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The “solidarity economy” is generally thought of as comprising four distinct classes of activity: community services consultancy, micro-finance, Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS), community services and Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). Because they try to emphasise the citizen’s activism, these solidarity initiatives are thought to be deeply political in the philosophical sense of the term. But today an important question arises regarding the kind of formal political institution that might speak in the name of all these initiatives. Some commentators see solidarity initiatives as new economic models with the potential to solve the ethical impasse of advanced capitalism. They are eager for academic researchers and movement leaders to reach consensus about the kind of concrete political identity such initiatives may be expected to generate. My research examines the failure to move from micro-level initiatives to an overarching “macro” political entity. This chapter, using the insights of pragmatic sociology, aims to understand how the obstacles to this goal are rooted in the libertarian socialist grammar of the solidarity economy itself. |
