By RENATO DAGNINO*

The left learned from these urban trajectories, and especially from that of family farming, that in order to replicate them it was convenient to start at their end.

The article's epigraph “New gaps for Solidarity Reindustrialization” – “The recently approved Solidarity Economy Law can subsidize another development project. But new legal frameworks are needed. To facilitate, for example, the public purchase of products from popular movements and the recovery of bankrupt companies by their workers” – he outlined what I had hopefully envisioned in December about the potential of the solidarity economy to increase governability.

Referring to the indispensable “construction” of an actor capable of uniting interests for the implementation of the law, I emphasized the need for actions to promote Solidary Reindustrialization, aiming to incorporate it into the proposal of the New Industry Brazil.

In the current situation, amidst “open letters”, opinion poll results, fears that coup plotters will not be punished, etc., the recent announcement of the program, known as the “platform”, “Contrata Mais Brasil” (Hire More Brazil) tends to go unnoticed. Because it hinders that “construction” and reduces the potential of the solidarity economy to reverse the loss of governability resulting from events of this nature, it is discussed here in the context in which it is inserted.

Anyone who has heard of the solidarity economy has heard its characteristics of being “bottom-up”. Among them, I would like to highlight one of a techno-productive or techno-scientific nature that incorporates aspects known to be of a cultural nature that are paradoxically little taken into account.

The solidarity economy is organized in territories where there is techno-scientific knowledge consistent with its attributes of collective ownership of the means of production, instead of private ownership; solidarity and cooperation instead of competition; and self-management instead of control of capitalist production and consumption.

Garbage recyclers, something that, at least until now, is not private property and whose profitability from exploitation is not of interest to capital, are the clearest example in the urban environment. They are the solidarity network most valued by left-wing leaders.

In rural areas, family farming, which is the heir to collective family land ownership, among other attributes, has acquired even greater value and legitimacy. It has been able to leverage the nation's most important social movement, legitimize agroecology in universities, capture a portion of public procurement, etc.

Techno-scientific knowledge built “from the bottom up” of family farming, which includes aspects of hardware (work instruments), from software (mental models about how and what to produce) and orgware (forms of organization that include, among others, the way in which it defends its right to land), is a recognized factor of success.

Even at the risk of exaggerating, it is possible to say that the left learned from family farming how to boost the solidarity economy.

If it were possible to replicate this paradigmatic trajectory of consolidation in urban areas, the left would be able to ensure the implementation of its political project. After all, this is where tens of millions of poor people survive who have never had and never will have a job. Those for whom, as has been exhaustively demonstrated, the solidarity economy is, if not the only, then the best alternative, from an economic, social, environmental and political point of view, to this condition.

The virtuous circle of awareness, mobilization, organization, participation, empowerment and governability (expressed “on the streets” or “in the vote”) of the working class as a whole could be established through the expansion of the solidarity economy.

Urban areas lack many of the attributes that, in rural areas, have enabled family farming, albeit incipiently, to achieve a very significant success factor: the allocation of a portion of the State's purchasing power. Among these, I would highlight the one related to technical and scientific knowledge.

Expelled from their territories, families living in the city do not have the technical and scientific knowledge that would allow them to become independent from the capitalist exploitation circuit. The “law” that no one can consume what they produce and no one can produce what they consume prevails there: everything has to go through the market. The little that survives from it, surprising the property-owning class, is the solidarity that prevails among poor mothers; it is no wonder that they are the ones who drive the solidarity economy.

These families, as units of the popular economy, survive at the expense of the techno-scientific knowledge that they were able to recover throughout their miserable life of subordinate insertion. Some of their members, absorbing capitalist techno-scientific knowledge, manage to survive, as individuals, by performing tasks whose low expectation of profit is of no interest to the company.

The left learned from these urban trajectories, and especially from that of family farming, that in order to replicate them it was convenient to start at the end. That is, by answering the question about what solidarity economy networks could produce to meet the state's demand for goods and services, which today represents almost 18% of GDP, under competitive conditions in relation to the company that today captures it almost entirely.

As something that allows me to allude to the enormous quantity of goods and services of very varied techno-scientific intensity that these networks can produce, I resort to a metaphor: our next Minha Casa Minha Vida must have aluminum windows produced in a solidarity chain that begins when, in the country that is one of the leaders in aluminum recycling, a collector picks up a can on the street.

The left learned that it should then select from among those goods and services those that can be produced with the techno-scientific knowledge of the urban poor. In particular, those that incorporate its most precious and irreplaceable component for the solidarity economy, self-managed cooperation. And that they can be optimized through actions of Sociotechnical Adaptation of Capitalist Technoscience towards Solidarity Technoscience, implementable with the help of left-wing professionals from our educational and research institutions.

By ordering the production of these goods and services through their different levels and organizations, the State could organize, around the approximately 20 million people who work individually on their own account in urban areas, Solidarity Reindustrialization.

But, returning to the thread I left in the cited article (and which I return to in order to settle the debt I incurred with what I mention in the title) I indicate how Contrata mais Brasil changed my expectations.

As can be seen from the statement on the government website (available here), it seems to go in the opposite direction of what the left has learned about how to act to expand the solidarity economy in urban areas to benefit the implementation of its political project.

“Contrata+Brasil [which] is the Brazilian government’s business opportunities platform that connects, in a simple and fast way, public buyers from the Union, states and municipalities and suppliers throughout the country, initially individual microentrepreneurs (MEIs), to expand local business opportunities and generate more jobs and income” … “expands opportunities for small entrepreneurs in public procurement” … “reaches more than 30 adhesions from city halls and other public bodies in the country”.

The platform program implements in its own way “banners” such as public procurement that the solidarity economy movement has been raising with its comrades who, today in government, are involved in the development of public policy. The way it does so, however, fails to take into account even basic concepts such as the increase in labor productivity resulting from cooperation between workers and the economies of scale that have occurred throughout history.

However, the allocation of the State's purchasing power to the urban poor who are qualified to provide services to meet the demand of the “almost 500 mayors [who] have already expressed their intention to join the platform” will occur in a very different way from what was expected with the approval of the Solidarity Economy Law.

The approximately six million MEIs who work independently in urban areas could benefit from the platform program and will tend to operate individually and non-associatively, and will be very unlikely to work in solidarity. Among other things, because, in addition to being under the influence of neoliberal ideology that encourages competition and allegories such as entrepreneurship and meritocracy, they will be sociotechnically induced to use the technoscientific knowledge (associated with Capitalist Technoscience) that they have.

Even though the platform program falls short of their needs, as they benefit from it, these urban poor will be able to increase governability in the long term.

But its implementation runs the risk of slowing down the movement of the urban solidarity economy. By disregarding the lessons learned from the left, we will be wasting the potential for mobilization – “on the streets” but also “through the vote” – of a movement that, like the MST today, could become the vanguard of the society we want.[I]

* Renato Dagnino He is a professor at the Department of Scientific and Technological Policy at Unicamp. Author, among other books, of The defense industry in the Lula government (Popular Expression). [https://amzn.to/4gmxKTr]

Note

[I] I would like to thank, without incriminating anyone, my colleagues Luciana Ferreira da Silva, Marcia Tait and Alzira Medeiros, and my colleagues Gabriel Kraychete, Delso Andrade, Henrique Novaes, Antônio Cangiano, Marco Baleeiro Alves and Arthur Guimarães, for the ideas they contributed to this text.

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