ABSTRACT
This chapter examines solidarity economy as an ecology of mind: as diverse epistemologies/ontologies reflecting (and themselves constitutive of) local peculiarities of place. In doing so, it frames capitalism as, fundamentally, an epistemological and ontological crisis: ongoing depletion of the collective human capacity to understand the world in different ways and to express those understandings through distinctive ways of being in the world. Solidarity economy is framed as deliberate collective acts of epistemic resistance and renewal: the defence and deliberate creation of economically autonomous space. The focus of this chapter is on the epistemic mechanisms through which people self-organise to create livelihoods that are autopoietic, in that they are generative of the cultural, social and natural capitals on which they themselves depend for their own reproduction, based on diverse forms of commons ecologies.
