Oscar Bastidas Delgado
About the Social Economy: Did you know…?
The Social Economy is not just a term, it is a socio-economic reality with historical and geographical expressions built throughout humanity, catapulted by the impacts of the Industrial Revolution. These verifiable realities have received various names, the oldest, Social Economy, has a European origin and dates from the early nineteenth century but has spread throughout the planet.
Forms of help and solidarity have always existed through which individuals, groups and entire populations have achieved solutions of various magnitudes to common problems; In this panorama, utopias, written or not, understood by such only feasible approaches and referred to societies, contributed and still do greatly.
Paul Lambert, a student of cooperativism, highlighted in his book "The Cooperative Doctrine", the amazing analogies between certain institutions with collective schemes of Antiquity and the Middle Ages, with the cooperatives of our time, he mentions some, I add others: burial and insurance fellowships in Greece and Rome; common dairies in Armenia; common land leasing societies in Babylon; the collegia funeralitia of artisans of ancient Rome; the drainage, irrigation and levee fellowships in Germany; the agapes of the early Christians as cooperative forms; agrarian and labor organizations among Slavic peoples; the mir among the Russians; the artels of fishermen and hunters of ancient Russia; the zadruga of the Serbs; the cheese factories of the Armenians and the European peasants of the Alps, the Jura and the Savoy; the well-known Fruitières du Jura in France considered true cooperatives for the collection and transformation of milk derivatives; the Greek Sunedrians and hetedries and the medieval savings and guild associations of artisans and craftsmen, who were once seeds of mutualism; and others such as the construction teams that toured Europe at the time of the cathedrals or "compagnons"; the brotherhoods, relief brotherhoods and montepíos.
There were also experiences of this type in America such as the calpulli of the Aztecs, of collective use of the land for individual and communal usufruct; the councils of elders of the Nahuas who directed the organization of the community with the older relative as "chief"; and the Positos, a sort of communal warehouse in which the indigenous people of pre-Columbian Mexico deposited their crops to prevent bad seasons.
Then followed the ayllus of the Inca culture; the community funds of the Spanish colonization; the immigrant colonies of North America with a high religious character; the reductions of the Jesuits in Paraguay; the religious brotherhoods in almost all the continent; and expressions of associated work such as minka and waki as delivery of agricultural labor in exchange for food and part of production in Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru; tequio in Mexico; the Boruca meetings in Costa Rica; the ayni in mutual and reciprocal help of services or goods between two families in the Andean countries; apthapi or sharing food in a community way; the collective ejidos of Mexico and the convite, the manovuelta and the cayapa in Venezuela.
Currently there are infinite spontaneous or permanent expressions that individually or collectively are used to face problems; They are found in all human spaces and are a logical consequence of new urban and rural needs that, with creativity and innovation, generate new economic systems and organizational models based on innovative forms of governance, communication networks and exchange systems.
The range of terms covered by these organizations is varied, some are generic such as third sector, third system, fourth sector; others try to point out the sector they build: social economy, popular economy, indigenous economy, family economy, community economy, labor economy; some refer to the spaces in which they operate: urban economy, peasant economy, marginal economy, neighborhood economy, communal economy, collective economy, orange economy, informal economy; others point to what they intend to do with them as an alternative economy, circular economy, inclusive economy; others denote the value that they supposedly develop: collaborative economy, self-help economy, participatory economy, associative economy, cooperative economy, self-managed economy, democratic economy, solidarity economy, and others that indicate operating conditions as non-profit organizations.
During the Middle Ages, Europe saw the emergence of charitable organizations made up of wealthy classes to carry out charitable actions towards poor sectors; the organizational space was dominated by the mountains of piety, the brotherhoods, the charitable hospitals, highlighting the Friendly Societies, the York Female Friendly Society, best known for its broad female composition, founded in York in 1788. From the end of that time, population groups decided to organize in various countries to face their problems directly.
Ruptures of traditions due to the social crisis and population migrations were on the agenda, many people protested violently while others later exploded, in parallel expressions of solidarity were sought and multiplied; Collective actions emerged with difficulties adding to the previous ones, forming an extraordinary range of organizational proposals focused on people. Under this logic, at the end of the 18th century, the first modern cooperative in the world was established, the Ampelakia Joint Company (Greece), according to a quote by José Luis Monzón and Rafael Chaves:
"It was founded between 1750 and 1770 when small cotton growing and red thread producing associations from 22 villages in the Tempi area came together in 1772 to avoid unnecessary rivalry and competition. It became a large company, with 6,000 partners, 24 factories and 17 branches across Europe, from Saint Petersburg and London to Izmir. Its partners benefited from social insurance, health facilities, schools and libraries and from the Free University of Ampelakia. It was dissolved in 1812 due to the combined pressure of high taxes and the economic and technical evolution of the yarn industry".
