How to Build a Solidarity Economy: The Logic of Non-Reformist Reforms

by David Cobb and Emily Kawano

As co-coordinators of the US Solidarity Economy Network (USSEN), we routinely face the joys and challenges of working with a wide range of social change agents and organizations to advance an explicitly post-capitalist framework.

We’ve been at this for a while. USSEN was formed in 2007 at the first US Social Forum in Atlanta when approximately 15,000 folks gathered under the banner “Another World is Possible and Another US is Necessary.” The goals, then as now, were to organize around a common vision—one that centers racial, economic, and ecological justice; strengthens ties among existing organizations; and builds a broader and better-connected social justice movement. 

But it is one thing to say that you are building a solidarity economy within a dominant capitalist economy and quite another to actually do it. A key strategy that we have found helpful in enacting our vision is the concept of “non-reformist reforms.”