Written by PEL Lab Leader Deric Gruen
The federal government is undergoing seismic cuts, the Washington State Legislature just finished wrestling with a $15 billion budget crisis, and the City of Seattle will undertake its own budget reckoning this fall. As champions of solidarity economies, we envision a multitude of local, community-centered economies, and we believe community leadership is critical to prosperity. But a community-centered economy cannot work in isolation. To ignore the importance of the public sector at this time would be a serious mistake.
The solidarity economy is not an alternative to the public sector. Governed well, especially at the local level, the public sector is complimentary and necessary. While building the new economic models we know we need, we must also advance our vision within existing systems. The government’s unique powers to tax, fine, and incarcerate people are simply too powerful to ignore on the one hand, and the government’s potential to catalyze our work is too attractive on the other.
This is particularly important at a time of political and economic transition. The era of neoliberalism – the ideology of restrained government in favor of unrestrained trade, capital, and migration – is being seriously challenged. What is rising is a government with a heavier hand in directing our lives and economy. Examples include the Inflation Reduction Act from the last federal administration, an attempt to boost clean energy, and tariffs in the current administration. It’s important to recognize these changes aren’t happening in a vacuum. The super wealthy and corporations are looking to shape changes in the political economy – whether getting government out of the way or using government to their advantage – to expand their power. While solidarity economy practitioners don’t have their resources or clout, we can’t afford to give up on influencing government’s role as a lost cause.
In Washington State, important progress on solidarity economies has included government support for Community Assemblies, the Community Reinvestment Project, and Washington Community Ownership Program at the state level, and Community Wealth Building at the city level. But beyond direct investment, we must, quite literally, be in solidarity with other publicly provided goods and services, even if there is not an immediate shift toward shared governance with the community. That includes everything from subsidized preschool and healthcare to public transportation to the basic rule-of-law infrastructure that allows people to participate in the economy safely.
Gar Aprovitz, a historical and political economist, has long theorized about building a better economy. Although he contrasted free market capitalism and state socialism to pull visibility to strategies like worker cooperatives, he also argued that we can’t ignore the importance of the public sector in solidarity economy work. To achieve common ownership, through what he envisioned as a “Pluralist Common-wealth,” Aprovitz emphasizes scale and role for different actors. Food, retail, and entertainment, for example, should be tackled by cooperative enterprises. Land trusts can operate on a slightly larger scale like a neighborhood corporation. But for bigger forms of common ownership, like utilities or a state bank, we need government.
To engage effectively in creating the government we want, we need not absolve the government of the damage it’s done and is still doing. From individual frustrations with bureaucracy or politics to generational harms like racist rules on who can get a mortgage, police violence, and forced displacement, there’re plenty of tails to pin on the donkey and elephant. And after years of feeling stuck, it’s not unsurprising that people from across the political spectrum express a willingness to make drastic changes to our institutions. We will need drastic change to get unstuck and to weather coming changes in environment, politics, and technology. Most of us can agree, however, it’s the who, how, and for what questions we care about most, not whether government and public services should exist. But after decades of work to discredit government, on both the left and the right, it’s worth reminding ourselves that government is a vehicle for collective action. Right now, that means standing up for our democracy – our ability to self-govern – and for the important public investments we need at a time of tremendous stress.
