The Solidarity Economy As a Reconfiguration of Social Movements in a Context of Dismantling

The aim of the present work is to discuss the constitution of a solidarity economy agenda in conjunction with the Brazilian social movements in the last decades, seeking to perceive its constitution as a political subject and its relationship with the Brazilian democratic process and the social movements after the 1980s.

The literature temporally locates the (re)emergence of the solidarity economy in Brazil - understood as the creation and expansion of associative and self-managerial ways of organizing economic activities – starting from the re-democratization in the early 1980s.

However, the hypothesis of this work is that only in the 1990s - as a response to the advance of neoliberal policies and the consequent configurations of social movements in this scenario – did the solidarity economy acquire meaning and presence in the public sphere and become a political subject. The experiences of the solidarity economy and its political agenda could be considered more as the result of the dynamics of the 1990s and its context, characterized by the advance of neoliberalism and the ebb and flow of democratic experiences of the previous decade, than the opposite.

The central argument of this work is that this process takes place precisely because of the more general reconfiguration of social movements throughout the 1990s, which stemmed from profound transformations in Brazilian society. These transformations led a group of social movements and several of their activists to find in the solidarity economy a new agenda that allowed them to (re)position themselves in a field of conflict in profound mutation.

Considering that, we aim to discuss the reconfiguration of the mobilization processes originally organized around the grammar of the solidarity economy, focusing on the semantic sense of democracy in both cases.