Two things happened to me last Wednesday that inspired this post. Nairuti Shastry sent an email to a group of us working with her on the NOVA Council encouraging us to read Fight and build: solidarity economy as ontological politics, and I attended an open house, also on the recommendation of Nairuti, for a pilot project titled Elements for Regional Solidarity Economy Cohort: A 5-month cohort-based online training series for groups organized by folks from the Cooperative Economics Alliance of New York City. The cohort training sounded very appealing, especially since it includes an integrated study of the politics of the solidarity economy along with its political geography (I was once an aspiring GIS nerd - see Explorations in Free Software GIS - who still dreams of democratizing our social production of space), but I wasn't officially at the orientation as a representative of an already existing cohort, so there is no useful way for me to participate in it.

More than that, however, the fact that I was being offered yet another solidarity economy training while living in a place, the D.C., Maryland, Virginia metropolitan area (a.k.a. the DMV) without a solidarity economy to speak of, gave me pause. How many trainings and workshops do we need before we can begin to build something? What will it take to begin to create an actually existing solidarity economy in the DMV?

I am grateful to Nairuti for giving me these two "assignments" on the same day. While I've only had the pleasure of working with her for a short while, I am quickly becoming a huge fan. She seems to share my sense of urgency that we need to move our fight forward and begin to build, and her emails have consistently contained ideas and suggestions aimed at doing just that.

What I am most concerned about is the huge challenge of figuring out how to build, given the glaring contradictions of we face living within the hegemonic neoliberal empire, engineered to its core to prevent we the people from creating any effective opposition to it. So much of what little opposition does exist is contained within the nonprofit industrial complex, which I think in part explains both the preponderance of the workshops and trainings, and the simultaneous lack of real world examples of theory in practice.

The Fight and build article contains encouraging information about the concrete solidarity work being done in Massachusetts, including the Solidarity Economy Initiative (pages 1214-16) and the Boston Ujima Project (pages 1217-18), but it is written in an academic language that is challenging to understand. Its abstract begins with the sentence, "This essay explores the potential of solidarity economy (SE) as theory, practice, and movement, to engender an ontological politics to create and sustain other worlds that can resolve the existential crises of ecological destruction and historic inequalities" (page 1207). I can't say I understand what this means, and it doesn't help any that the Wikipedia page for political ontology has a warning that "This article may be too technical for most readers to understand." We need to strive to write in language people can understand, particularly if we claim to promote a democratic project.

I was excited to learn from the article that the U.S. Solidarity Economy Network grew out of the 2007 meeting of the US Social Forum. I think that the Virginia Solidarity Economy Network (VASEN) may be the right tool for our present effort to truly birth the solidarity economy movement in our area. It is a volunteer organization that does not depend on the NGO grant stream to exist, and it may give us the broad umbrella we need to have a shared space to collaborate and coordinate our work.

A group of us interested in building VASEN will be meeting Thursday evenings beginning January 30th from 5 to 7 pm in Arlington in space provided by the Social Justice Computing get together. We are continuing work we started with the VASEN dinner we organized in December. I hope comrades reading this post who share an interest in an economy that puts people and planet before profit will consider joining us.

In solidarity
Jeff Elkner