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The May 13 Group is an emerging solidarity economy. A solidarity economy requires at least two things: 1) an economy and 2) solidarity.

An economy involves the movement of multiple types of capital. In a solidarity economy, this movement must be across identity, role, and class status. Our identities are shaped by our socialization and enculturation into groups that we and our ancestors have formed around shared interests relative to shared experiences of both subordination and superordination. Roles played in an economy as well as an ecosystem include those of consumer, producer, and worker. We all play multiple roles. Class status is determined by the extent to which we own and control both the means and the ends of production. We may gain or be denied access to such ownership and control through the land(s) of our ancestry, birth, training, residence, and work; our family and community of origin; our interpersonal partnership(s); and our institutional affiliation(s).

Solidarity is collective, decentralized, and nonhierarchical. A solidarity economy puts these principles into practice through its stewardship of resources and governance, which are intentionally saturated with the perspectives of people harmed by the current economy as opposed to the people profiting from it.

Ways to join

The May 13 Group

Everyone is welcome to help redirect capital. The May 13 Group offers three interrelated ways* for individuals and institutions from different overlapping, intersecting, and sometimes internally conflicting personal and professional identities and roles to engage toward a shared political commitment to restitution: Grow, Plant, Compost. They are described below.

*This framework was originally developed collaboratively by Hindolo Pokawa (Sierra Leone Foundation for New Democracy) and Vidhya Shanker through their shared work on the ground between 2011 and 2016. We encourage its wide use with explicit recognition of our labor and contribution toward our solidarity movement work.

Grow: Toward Critical Mass

Growing is breathing new life into bodies that change, structurally. It can mean getting bigger. Or it can mean getting more complex, in the way that learning fosters connections among the synapses in our brains. It can also just mean maturing. Through The May 13 Group, workers from displaced and dispossessed groups who produce knowledge for the people that they come from and are accountable to—credentialed or not, paid or unpaid, as consultants or staff, across firms, foundations, governments, organizations, higher education, and publishers—can grow their livelihood and lines of income to ensure their families’ and communities’ survival without orienting themselves around capital.

Become part of a growing solidarity economy whose constituents will collaborate; trade goods and services with one another; share access to a commons of resources; and engage in mutual aid, cooperative economics, collective bargaining, and direct action organizing by making a contribution between $75 and $2,999. The May 13 Group prioritizes Grow contributions, which will comprise half our overall budget and most of our members, to ensure that our solidarity economy remains led by and useful for members of the working class and the struggle against capitalism.

Plant:
Toward Critical Connections

Planting involves loving. It’s about protecting seeds that have survived—preserved and passed down—for generations deep in the nourishing soil of mother earth or layers of our bodies. Members of the petit-bourgeois professional and managerial class within the nonprofit/ nongovernmental industrial complex, who often grapple with conflicting loyalties and interests—including those arising from their own precarity—can co-create healing time, space, and community through The May 13 Group.

Fund healing and community-building activities that support members in (re)connecting with their ancestral, community, and experiential knowledge to counter hegemonic narratives by making a contribution between $3,000 and $6,999. The May 13 Group will bracket Plant contributions at a quarter of our overall budget. Accepting such contributions allows us to expose and undermine the theoretical justification and cultural reinforcement of capitalist relations through these activities. Limiting them helps us resist the pressure to admire the problem without changing material relations, focusing on style at the expense of substance.

Compost: Toward Critical Consciousness

In an ecosystem, composting means that things die and decay. Organisms break down their matter, transforming it into energy. This generates heat and nourishes new life. Members of the owning/ ruling class seeking to deconstruct and transform the exploitative and extractive ideas about risk, knowledge, and investment that allowed them to accumulate wealth can cede their capital to seed The May 13 Group’s work toward epistemic healing and wholeness.

