New York City: Struggles over the narrative of the Solidarity Economy

The solidarity economy in North America has received growing attention at multiple scales in the past ten years. As worker cooperatives in New York City enjoy newfound municipal support, narrative struggles emerge between actors within the solidarity economy space. The solidarity economy may be theorized as capitalism's feminized 'other': malleable, unfixed, local, and difficult to quantify. This feminization extends to both its workforce, a majority of whom are women, and the labor it produces, primarily domestic work. It is for these reasons that solidarity economy work is often overlooked as a political economy capable of structural transformation, and the discomfort with its breadth has lead movement leaders to uphold and advocate for more 'formal' models like cooperatives and deploy 'poverty alleviation' and entrepreneurship narratives to stabilize the fluid field. I argue that this project blanches the radical edges of a movement, minimizing not only those whose labor accounts for the majority of solidarity economy work, but ignoring the transformative potential of sites where such work happens. Based on a series of qualitative interviews with solidarity economy practitioners, this paper argues that the dominant narrative of solidarity economy work in New York City ignores where most of this work occurs and by whom, erasing and undermining those efforts. Counter-narratives emerge in those 'forgotten' spaces and thus transform them into sites of radical, anti-capitalist organizing. In so doing, this paper poses a question for geographers about how movements may continue to challenge our assumptions about space.