Citizenship and Social Policies Research Group Seminar
Dialogic Democracy: an analysis of solidarity economics initiatives in Brazil

Daniela de Oliveira Miranda (CES Doctoral Student)

March 4th, 2009, 17:00, CES Seminar Room

 
Presentation
Solidarity Economics, also known in Latin America as social economy, characterizes itself by associative labour and income experiences under the focus of another form of making economy. Presently, self-management experiences represent over 21.000 ventures in Brazil.
Nonetheless, these economic forms are not related merely to scarcity/necessity, in the sense that it does not reduce itself to the market, but rather contemplates relations more compromised with human development.
The involvement of social actors in this context constitutes itself as an imperative, since the social acting of subjects in the core of the ventures as well as in the public sphere represents, per se, another logic in the economic and social relations, that establish themselves beyond a simple alternative to unemployment.
Democracy has been the aim of a permanent theoretical debate, mainly in view of the fact that representative democracy does not correspond to the contemporary social complexity, given that party organizations tend to overvalue bureaucratic structures, transforming political action in an issue to be handled by “experts”, causing representation forms, usually, more to dominate than to serve popular classes. Thus, the study constitutes itself in the sense of verifying the existence of dialogic democratic practices in solidarity economics ventures, as well if those practices establish themselves as constitutive conditions of the ventures.
The pivotal issue tends to research how the democratic participation of actors, so much in the internal relation of self-management, as in its forms of political articulation and of public sphere representation, comes about.
The evidences demonstrate that self-management forms of labour seem to close the doors of oppression and open those of emancipation, in the sense of denouncing the absences of the subjects that have not been subjects, rather objects in labour relations.
In this sense, we seek to approach Solidarity Economics in Brazil as a process of acknowledgment of subjects opposite of colonization, establishing connections with the democratic forms inherent to the constitution of ventures, that, per se, represent a new organizational system of labour and income relations and that have resisted the impositions that hang on them.

 
Biographic Note
Daniela Miranda holds a degree in Law, a Masters in Law and is a Doctoral Student in social Sciences at Vale do Rio dos Sinos University – UNISINOS. Professor of the Law Course at Caxias do Sul University – UCS.

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