Emanuele Rubim and Lucas Milanez, Economia Solidária Digital: Caminhos para potencializar políticas e ações baseadas em cooperação e solidariedade, São Paulo: DigiLabour / Rosa Luxemburg Foundation / Ministry of Labour and Employment (SENAES), 2024, 75 pp.
Emanuele Rubim and Lucas Milanez’s Economia Solidária Digital is a comprehensive study that discusses how the solidarity economy can be rethought in the digital age and how collective, democratic, and self-managed digital alternatives to platform capitalism can be developed. Drawing on experiences of the digital solidarity economy in Brazil, the book approaches digital technologies not merely as tools for economic activity, but as infrastructures that can serve the shared needs of communities, be collectively governed, and become part of social transformation. Within this framework, “digital solidarity economy” is conceptualized as both the solidarity economy’s response to the challenges of the digital age and the construction of new digital commons.
The book defines the digital solidarity economy as a perspective on the digital economy grounded in the principles of collective ownership, democratic governance, self-management, cooperation, and social justice. In response to the concentration of platforms, algorithms, and data under the control of large technology companies, it argues that digital technologies should be collectively owned and governed by communities and workers. The digital economy is thus approached not simply as a matter of turning existing platforms into cooperatives, but as a broader field of transformation in which communities can collectively develop their own digital infrastructures, data, and technologies.
The book gives concrete form to this theoretical framework through a rich field of experiences involving platform cooperatives and technology collectives in Brazil. Initiatives such as the São Paulo bicycle courier cooperative Señoritas Courier, the MTST technology hub, Liga Coop, CaipiraTechLab, Castanhadora, and e-COO are examined as examples in which workers collectively develop and govern technologies. The book also considers the Drivers’ Seat cooperative in the United States, the FACTTIC federation of technology cooperatives in Argentina, and digital cooperative experiences in different countries, thereby demonstrating the international dimension of the digital solidarity economy.
At the same time, Rubim and Milanez do not present the digital solidarity economy as a ready-made or complete model. Economic, organizational, technological, and legal challenges are discussed in detail; lack of financing, competition with large technology companies, the construction of a collective organizational culture, access to technical knowledge, and the limitations of cooperative law are identified among the main difficulties faced by these initiatives. The book therefore links the development of the digital solidarity economy not only to individual cooperative initiatives, but to a broader ecosystem supported by education, technological capacity, federation-building, and public policies.
The final section of the book shifts the discussion toward public policies and the construction of alternative digital futures. Digital public infrastructures, free software, support for technology cooperatives, data cooperatives, digital education, and mechanisms of intercooperation are proposed as key policy areas for strengthening the digital solidarity economy. The authors emphasize that the aim is not merely to develop cooperative versions of existing capitalist platforms, but to collectively imagine different digital futures that serve the needs of communities, strengthen technological sovereignty, and enable new social relations.
From this perspective, Economia Solidária Digital is an important reference that brings together debates on platform capitalism, platform cooperativism, digital commons, and social self-management. For debates on workers’ control and self-management, the book is particularly significant because it brings to the fore not only workers’ control over labour processes, but also their collective democratic control over data, algorithms, and digital infrastructures. By understanding digital technologies as a terrain of social struggles, solidarity, and collective organization, the book opens up the digital solidarity economy as an alternative social and technological horizon to platform capitalism.