Fundamentals of the Solidarity Economy
aka SEIZE Curriculum
To build a more just and sustainable world, we need to transform our economy. But how? This eight week curriculum introduces the global solidarity economy movement and helps participants understand their place in it.
The solidarity economy organizing certificate covers examples and practices of the solidarity economy movement through hands-on popular education methods, experimentation and participatory discussion. Participants will leave with a roadmap for their own participation in a global movement, an understanding of what skills and relationships they will develop, and a Certificate in Solidarity Economy Organizing.
Curriculum Sessions
Capitalism & Ecocide
What do we mean when we say “capitalism”? How is our economic system connected to the overlapping crises we see in the world today? And what, if anything, can we do about it?
The course begins with an overview: Setting expectations, and going over the fundamental definitions we will be using in the course. Marcus 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.
Following this introduction, Bengi will take us through the fundamentals: What does capitalism mean and what are the relationships between land-capital-labor that enable it? What are the feminist and environmentalist approaches to organizing against capitalism? We will go through specific examples to see a history of anticapitalist struggle, how they have emerged in opposition to the climate crisis, identify some of the main experiments, and explore their strengths and shortcomings.
Relevant learning material:
- Capitalism for Ex-Dummies is a short critical pamphlet from an anarchist perspective.
- Participatory Economics, or Parecon, is a thoroughly thought-out model of a completely democratic, non-market-based mechanism for managing local, regional and global economies. Its developers, Albert and Hahnel, are anarchists who are highly critical of both authoritarian communism and capitalism.
- how capital centered economies have manifested and how they can be characterized as separate from the economy as a whole.
- The intersection between the crisis of capitalism and the climate crisis
- The feminist critique of capitalism
- Overview of the social solidarity economy