Change the current knowledge economy’s paradigm, narrative, or mental model with The May 13 Group by making a contribution of $7,000 or more and repudiating control or ownership of its process or results. The May 13 Group will cap Compost contributions at 25% of our overall budget, to ensure that we do not disproportionately depend on, and orient ourselves toward, a few contributors who can give large amounts or the capital class more generally.

Note that some toxins will not compost in our lifetimes, if ever. We refuse contributions of any size from individuals and institutions who profit—financially, politically, or socially—from the ongoing manufacture of weapons, extraction or pollution of nature, exploitation of people and other animals, or oppression and abuse, including genocide, of minoritized and peripheralized groups.

Which way is right for me or my
business/ organization/ government?

The May 13 Group cultivates the practice of radical relationality. We explicitly place ourselves in relation to others and name how we are in relationship—the nature of the relation—as well as how we are related to common patterns of exploitation and extraction. Such practice can help us determine which of the above ways of engaging in the solidarity economy would repair, reverse, redress, and regenerate from harm. Radical relationality allows positionality, status, power, advantage, and privilege to be defined in fluid, relational terms rather than fixed or static terms of identity or difference that somehow lies in us as individuals. Instead, capital is mobilized through relationships that economic, political, and social structures mediate.

I come in right away with elements of my identity that we can talk about…. It’s about who you’re related to, and do you know who you’re related to.

— Indigenous evaluation practitioner, scholar, and organizer

We start by reflecting on the many types of capital that we may be in a position to share and those that we have been separated from or struggle to access. Consider the sources of each types of capital and how we are related to them. The following prompts may be helpful:

  • Land(s) of your ancestry, birth, training, residence, and work: What lands are you connected to and disconnected from? What have they gone through? What condition are they in now? Who cared for them or worked on or lived in them for generations? Who was ripped apart from them or from their intimacy and mutuality with them? How are you related to all of these peoples? Think about colonization, forced migration, segregation, redlining, gentrification, pollution, deforestation, mining, and climate shocks.

  • Place(s) you work/ed: To what extent have you needed to work for wages to pay your bills? To what extent have you been able to find and keep work that pays your bills? Reflect on the history, location, pay structure, and decision-making roles of any places that you may have worked. What institutions did they replace/ displace? How many times more does the highest-paid position make compared to the lowest-paid? How much control have you had over the work that you do? The work that others do? Who all has been affected by decisions you have been responsible for through your work?

  • Person(s) you partner/ed with (if applicable): Think about your access to healthcare, retirement, and legal and economic protections, especially in relation to the institution of marriage. Do you have a partnership in which one person can focus on paid work while the other focuses on unpaid (devalued) work? Do you calculate how your individual or combined earnings may affect your access to public benefits, subsidies, or assistance? Can one or both of you earn higher wages or enjoy leisure time because you rely on lower-paid labor for certain types of work?

  • People you were born to/ raised by: Account for all that was available to you growing up. What kinds of work did it come from? Who performed that work? Who profited from it? To what extent do you, or did your family, depend on family and friends during an emergency or for financial survival? To what extent could you or did you depend on the State? To what extent did your family and/or the State invest in filling your childhood with resources such that your adult “success” appears to be “independent?” To what extent did others depend on your family, or do they depend on you now? What financial transfers of wealth have you received from your family for big expenses that allow you to avoid destitution or to generate income or accumulate wealth? These may include educational credentials, a vehicle, or housing. What such transfers have you made or prepared to make?

Once you’ve had a chance to reflect, select the way that feels right for you to join The May 13 Group in undoing harm and then get in touch below. Again, we refuse contributions of any size from individuals and institutions who continue to profit in any way from the ongoing manufacture of weapons, extraction or pollution of nature, exploitation of people and other animals, or oppression and abuse of minoritized and peripheralized groups, including genocide.

NOTE: We will soon share ways for people to join The May 13 Group by coordinating or engaging in its activities within self-organized pods or by stewarding the solidarity economy as part of a governing body.

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