Latin America

A report on the widespread use of formal and informal financial cooperatives by the people of Haiti and Grenada.

A look back on 20 years of the recovered factories movement in Argentina.

Michael Lebowitz shares his perspective on the social economic models in Venezuela and Yugoslavia. Lebowitz highlights the importance of self-actualization through protagonism and how the most successful of these models focused on solidarity over self-interest.

Camila Piñeiro discusses Cuba's new cooperative legislation.

How the workers of Creando Conciencia formed as a worker's cooperative for recycling workers in Benavidez, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

A community in Colombia is ditching traditional capitalist models in order to build a collective future.

In this chapter Razeto uses the analysis of solidarity economy developed to this point to make sense of the family as an economic unit and form of collective organization, and understand the roles of women as its main protagonists. The disintegration of the traditional family under industrial capitalism, with the rise of wage labor outside the home, the erosion of domestic and community economic activity, the creation of the nuclear family, and the concomitant changes in gender roles and the division of labor are shown to have aggravated inequality and damaged core relations of human solidarity.

This chapter offers a framework for analyzing the “ecological problem” that should be useful to those seeking to make sense of the economic aspect of the current planetary crisis. Razeto summarizes the crisis, considers the importance and insufficiency of existing approaches at the level of the State and Civil Society, and the difficulty of controlling nature and then offers a “theory of the ecological question” that focuses on the economy and its “mode of action and organization.”

In this chapter Razeto examines a question that has been central for the vast majority of people in the world: the question of development. Like many before him, Razeto questions the meaning of development and the objectives sought, opposing an alternative “desirable development” to the dominant model centered on industrialization, capital accumulation, and structural inequality.

Having previously identified the participation of workers in decision-making as the key to the emergence of solidarity in labor and the recuperation of work’s “rich meaning and content,” Razeto deepens and expands his analysis of participation and self-management. A “bottom-up” analysis of management, power, and authority – understood as a gift the subordinated make to those in power – enables a powerful critique of centralization, bureaucracy, delegation, and co-optation.