1.-TRULY INTERCOOPERATION AND ACTIVATION OF MUTUALISM

"Inter-cooperation has been understood as a solidarity relationship between cooperative enterprises or as an institutionalized network of social economy enterprises to meet their needs.

The immediate challenge we have is to put cooperative businesses that we are already set up to really interact. There are currently about 3,000 cooperatives in the Basque Country, as well as other companies, associations, etc. social economy. But normally everyone does war on their own. A large network has been created to respond to the needs of citizens, but most of them work in market keys, because they don't interoperate. In the Basque Country, very little interoperates in an institutionalized way. And what's institutionalized in this case is not about rigidity, but about the relationships that we create to perpetuate ourselves.

Although we do not create new projects, if those of us who are working on a compact network, surely our ability to do and reach society would increase enormously. The goal is to work more on the relationships between us, so that these relationships are institutionalized so that they have a way to endure, and to develop initiatives to create new projects among all. And what is it that we get together for? To seek formulas for solidarity between us, for example, collective funding. But also to create networks to support projects based on the sovereignty of work and self-training in the Basque Country.

We often fail in inter-cooperation structures. We believe that the creation of relationships and intercooperation will come by itself, because we work in another key… and no, we have to work hard for it, and we have to plan and work strategically.

Understanding long-term inter-cooperation means working mutualism. Today, in the market, we relate mutualism with insurance companies... Our approach is to create mutual tools to develop in the long term the well-being we want to generate from this networking. At one time this was associated with finances and the long-term management of money, but in the current context, and in the face of the evident crisis of care that the crises teach us, mutualism is a way to understand care in a community and collective way. If we want to organize care, we'll have to build it into tools for the future. In addition to making a foresight of what we need to live well, we will also have to organise the needs and tools of care that we will have: care cooperatives, community surveillance mechanisms in our companies and provide them with legal personality.

The first challenge, therefore, is to promote inter-cooperation strategically, to broaden inter-cooperation relations, to create structures and to bring that inter-cooperation from the point of view of well-being to mutualism structures, where we will manage money and care collectively and in the long term, with predictions, and not responding as we can to the needs we have at the moment, but knowing what we need to live well in the future. We have to foresee them and start building them today."

2.-COOPERATIVES FOR ALL

"In a situation where the crisis worsens, capitalism leaves more and more territories and more lives to one side. Capitalism needs territories and people from an exploitative extractivist point of view to increase its profits: it is interested in a territory while it can take advantage of it, it is interested in a person who does work and benefits it or gives it family support to be able to work.

In this cycle of crisis that goes from 2009 to the present, it is becoming apparent that more and more territories and people remain outside the circle of capitalism’s interests: capitalism does not need them. Classically, capitalism has needed large masses of unemployed people for its reproduction, because that means that people can explode at work. Today, along with the development of technology and increased productivity, it is observed that there are increasingly bigger bags that capitalism does not need. Capitalism rejects them. These bags will become ever bigger and more noticeable in the future.

The same is true of territories: with the metropolis, above all, the city has become a priority space for capitalism to increase its relations and profits. Many rural areas are increasingly alienated from the intentions of capitalism: it doesn't need them, because it doesn't give them benefits, and they're being evicted from economic relations, so they're being emptied, because the capitalist market doesn't generate jobs in those areas, and people are going to the places where there's work. At the same time, more and more of the territories of the Basque Country are releasing those areas that the State should reactivate, with less investment, fewer schools, fewer doctors...

Territories and lives abandoned by capitalism can truly be the strategic areas for the creation of another economy. We would have to make an effort in those places where they're really hard to live and work, to integrate our ways of understanding the economy. People who want to live and work in it need an alternative and we can offer that alternative, for an entire territory and for a large proportion of its inhabitants, but they are difficult areas. We have to make alliance with people who want to work and live there, we don't have to go from the outside who make transformative social economy in other places. We have to make a strategic alliance with the people in each place to ask them that we have tools and tools to make available to them, so that they and they do projects to live and work in it.

The same is true of the lives that are being excluded. Capitalism needs migrant women to perform household care tasks, but when COVID-19 care tasks have been redirected to households for short-term reasons, what has happened to these women? They have been completely marginalised, without work or housing. Even outside the welfare system of capitalism, in many cases. More and more people are going to happen.

This crisis leads to a process of deindustrialization in the Basque Country in which some will find a space in precarious jobs, but others will become "unnecessary". And to that we have to give an answer with tools of transformative social economy. These people have to have the opportunity to create their life projects through independent work and the tools that the transformative social economy can provide. That is a great challenge, very complicated, but we must continue to do so.

This requires being present in the territories that are left out of the maps, and requires being in contact and making available tools with people who are being pushed to exclusion. Everyone must have the right to create self-constituted projects. What for? To create jobs and meet the needs of life: consumer cooperative, energy cooperative or partnership to organize leisure and care. There can be a lot of things.

Or, if not, we will have to accept more precarious jobs, or we will go to exclusion. In a society where technology and productivity offer more and more opportunities, there will be more and more people out of it.

