Conclusion

Abstract

Most people in the Global South have had only non-capitalist experiences of solidarity and reciprocity. The message is that they are among the originators of community economies, exceling in humanizing the economy even when risky to do so. It is around the issue of politics that contextualizing theory is crucial to explaining community economies. Having the lived experience of community economies helps to make credible the claims for why we should acknowledge such other economic systems. This legacy of economic cooperation is preserved by the people of the Global South, who are often wrongly viewed as being on the receiving end of aid and incapable of their own emancipation. These cases show the lived experience and knowledge making cooperators are doing the world over. Global South people are remaking the economy long before any capitalist-versus-communist binaries took hold–using their own indigenous systems. There is a need for scholarship concerned about inequities and remaking economies to draw on empirical work first, and then to ensure the theories are reflective on the community (not imposing Western ideas for Global Majority people). Rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs) and other cooperatives show that informality can advance people’s livelihoods, and they are effective forms of business. The antidote to a marketplace that pressures people to conform to individualized capitalist projects is the collective, the ROSCA, and other cooperative systems. The cases on ROSCAs in this book are far from perfect, but they are witness to the worldliness of cooperatives of people in the Global South who are focused, in a conscious and politicized manner, on equity, social purpose, and preservation.