Page 5 - C.A.L.L. #38 - Summer 2014

Intentional Communities and Solidarity Economics
The mutual need for seeing each other
Michael Johnson, Ganas Community (ganas.org), Grassroots Economic Organizing (geo.coop)
Solidarity Economics is a powerful
framework for thinking about alternative
and grassroots economics being used
across the globe
(http://www.geo.coop/node/35).
Solidarity Economic enterprises and
organizations collaborate locally and
regionally to build a just, peace-based, and
fully democratic society. They collaborate
with a diverse range of other citizen
groups to build and share power in
democratic networks where peace-building
and peace-making are widely used to
prevent and manage conflicts.
Onlookers may well ask, “Why all this
agitation for alternative ways of living and
earning livelihoods”? Our answer is quite
complex, but can be roughly summarized.
The dominant way our culture thinks about
and does “economics” envisions, for the
most part, human beings only as
“consumers” and Earth as a “storehouse of
resources” to be used for private gain.
Over the last 40 years intentional
communities have become a major
alternative economic institution in the
United States. They are much more than
that, for sure. They are solid, ongoing
experiments in evolving cultures of
cooperation. They are small “other worlds”
already realized. In addition, the ICs in
the US are a fully developed movement,
and growing.
The more formal intentional communities
are unique and vital for they are both a
major form of alternative lifestyles and
alternative economics. Activists of every
stripe need to know about them and to
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understand the power of community and
cooperation these ‘formal’ models offer.
They need also to take note that the
intentional communities movement
embraces “projects where people strive
together with a common vision.” In both
of these regards, nothing could be more
aligned with solidarity economics and most
other forms of alternative economics.
Grassroots economic activists are, to a
very large extent, unaware of the breadth
and depth of the intentional community
movement, nor of how much they
themselves have in common this
movement. Likewise, many of the members
in the more formal intentional
communities don’t realize how much they
have in common with these activists and
their varied alternative economic
institutions like worker co-ops, food co-
ops, land trusts, alternative currency,
barter networks, and so forth.
The world is filled with alternative
lifestyles and ways of earning livelihoods.
Awareness of them is quite dim and
scattered, however. Even people living
these different lifestyles and practicing
different ways of producing, distributing,
and consuming goods and services are
surprisingly unaware of each other.
Mainstream media is, well, radically
mainstream. GEO's Fall 2013 Theme
(http://www.geo.coop/content/intentional
-communities-and-solidarity-economics)
seeks to fill and bridge some of the gaps
that mainstream media’s radically
exclusive approach creates. This focuses
on the connections between intentional
communities and solidarity economics.