On the contrary, if we activate those fields, if we give them tools, if we create a path of self-organization, they become a very powerful field. If the transformative social economy has given the territories and people abandoned by capitalism tools and opportunities to live a habitable life, let's see who takes that apart!

That requires a great effort and a great network of solidarity. It demands that from today they begin to create, to form and to promote this type of process, and that part of the current wealth be devoted to it".

3.-SCALE LEAP

"From the cooperative practices, from the projects that are being generated, the third challenge is to be able to make a leap of scale at the economic and social level. Of the tools we create to respond to our needs, where do we want to go? Is it enough for us to create self-organizing tools for ourselves and our environment? Or do we want to create tools for the whole of society? You may think that what we want for us is desirable for the whole of society. How is this organized? How do we move from daily practice to territorial or local strategy?

That is where we need a strategy of sovereignty. We have to know what the needs are for our communities, and for those needs we have to organize economic systems based on sovereignty. It is said in plural, because it has often been understood that political sovereignty, the attainment of the State gives us the opportunity to organize it. I do not leave it aside, we will also need it, but in this globalized world as complex as the present, having a state does not give you sovereignty. If we really want to create societies of emancipated people, we also need processes of economic sovereignty from the bottom up.

We will have to organise sovereign processes in different areas, understanding that in order to decide we need political sovereignty from a democratic point of view, and on the other hand we will have to organise material sovereignty and create a strategy to make that material sovereignty a reality. To do so, we will first have to choose what those sovereignties are, what strategies we want to put in place. For me, one of the strategic sovereignties is food, work, care and socio-sanitary sovereignty, we need technological sovereignty, information sovereignty (working in ARGIA)...

From the transformative social economy we have to make a proposal, so that Euskal Herria is materially sovereign, to see if sovereignties are strategic. For this challenge we need an alliance with other social and popular agents in the Basque Country. But the transformative social economy must be able to make a proposal."

4.-DIGITISATION

"Digitalization is the main field of application of the capitalist and neoliberal economy today. Capitalism has had different phases and the next steps come mainly from digitalisation: profit-making strategies, strategies of oppression of people and communities, citizenship and strategies of economic subordination will come from digitalisation.

But we can't respond to the capitalist storm of digitization by renouncing digitization. We need a sovereign digitalisation strategy. We have to take the digital tools and what digitization will bring in our favor to develop the economic and social model that we want. We cannot look the other way. We have to look directly to the face at digitalisation and above all at the strategy of the big multinationals behind it: Google, Amazon, Microsoft -- a dozen digital companies will organize the economy of the future. That's what we have to look at in the face and come up with an alternative: on the one hand, oppose, we have to be firm from the transformative social economy by saying "No Amazon," and on the other hand, see what is taken from digitization processes and tools, to create our tools, to meet our goals and needs. We can take it out of a purely lucrative sense and use it to meet our social community needs.

If we say "No to digitization," it will take us in every case the storm of digitization. Because this process comes."

5.-HABITABLE LIFE AND FREE TIME FOR ALL

"What do we want to organize another model of economy for? Why all those challenges I've mentioned before? For all lives to be stimulating. Achieving livable lives must be an aspiration that is in our collective hands.

What is habitable life? A big problem is that neoliberalism is also embedded in our bodies. Many times we don't decide what habitable life is, but the social model determines us. Nowadays, habitable life is associated with the occupation of time: occupied with the work and leisure that has become mandatory. A competitive, increasingly individualized leisure that we face challenges... That's life that's vivible? Is it to work to create an income, to provide them with resources for competitive leisure and to build our identity with what we do in free time? In the past, our identity was built with the work we did. That day is getting less and more and more, we build an identity based on the leisure time we do. We therefore need well-paid work so that that identity we want to create is based on perfect leisure. It is one of the most perfect mechanisms of neoliberal society for individualization.

We have to imagine a new model of habitable life. The one who looks at the needs of the collective and is interdependent, who has the care in the center and who gives time to the care... but free time also has to be located in the center. Free time does, but not the perfect leisure, in which I measure everything: how long running, how many movies I've seen -- we need a life in which we spend our free time. If you want free time to run, but also to do nothing, to be with your friends, to relate...

In my opinion, leisure time is to work relationships, the self-organization of those relationships to create projects, to have fun, to enjoy -- that's not in our strategies and I think it should be part of the discourse of the transformative social economy.

Leisure time is going to require less work, and we also have to incorporate the idea of working less. Many times carrying out a project takes a lot of work, and we have to try to make that work enjoyable. But why do we want all these projects to be done? For free time. This is the challenge that gives meaning to all the previous challenges.

What digitization and technological tools must bring is time. Let us not use digital tools to occupy our time more, but to gain time collectively and socially! ".

"We need tools like LIGHT to make stimulating lives."

"We need tools like LIGHT to make these habitable lives, to make known the projects we do and to weave networks. Knowledge will also provide us with information and it is essential to have sovereignty in the information in that way, and that our tools have more and more capacity, so that ARGIA also has time to live stimulating lives... therefore, I ask you all to subscribe to or help ARGIA as possible. ARGIA has a very good thing, [refers to the new model of belonging] that generates resources for people to contribute, but depending on their capacity."