Beautiful Solutions: A Toolbox for Liberation, 
Edited by Elandria Williams, Rachel Plattus, Eli Feghali and Nathan Schneider, OR Books, £19.99

IN THESE gloomy times of striking inequality, injustice, eco-disaster and war, it is easy to succumb to poison of defeatism. Beautiful Solutions: A Toolbox for Liberation is a welcome antidote.

This “collection of tools for transforming the economy and how people can co-govern it” centres on case studies from Argentina to Zimbabwe that show how some of the most oppressed people have devised, in the most difficult of circumstances, their own collective remedies to tackle hunger, joblessness, poverty and pollution. It is an ambitious work, with examples covering every area of the economy designed to show “another world is under construction.”

Targeted at both the “experienced activist and the person who doesn’t know where to start”, the book’s editors aim to “support people and communities working to make the places they live better – with big ideas, creative solutions and practical resources.” More specifically, it is to encourage the development of a “solidarity economy” that takes the world “beyond” a capitalist system controlled by a tiny, wealthy elite, and to do so in a way that interlinks with struggles to achieve climate justice and to overcome exploitation, racism and other forms of oppression.

The theoretical underpinnings are a set of eight values that are mostly ones any left progressive can recognise and adhere to, and some whose concepts or language require some explanation like “adaptation” (replenishing rather than depleting resources of people and the natural world), “right relationship” (building healthy, non-exploitative relationships between people and with the planet) and “celebration of life” (protecting basic human cultural activity like dancing, singing, debating); and a set of organising principles to put “solutions into practice effectively, strategically and creatively.”

Despite rather too many new age concepts for my liking, the book’s language is accessible. And so too in format: being modular by design the reader can either “read from front to back” or “hop around.”

Each section starts with an introduction that provides pithy answers to the same set of questions including what is at stake, the possibilities, cost of failure, the opposing forces, promising strategies and tactics (“beautiful trouble”) and who we can learn more from (Cuba’s health system is cited). Then follow a handful case studies (“stories”) and one or two solutions (“a specific strategy or tool that a group might use to solve a problem”). Finally, an organising principle and a question (“big challenges that we are likely to face as we do the work of building solutions”).

So, for example, the last chapter on governance features a story on India’s Self-Employed Womens’ Association, a trade union organising women workers to collectively demand their rights that grew from a few hundred women to two million today. One of the chapter’s solutions includes Baraza, a Swahili word that denotes a form of direct democracy, of ancient roots, utilised by socialist Julius Nyerere in post-colonial Tanzania and most recently deployed in Uganda to secure improvements local infrastructure. Participatory budgeting, launched by Brazil’s Workers’ Party in 1989 in Porto Alegre and since spread to 3,000 cities worldwide, and Free/Libre and Open Source Software, enabling a digital commons, are two other solutions profiled.

This chapter most interested to me when it posed the question: “How do we scale up solidarity economy ideas and solutions?” How indeed, when such a multitude of relatively small-scale alternative economic realities across several continents operate within globalised capitalism? In short, by networking them (something made infinitely easier today with digital technologies), or the more centralised option of federations (for example, as happened with co-operative movement in Britain in the 1840s). I confess this answer to what was the last question in the book left me rather unsatisfied.

Across the 350 pages interesting questions on ownership were asked, illustrated with concrete examples of the different types of collective ownership and democratic control that have been used in various countries in the Global North and South, to meet people’s needs; on this, the chapter on land and housing was perhaps the most stimulating read. Throughout, the emphasis was on keeping it local and in the hands of communities, as they are best placed to make decisions about the service, product or land that they, after all, use and rely on.

In arguing in favour of the commons, the book makes an excellent case for “public pharma,” citing revolutionary Cuba as an exemplar for producing low-cost generic drugs and first-in-class discoveries that create jobs and educational benefits for Cubans while sharing its technology with numerous low to middle-income countries, reducing their dependence on profiteering Big Pharma. It also gives positive examples: remunicipalisation and nationalisation in the energy and utilities sector, and how co-operatives and mutuals in health are not a stand-alone solution but have over time come to rely on public funding (Mali), or have receded as the austerity cuts to public services they were a response to have been reversed (Greece).

Activists from around the world will certainly learn something useful to apply in their own contexts from this book, including the handy appendix for educators and the many online resources it signposts. There are also broader political lessons. We can all draw some hope from it too.