Curriculum

The course begins with an overview: Setting expectations, and going over the fundamental definitions we will be using in the course. We will follow this with a brief introduction of SEIZE, its position within the social-solidarity economy movement in Montreal/Quebec/Canada, and the way the SEIZE network operates.

Cooperation is about people coming together to meet a common need. Coops make up a significant piece of the social and solidarity economy and have their own legislation. In this module, we will explore how the cooperative movement has evolved over the centuries to manifest into formal business models that center people, community, and the environment. We’ll also look at how and why coops form in Quebec and Canada.

Capitalism may be the dominant economic system of the past few centuries, but far from being a singular force of social coercion, it instead acts as a carrier for other toxic institutional forces, including colonialism, patriarchy, and imperialism, to name but a few. Movements have risen to challenge and assert new paradigms, while developing their own language to help us better understand systemic oppressions (and each other).

The challenge for solidarity organizers is to understand the historical context of oppression and the personal context of trauma, and to see the way these interlink, such that we can recognize and uplift the humanity of those we (seek to) work with, without straying into essentialism. We will discuss what aligned intersectional organizing, otherwise known as solidarity, looks like.

The labor movement has been the single greatest challenge to industrial capitalism, and has as its most basic unit the union. Unions have won incredible victories against entrenched capitalist powers that have carved out a middle class and empowered countless millions of estranged workers. Unfortunately, with the rise of global neoliberalism, unions have been on the long-term decline, with only around 30% of Canadian workers now being represented through a union.

However, unions are once more on the rise, and the burgeoning labor movement has started to take root, exploding in the States, and following in Canada, with the first Starbucks union bearing fruit in Victoria, BC, a little over a year ago. We will discuss the fundamentals of unionism, the various forms of unions, and what it takes to begin a union organizing drive, drawing from such models as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and their approach to building worker power through solidarity unionism.

While capitalist accumulation threatens coastlines, forests, ecosystems and the survival of humanity as we know it, is the actually-existing vision of a solidarity economy up to the task? We’ll look at some unexamined assumptions about co-existing with capitalism and the colonial state, and think about how the solidarity economy can actively contest the foundations of the capitalist state to uproot and revolutionize it into a sustainable system. 

We will go over our approach at SEIZE, drawing from real world examples, and building a theoretical model of how to secure (and entrench) successes and victories for the SSE. We will then reflect on building power strategically in different sectors and movement building as a way of carrying out this work.