Jason Nardi – General Delegate Ripess Europe
The hottest Summer ever registered, with the Climate and ecological crisis deepening and spreading… political turmoil in many countries worldwide… genocidal wars ongoing with criminal leaders dictating there agenda unchallenged… a broken economic and financial system which is rapidly extracting and destroying not just our ecological life systems, but social and human rights that have been slowly yet tenaciously and collectively conquered.
The global polycrisis we are living seems so overwhelming that whatever new positive results or advancements we do in our practices, they seem too small and insignificant in front of these immense challenges.
As Kali Akuno of Cooperation Jackson Mississippi puts it (read the interview by DOCK SSE here), “Let’s be honest, most solidarity economy operations throughout the world at present serve either as relief institutions or niche economic operations. This is because they are very constrained by the dynamics of capitalism. Not the least of which is access to capital, as a means to secure materials within the framework of capitalist social relations. And also access to material resources that don’t require purchase, which again just supports commodity relations. Now, the deep democratic and self-organizing dimensions of the solidarity economy can be profoundly transformative, and help us create a society of associated producers, of which we have little doubt from our perspective. But, the solidarity economy movement must become more of a political movement to accomplish its goals”.
Now the challenge is how to be at the same time a deeply democratic self-organising form of plural interconnected “economical” practices and a people-led movement that is recognised at all different levels and is capable of having a transformative agenda and clear common goals. We need to build the diffused power of Solidarity.
There have been some significative advancements in both directions: the 2023 UN’s resolution on SSE (resulting from years of interaction with several bodies of the UN and the creation of a UN interagency task force on SSE), the EU commission’s action plan on (S)SE is advancing, the EU Nature Restoration law finally was approved, new legal frameworks and policies are being claimed or built in several countries, notwithstanding the strong wave of neoliberal backwash most of the world is going through today.
And yet, the re-volution must come first from within. RIPESS Europe, as a network of networks has been re-envisioning its internal structure (towards a more shared governance and sociocratic practice) and its organisational culture, developing our Knowledge commons, our Intercooperation spaces, our Movement building through convergences and re-elaborating our SSE Foundations, to be able to have stronger roots and spread out mycelium, sharing competences, training our skills, exchanging methodologies and developing further our collective techological platforms… you can read about all of this in the report from our last General assembly in Geneva.
An example of how our members are working in this direction is the “Soft Skills for a Better World” and “Training for Activists” publications, the result of an Erasmus+ project in Central Eastern Europe appropriately named “Hard-Times, Soft-Skills”. Another example is the networking towards the 2025 International Year of Cooperatives in Turkey, bringing together new generation cooperatives in a three-year long process. And yet another E+ project just took off with a meeting in Florence, Italy: Looking Up – how to strengthen community building, training and advocacy on participatory development…
Finally, you will find many other inspirational practical examples of transformative SSE in this newsletter – and if you don’t want to read, you can watch two freshly published movies from Local Futures, featuring some of RIPESS’ members worldwide: “The Power of the Local” and “Close to Home”.
Reclaiming our cooperative capacities, mutualistic relations and creative abilities is no longer an alternative option: it is a necessity and a universal right if we want to have a future on this Planet.