In 1793 the English Rose Law gave the first statute to mutuals and they, which stood out since the middle of the century with groups that agreed to the common commitment to defray the expenses due to illness or burial of their members, would have boomed when reaching greater dimensions impacts by its own dynamics and by the influence of various thinkers. France at the end of the 18th century stood out with associative experiences such as the Feuillants and Cordeliers clubs and the famous Jacobin association of the Friends of the Constitution from 1790, which were promoted by the French Revolution, which in turn was supported by them to rule.
Since the beginning of the 19th century, emerging features of mutualism have been added that would be nourished by the autonomy of grassroots associations and the diverse relationships between professions and territories, and even doctrinal proposals such as "solidarityism", the official doctrine of the construction of the Third Republic, would emerge in France as an alternative route to individualism and socialism.
"The history of French society and the persistent difficulty of admitting the right of association favored, on the contrary, the rooting of this sovereignty. The impulse given from the bottom up in the institutional development of the mutual society made this phenomenon irreversible".
It is noteworthy that English cooperativists established close relations with the labor movement and its unions since 1824, in such a way that from one of the eight Cooperative Congresses held in England between 1831 and 1835 by cooperativists and workers, the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union emerged that unified all British unions.
At the same time, other cooperative experiences arose, such as that of consumption in Zabaikalie, Russia, one of construction in Philadelphia and one poultry in Ireland, all three in 1831. The first production cooperative in France followed: "l’Association chrétienne des bijoutiers en doré", founded by four Parisian workers in 1834 and one for consumption in Lion, "Le commerce veridique et social" from 1835, for whose foundation the Lyon-born Michel Derrion was condemned in 1840.
Later, as will be seen in later lines, the Society of Equitable Pioneers of Rochdale would be constituted, which, not being the first cooperative, was to systematize and write operating guidelines that originated the well-known Cooperative Principles. In parallel to Rochdale, the production and work cooperatives known as "familisterios" founded in Guise by Juan Bautista Godin flourished in France.
As can be seen, cooperative ideas and practices were spreading rapidly, thus, Czechoslovakia founded its first cooperative in 1845 and the housing and insurance cooperativism was present in the Scandinavian countries together with consumer experiences that gave rise, among other expressions, to the Swedish Federation of Cooperatives (KF Kooperativa Forbundet).
Synthesizing, in clear confrontation with the values and interests of the nascent capitalist system and as a consequence of the social ebullition and the need to concentrate forces with a political and government vision to direct long-term processes at the level of entire societies, unions and parties emerged with a long-term transformative vision like the Socialists and the Communists (Communist Manifesto of 1848), which contributed to creating a revolutionary climate within an also growing working class, compromising the viability of capitalism.
It was then as a response to the fatal consequences of capitalism that specific modalities emerged from the Common or "the people" with a clear profile of self-defense, beginning the construction of an economic sector of organizations with specific features with economic activities such as associations, mutuals with obvious aims of social welfare and cooperatives as stronger socio-economic organizations, all grouped under the name of social economy. These manifestations of inter-aid in various spheres were concomitantly supported by far-reaching political proposals such as those of the nascent workers, socialist and communist parties, particularly feminist movements and unions; Observing them, the economists of the time founded a current of study that they called the School of Social Economy.
From that moment and until now, social economy organizations would face problems with capitalism and its variants such as state capitalism and other systems that sought to replace capitalism as real socialisms; Over time, new situations and legal coverage would make the organizational universe of social economy organizations more complex.
Here is the basis of all social economy organizations, they are made up of groups of people who voluntarily and directly, without intermediation, face their common problems, contributing their own resources. As a whole, they have a special organizational structure that differentiates them from capital and public organizations.
Along with social economy organizations, organizations would emerge with proposals from alternative societies such as the socialist and communist parties and unions for the defense of workers in companies. These organizations would become channels of socio-economic struggles, in alliances in certain cases with social economy organizations, reaching national and even global levels. Cooperatives, for example, according to a study by the International Organization of Industrial, Artisanal and Service Production Cooperatives (Cicopa), an international organization attached to the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA), a leading organization for the integration of cooperativism worldwide, they constitute the largest socio-economic movement on the planet with a number of cooperatives of 2.94 million and 1,217.5 million members in all kinds of cooperatives over a world population of 7,324 million, 16.62%, one sixth.
Employment in the field of cooperatives comprises at least 250 million people on the planet, 8.73% of the world’s employed population, distributed as follows: 10.8 million worker-members; 15.6 million employees; and 223.6 million people, most of them belonging to the agricultural sector. If we consider that each member has an average family of three people, the total number of people linked to the movement exceeds four billion.
To complete the picture, it can be said that the 300 largest cooperatives have generated annual income of 2.2 trillion dollars, equivalent to the GDP of the seventh largest economy in the world. These figures should be fed by government reports, but many states attach greater importance to other economic sectors than to social economy organizations, particularly cooperatives.
Photo: chamba.coop
NOTE: The views and opinions expressed in these articles are those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect the views of PromoCoop and its partners.
Share