Advancing Economic Democracy: Theory, Movement, and Policy

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Session Description

Throughout the crisis-prone 21st century, interest in economic democracy has been intensifying. Cascading crises have generated heightened economic insecurity, which has in turn fueled economic ingenuity as people seek out alternative ways to meet their needs and to counteract exploitative working conditions and the disembedding consequences of market logics and neoliberal modes of governance. Worker cooperatives are a powerful illustration of this. Over the past decade, the number of worker cooperatives in the US has more than doubled (DAWI 2024) while innovative partnerships between worker cooperatives and labor unions have forged new pathways and institutions of labor solidarity (Lurie and Fitzsimons 2021). Beyond worker cooperatives, experiments with other types of cooperatives and collectives, as well as with community gardens, community land trusts, community currencies, and other forms of solidarity-based practices have proliferated in the US and abroad (Spicer and Kaye 2022). These developments have inspired both new movement formations and new theoretical frameworks to better comprehend postcapitalist possibilities, including conceptualization of community economies (Gibson-Graham 2006), real utopias (Wright 2010), coöperism (Harcourt 2023), and solidarity economies (Safri et al. 2024; Loh and Shear 2022). Alongside these more utopian aspirations, other analysts have drawn attention to various racial, gender, and class divisions that cut through the movements, much as they do society writ large (Borowiak 2018; Safri et al. 2024; Hossein et al. 2023; Hudson 2022). Meanwhile, practitioners have had to contend with deeply pragmatic concerns of movement building, which often center on the immediate needs of grassroots organizations and umbrella networks. With attention drawn to normative and aspirational elements of economic democracy on the one hand and to the internal movement dynamics on the other, what often falls from view are the policy environments in which these initiatives and movements operate (Kelly and Manklang 2023). All of this raises questions both about the relation between theory and practice in the context of movements for economic democracy and about the role that policy analysis and campaigns should play in such movements.

This roundtable brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars and practitioners who have all been deeply immersed in the study and/or practice of cooperative and solidarity economies. In their own ways, each of the participants has actively bridged divides between academic scholarship and community practice when it comes to economic democracy. The aim of the roundtable is to forge a dialogue about the current state of movements for economic democracy and about the challenges being faced, the strategies being pursued, the place of public policy, and the relation between academic researchers, movement practitioners, and different levels of government.




Works Cited:

Borowiak C, Safri M, Healy S, and Pavlovskaya M (2018). “Navigating the Fault Lines: Race and Class in Philadelphia’s Solidarity Economy.” Antipode 50 (3): 577–603

Democracy at Work Institute (DAWI). (2024). 2023 Worker Cooperative State of the Sector Report.

Gibson-Graham JK (2006). Post Capitalist Politics. University of Minnesota Press.

Harcourt B (2023). Cooperation: A Political, Economic, and Social Theory. Columbia University Press.

Hossien CS, Wright-Austin SD, and Edmonds K (2023). Beyond Racial Capitalism: Co-Operatives in the African Diaspora. Oxford University Press.

Hudson L (2021). “New York City: Struggles over the Narrative of the Solidarity Economy.” Geoforum 127: 326-334

Kelly E and Manklang M. (2023). “Unlikely Advocates: Worker Co-ops, Grassroots Organizing, and Public Policy.” Nonprofit Quarterly (NPQ). August 8.

Loh P, Shear B.W. “Fight and build: solidarity economy as ontological politics.” Sustain Sci 17, 1207–1221 (2022)

Lurie R and Fitzsimons BK. 2021. A union toolkit for cooperative solutions. City University of New York.

Safri M, Pavlovskaya M, Healy S, Borowiak C. (forthcoming 2024). Solidarity Cities: Confronting Racial Capitalism, Mapping Transformation. University of Minnesota Press.

Spicer, J. and Kay, T. 2022. Another Organization is Possible: New Directions in Research on Alternative Enterprise. Sociology Compass. 16(3)

Wright EO (2010). Envisioning Real Utopias. Verso.

Sub Unit

• Division 42: Critical Political Science (formerly New Political Science)

Chair

• Craig Borowiak Haverford College

Presenters

• Craig Borowiak Haverford College

• Bernard E. Harcourt Columbia University

• Jason Spicer Baruch College, City University of New York

• Rebecca Lurie City University of New York