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Jose Luis Coraggio: Another Economy is Happening |
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Page 2 of 27
Building on existing alternative economic institutions, and welding them together to build a people’s economy with enough political clout to get governmental backing for grassroots change, may sound like an abstract idea to people located in some parts of the world. For Coraggio, located in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he is the director of the graduate program in social economics at the General Sarmiento National University, the idea is not abstract at all. It is a close approximation to what is actually happening. The relationship is reciprocal. Coraggio writes of a new people’s economy that is in the process of being built, while one reason it is being built is the widespread influence of the writing and teaching of Coraggio.
Coraggio has published several lists of the existing alternative institutions that are the real world starting points for his strategy for constructive structural change. They include the following institutions and assets:
- Cooperative schools in which groups of parents work together to enhance the lives of their children;
- Consumers’ cooperatives for assuring supplies of needed items, including the comedores populares, through which women in the barrios share food, and acquire donated food, and cook meals to which everyone in the neighborhood is invited
- Swap meets and barter networks, with or without a form of scrip or local currency, such as the Ithaca Hours used in Ithaca, New York.
- Production cooperatives producing items for the use of the members, including community garden plots
- Local committees for general civic betterment, such as neighborhood improvement associations, which conduct such activities as crime watches and neighborhood cleanups and improvement projects
- Ethnic organizations, which engage in mutual aid among their members, such as the organizations of tribal people who have migrated to the cities, or people whose roots are in the same European country
- Neighborhood organizations for mutual aid or recreation, such as social clubs or sports clubs
- Incorporated mutual aid organizations, such as the medical care plans operated by labor unions, which were organized by the Peronista movement (6)
- Houses and other assets that people own are assets of the people’s economy. (Argentina’s history has been such that many people were formerly able to afford houses, and still own them, even though now they have no money.)
- People also often own small shops or workshops.
- People also often own vehicles.
- Workers often have tools.
- Available lands also count as resources for the people’s economy. In Argentina it has proven to be no problem to get people to lend land, or to get access to public land, or access to land owned by diverse institutions (such as hospitals), in order to raise food in community gardens or family gardens.
- Pension funds can be sources of funding for a people’s economy, both because ordinary people often have pension rights and because the directors of the funds are sometimes committed to the people’s cause.
- The skills and knowledge of the people themselves are resources for the people’s economy, as are their pro-social attitudes and motivations. (6)
- Workplaces that have recently been taken over by the workers and run as workers cooperatives. There are about 300 of these in Argentina now.
- There are also older workers cooperatives that pre-date the recent Argentine crisis, most of which have lent a hand to aid the new ones.
- The voluntary help people give each other, such as, but not limited to, family members caring for the old and for the young.
- Savings put into savings institutions of the kind known in Spain as “ethical banks” which deliberately lend money to the institutions of the people’s economy. The Municipal Bank of the City of Rosario is an Argentine “ethical bank”. (8)
- Institutions of lifelong learning, which permanently build up the skills and knowledge of the people.
- Technical assistance groups devoted to the people’s cause, for example the volunteer lawyers, accountants, and engineers who support the 300 workplaces recently taken over.
- Consumer cooperatives that buy collectively to lower costs, or increase the social quality of the goods sold, e.g. by retailing the products of the people’s economy.
- Marketing associations of autonomous producers, e.g. artisans, artists, small farmers.
- Labor unions of workers employed by the other two parts of the economy, i.e. by the entrepreneurial economy and by the public sector.
- Associations for mutual aid, which make people more secure by having networks to rely on in case of need, e.g. churches which send volunteers to help members who are sick.
- Places to exchange experiences, reflect, and systematize collective learning, e.g. adult education conducted along the lines practiced by Paulo Freire. (9)
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