By RENATO DAGNINO*
Left-wing candidates for municipal elections, because they are left-wing, cannot fail to talk about Solidarity Economy
At this moment, when political democracy is threatened throughout the world and, here, blackmailed because the left has not been able to implement social democracy, we are going to have municipal elections...
Because the Solidarity Economy is an extraordinarily significant space to resume, albeit in a very different scenario, the march interrupted six decades ago in the construction of our social democracy, and because the municipality is a particularly suitable territory for this, I consider the following observations to be opportune. .
Left-wing candidates for municipal elections, because they are left-wing, cannot fail to talk about Solidarity Economy. It is their characteristics that will convince voters to support them.
By committing to strengthening production and consumption networks and Solidarity Economy banks, they will receive approval from different types of voters sympathetic to left-wing ideas.
Potential voters who are more aware of the crisis, more than global, civilizing, and its economic, social and environmental challenges, know that its characteristic of solidarity (instead of the competition of the capitalist economy of companies) makes it today everywhere the world recognized as the only possibility to face these challenges.
They also know that self-management (as opposed to heteromanagement and authoritarian control inherent to the capitalist economy), through which workers decide on their future without the imposition of generating profit for the owner of the means of production, is that will realize our cognitive potential and ensure everyone’s well-being.
Those most concerned about the fact that of the 170 million Brazilians of working age, less than 40 have a formal contract will support these candidates because they know that the almost 80 million who have never had or will never have a job will only have a dignified life if they can generate their own job and income opportunities. And these depend on the characteristic of collective ownership of the means of production (and not private or state) on which the Solidarity Economy is based.
There are others who, seeing each year the property class, due to its political-institutional power, appropriate a large portion of what is collected as taxes, also realize the importance of the Solidarity Economy.
They know that, among other benefits, 6% of the total wealth we produce (GDP) is appropriated as public debt service, 10% as tax evasion, 5% as tax waiver. And that increasing the little that is destined to satisfy the needs of the working class through the expansion of the Solidarity Economy is the most effective way to reduce that power.
They also know that the correlation of political forces is not yet favorable for the left to be able, with current legislation, to change this situation, alter the unfair tax structure that penalizes the poorest and, in this way, allocate public resources to Solidarity economy.
But they see that there is a possible path to be taken progressively with this objective through the redirection of the resources that the State spends on purchasing the goods and services (health, education, energy, communication, transport, etc.) that we receive in exchange for the tax we pay . This resource – public purchasing –, which is equivalent to almost 18% of GDP, is currently allocated, with the exception of a tiny part (which goes to purchasing food from family farming, the PAA and PNAE), to companies.
Left-wing candidates must point out to their potential voters the infinity of things that city halls can immediately, if elected, buy from the Solidarity Economy. And that, gradually, the mobilization of the knowledge generation potential of citizens and people involved in their municipalities with different levels of education will generate solidarity technoscience that will make the Solidarity Economy competitive in relation to the capitalist economy and its companies.
What we have been saying for some time – “our next Minha Casa Minha Vida must have aluminum windows manufactured in the Solidarity Economy” – gives an idea of what is possible with the coupling of the solidarity reindustrialization that we propose to the corporate one, from Nova Indústria Brasil.
By proposing this course of action, our candidates will also be satisfying the interests of a fourth type of voters. Those who know that it is through the organization of the working class to subvert the golden rule of capital, that “no one can produce what they consume and no one can consume what they produce”, that it will move the country forward. Justice, equity, environmental responsibility and the realization of the intellectual capacity that human beings have to be happy depend on this subversion.
These voters know, perhaps more than other types, that the five feedback processes (awareness - mobilization - organization - participation - empowerment) that the Solidarity Economy will trigger within the working class is a condition for living well.
And, also, that in the short term, throughout these processes and even before the transition between the “inherited State” and the “necessary State” begins, it is the workers organized in the Solidarity Economy who will guarantee the governability of the governments of left and will exorcise the ghost of fascism.
The dialogue between left-wing public agents and the Solidarity Economy must take into account an aspect that is beginning to be perceived more and more clearly: the need to generate a “cognitive launch platform” that makes it competitive in relation to the capitalist economy. I am referring here to the relevance of adopting the perspective of the socio-technical adequacy of capitalist technoscience (that of the seven deadly sins: programmed deterioration, planned obsolescence, illusory performance, exacerbated consumerism, environmental degradation, systemic illness and psychological suffering) with the aim of conceiving the cognitive package that we have called solidarity technoscience.
To achieve this, it is necessary to employ the potential of knowledge workers in our educational and research institutions who have already realized these seven sins and realized that the separation into “inhumane” and “inaccurate” that capitalism imposes on them is an obstacle. to the redesign of capitalist technoscience; through, including, taking advantage of essential knowledge that has historically been trampled on and excluded from its teaching, research and extension agendas.
These knowledge workers (and I am referring here especially to the trainers who will be the subject of the first phase of the Social and Professional Qualification Program in Popular and Solidarity Economy at the Federal Institutes) will play a central role – as trainers and as mobilizers, respectively – in the two immediate and combined actions to consolidate and expand the Solidarity Economy.
In the first, which has to do more directly with satisfying the most urgent needs of Solidarity Economy networks (and whose attack is morally unpostponable), they will act as trainers for the people involved with them. Here, the complex task of prioritizing between the themes that the Solidarity Economy movement has been addressing and the subjects that the trainers bring in their baggage as militant intellectuals, can be facilitated through a praxis associated with the five feedback processes mentioned above.
In the second action, which has to do with the essential expansion of the Solidarity Economy and which crucially depends on the seduction and convincing, among other actors, of left-wing public agents, they will act as mobilizers.
The broad repertoire of knowledge, language, work experience, institutional transit and social experience that they dominate is essential to make these actors convinced of the superiority of the solidarity economy for implementing the left's political project.
The vector that crosses these two actions, and which therefore must influence the substance of the activity of the trainers-mobilizers, occurs within the scope of an absolutely central movement to be carried out by those left-wing public agents for the consolidation of networks, which is the orientation of the State's purchasing power for the Solidarity Economy.
Returning to what motivated these observations, I reiterate my expectation that they will help our candidates on the left to seduce their voters to leverage our social democracy through the revolutionary path of the Solidarity Economy. And to remember that this construction begins with what they can accomplish through the reorientation of public purchasing in their municipalities.
* Renato Dagnino He is a professor at the Department of Scientific and Technological Policy at Unicamp. Author, among other books, of Solidarity Technoscience, a strategic manual (anti-capital fights).
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