize for a better world, today.

Mutual Aid Is Not Charity

Mutual aid is often painted with the same brush as the capitalist idea of charity. This ignores the fact that mutual aid is the work we do to support each other in struggle wherein people take on the responsibility of caring for each other’s needs. As we build skills and share them with each other, we are able to create a more immediately survivable environment, challenging alienation and capitalistic relations through reciprocity and solidarity. This can also be an aid to our struggles. For example, the wildcat teachers’ strikes gained extensive popularity through providing a replacement for free lunches to low-income students unable to attend classes due to the strike.

But it’s not just that mutual aid can ease material conditions or help striking workers so that they have more power against the bosses – it is an assault on the existing power structure. Consider this: if mutual aid can meet the food needs of everyone in a city without them having to pay for the food, what’s the point of paying for food in the first place? Start asking questions like this, and you can quickly start to unravel the capitalist economy itself in that local area. Capitalism is based upon a network of institutions that draw their power from dispossession, control, enclosure and exclusion. Free access is capitalism’s poison. By building up the capacity to universally provide resources on a non-market basis, we plant the seeds for capitalism’s ultimate destruction.

In all this, we must remember that mutual aid runs not from the socialist movement to the grateful workers but is something workers do for each other on an organizationally egalitarian basis. We must work to ensure our mutual aid raises each other up as opposed to charity which hands down from “on high.”

Projects of Cooperation Milwaukee

MUTUAL AID | Cooperative Economics FUNDRAISER

Please consider donating to our Mutual Aid fundraiser: here. Email us at dsamkemutualaid@gmail.com or text/call at 414.377.3443 if you would like to help with mutual aid preparedness & relief.

MKE MESH COOPERATIVE

MKE Mesh Cooperative is dedicated to providing low-cost to free community based internet in the Milwaukee area. To get involved, please reach out to Cooperation MKE | DSA-LSC @ dsamkemutualaid@gmail.com. Our website is mkemesh.org.

TOOL LIBRARY

Milwaukee Tool Library is still in its planning stages. Our website is mkelibrary.org

FLORA COOPERATIVE

Flora Cooperative grew out of Milwaukee Industrial Worker's of the World and Cooperation Milwaukee members to build a union worker-owned cooperative in markets typically neglected by organized labor. We have recently joined International Union of Painters and Allied Trades. Our website is floracooperative.com and floradesigncoop.com.

SHAKY HANDS COOP

Shaky Hands is screen-printing worker-owned cooperative dedicated to utilizing equitable produced products, such as shirts, sweatshirts, hats etc. and high-quality printing. Our website is shakyhands.co

Resources on Solidarity Economy & Mutual Aid

Mutual Aid: A Factor In Evolution by Peter Kropotkin

The Revolutionary Potential of Solidarity Economy by Yavor Tarinski

Cooperation Jackson – Solidarity Economy Projects

US Solidarity Economy Network – Solidarity Economy Network

Industrial Democracy | Solidarity Unionism – I.W.W.

Mutual Aid Disaster Relief – Mutual Aid Project

People’s Movement Assembly – Community Assemblies

I.W.W. Incarcerated Worker’s Organizing Committee – Prisoner Support

UW Madison Center for Cooperative Development – Cooperative Economics

Chicago Bail Bonds – Prisoner Support

Libertarian Socialist Caucus Logo

Libertarian Socialist Caucus of Milwaukee

Who We Are

The Libertarian Socialist Caucus is an organization of members of the Democratic Socialists of America who believe that libertarian socialist values are the fullest embodiment of this democratic socialist vision. We cherish the DSA’s status as a multi-tendency mass socialist organization and wish to create a space within the DSA to discuss and organize for the development of socialism beyond the state.

We take libertarian socialism to encompass those parts of the socialist movement (including syndicalists, council communists, anarchists, cooperativists, communalists and libertarian municipalists, among many others) which have historically seen the surest path to socialism as residing in the creation of independent institutions in civil society that give the working class and ordinary people direct power over their lives.

We believe in the socialist principles of common ownership and that worker control over workplaces can only be advanced through the creation and support of worker-owned cooperative firms, radical trade unions, workers’ & neighborhood councils, popular assemblies, time banking, alternative banking systems, community land trusts (CLT’s), and other directly democratic non-state institutions. The power of socialist parties and socialist governments should be subordinate to these more decentralized grassroots formations.

Our particular vision of a libertarian socialist society—and the specific path we intend to take to get there—will emerge out of the discussions and activities of the LSC itself. We believe radical democracy is an ongoing participatory process of deliberation, renegotiation, and collective self-determination. It is for the people themselves to decide what the world they wish to live in is to be. Our inability to describe the precise contours of the liberated society is rooted in the simple fact that democracy is inherently a work in progress, continually created and recreated by its participants.

In short, wherever domination exists—of bosses over workers, of men over women and gender nonconformists, of states over subjects, of whites over people of color, of human society over the rest of the web of life—we seek to replace it with equality, cooperation, love, and mutual respect. Ours is a vision of total liberation, not just in some far-flung revolutionary future but here and now.

Educational Recommendations of the MKE LSC

*Liberate the Library | Liberate the World!*

Groups that DSA-LSC is Affiliated With:

Symbiosis Federation

Industrial Worker’s of the World

Join Us

Please fill out our intake form and we’ll get you plugged in to LSC as quickly as we can! For more information, feel free to find us on twitter, email us, or follow us on facebook.

If in the Milwaukee area and are interested in the work of MKE DSA-LSC, please email us at dsamkemutualaid@gmail.com

Cooperation Milwaukee | Counter-Power [Solidarity Economy | Mutual Aid Working Group ] Libertarian Socialist Caucus (Milwaukee DSA)