My PhD journey — how and where can I be of service?
As I begin to think about the spaces that I want to venture into to collect data I become more aware of my positionally as a researcher. I am a white cis-gendered man. For now that is all I feel like I need to reveal. Perhaps, when I come to write my thesis I will include an auto ethnographic element. It is important for me to be transparent from the start as my positionally shapes the way I research and how people respond to me and act around me. If I am lucky any blind spots in my bias will be reflected back at me. The personal is political, this is one of the only things I know for sure, and it cuts through a lot of shit when one is explicit about positionally. Thinking of my privilege leads me to ask myself
How and where can I be of service?
Do relationships based on the principles of solidarity emerge from socio-economic and cultural necessity? In the spaces that capitalism has excluded, criminalised, exploited to near extinction. Perhaps the spaces modern liberal democracies simply do not care about or actually have a pathological fear of? This leads me to consider two specific areas where solidarity manifests as harm reduction — drug consumption and sex work. I will pin these two for now.
It seems timely as I begin my academic delve into the culture of solidarity economics that a new book is published on the subject — The Solidarity Economy: A Visual Guide. Last week I attended an event at the BASE centre in Bristol hosted by the creators of the book.
As I came off the train I lost my bearings and asked a young women for directions “that’s the anarchist centre” she replied. We walked and talked in the direction of my destination until she headed off home.
The publication of the book was funded through on an online crowdfunder. I received my copy this week . It is an excellent guide. If you want to know more then go get yourself a copy here. I also received a copy of Social Ecology and the Rojava Revolution. Social Ecology was conceived by Murray Bookchin. I read a lot of Bookchin when I was doing my undergrad and masters. Maybe I need to return to his writings…
There were 12 of us at the gathering, 10 humans, tea and cake. We chatted about the solidarity economy, its associations to anarchism, anti-state communism, how it is being co-opted from the top, what it means on a global scale and what it means to each of us on a personal level. We all have experience of forms of solidarity in our personal lives and I really enjoyed hearing peoples stories. One thing that always rises to the surface when discussing alternatives is how. How do we change in the face of the capitalist monster that reaches so deep into all our lives? Are we resigned too tinkering at the edges …? Making community jam (I love making jam btw) ? Creating innovative spaces of solidarity, like eco-housing co-ops, or land based communities, only really accessible to the privileged? And if truly accessible spaces of solidarity arise from the margins how can we grow them before crises hit?
Still, I come back to wellbeing as a central agent. Wellbeing as the antithesis to fascism.
Wellbeing as a fundamental. Maslow nailed this with his hierarchy of needs over 70 years ago.
Except that my self-actualisation cannot exist in a vacuum. And surely any self-actualisation should result in committing to the fight for all to reach self-actualisation, or else it’s just another empty manifestation of hyperindividualism.
Neoliberalism coverts and hoards wellbeing which it distributes in abundance amongst the wealthy shareholders of the corporations that are killing the planet and contributing to multiple genocides.
One has to ask how do the 1% experience that wellbeing and where do they think they are running to? How will they achieve self-actualisation on a burnt planet where AI robots fight perpetual wars for resources. Are they just stupid? They must be. Rich and stupid.
I return to my 2000 word critique.
I begin with these …
Bauhardt, C. (2014). Solutions to the crisis? The Green New Deal, Degrowth, and the Solidarity Economy: Alternatives to the capitalist growth economy from an ecofeminist economics perspective. Ecological Economics, 102: 60–68.
Fox, N. J. (2023). Green capitalism, climate change and the technological fix: A more-than-human assessment. The Sociological Review 71(5): 1115–1134.
Gibson-Graham, J. K. a. M., E (2015). Economy as Ecological Livelihood. In, Manifesto for Living in the Anthropocene. Eds. D. B. R. Katherine Gibson, Ruth Fincher. Brooklyn, NY., Punctum Books: 7–16.
Gordon-Nembhard, J. (2023). Black Political Economy, Solidarity Economics, and Liberation: Toward an Economy of Caring and Abundance. Review of Radical Political Economics
Kelly, D. & Woods, C. (2021). Ethical Indigenous Economies. Engaged Scholar Journal
