Paul Singer, Introdução à Economia Solidária, São Paulo: Editora Fundação Perseu Abramo, 2002, 128 pp. ISBN: 85-86469-51-3.
Paul Singer’s Introdução à Economia Solidária is one of the key works examining the fundamental principles and historical origins of the solidarity economy, as well as forms of organisation that provide alternatives to the capitalist enterprise. Singer contrasts the competitive, privately owned, and inequality-producing structure of the capitalist economy with a solidarity economy based on the collective or shared ownership of the means of production, cooperation, equality, and democratic decision-making. For him, one of the central organisational forms of the solidarity economy is the production cooperative, in which workers are also members of the enterprise and make decisions democratically.
One of the most important parts of the book from the perspective of Workers’ Control is Singer’s distinction between self-management (autogestão) and hetero-management (heterogestão). In a capitalist enterprise, management is organised through a hierarchical structure composed of different levels of authority, whereas in a self-managed enterprise the highest decision-making body is the general assembly of members. Managers and delegates are elected by the members and are accountable to them. Economic democracy thus appears not only as a question of the form of ownership of the enterprise, but also of who makes decisions and how those decisions are made.
At the same time, Singer does not present self-management as a model that functions automatically or without difficulties. Self-management requires workers to remain informed about the general problems of the enterprise, participate in discussions, and assume responsibility for collective decisions. If members withdraw from decision-making processes, information and effective decision-making power may become concentrated in a small group of managers, and the cooperative may gradually move back towards practices of hetero-management without fully realising it. For Singer, one of the important achievements of self-management is therefore not merely economic efficiency, but the development of democratic capacities and human development through participation.
The book also places the solidarity economy within a long historical framework. Singer traces its origins back to Robert Owen and the first cooperative movements of the nineteenth century; he interprets production cooperatives that emerged in connection with trade-union struggles and strikes as attempts by workers not simply to improve wages and working conditions, but to abolish the wage-labour relationship and replace it with self-management. He then examines different forms of the solidarity economy, from consumer, credit, purchasing and sales cooperatives to production cooperatives and the Mondragón experience.
Singer links the revival of the solidarity economy at the end of the twentieth century to unemployment, business failures, and neoliberal transformation. Among the features that distinguish this “new cooperativism” from some earlier cooperative forms are the emphasis placed on democracy and equality, self-management, and the rejection of wage labour. In Brazil, examples of this revival include the transformation of firms in crisis into cooperatives by their workers, the cooperatives of the MST, Catende, university-based cooperative incubators, and various networks supporting the solidarity economy.
From this perspective, Introdução à Economia Solidária is an important source for thinking about the solidarity economy not merely as cooperativism or as a tool for combating poverty, but as a democratic and self-managed form of economic organisation opposed to the hierarchical organisation of the capitalist enterprise. In Singer’s approach, the development of the solidarity economy depends not only on individual successful cooperatives, but also on the networks they build with one another, support institutions, public policies, and the wider spread of the principles of solidarity, equality, and democracy within everyday economic relations.