This article analyzes “farmers’ rights” as a strategy of resistance against the perceived inequities of intellectual property rights regimes for plant varieties. As commercial models of intellectual property have made their way into agriculture, farmers’ traditional seed-saving practices have been increasingly delegitimized. In response, farmers have adopted the language of farmers’ rights to demand greater material recognition of their contributions and better measures to protect their autonomy. This campaign has mixed implications. On one hand, farmers’rights are a unique form of right that may help transform conventions of intellectual property in ways that are better suited for registering and materially encouraging alternative forms of innovation, such as those offered by farming communities. On the other hand, farmers’ rights have proved enormously difficult to enact. And by situating farmers’rights alongside easily enacted commercial breeders’rights, the campaign risks further legitimizing the inequities it is responding to.

In debates over post-capitalist politics, growing attention has been paid to the solidarity economy (SE), a framework that draws together diverse practices ranging from co-ops to community gardens. Despite proponents' commitment to inclusion, racial and class divides suffuse the SE movement. Using qualitative fieldwork and an original SE dataset, this article examines the geospatial composition of the SE within the segregated geography of Philadelphia. We find that though the SE as a whole is widely distributed across the city, it is, with the exception of community gardens, largely absent from poor neighborhoods of color. We also identify SE clusters in racially and economically diverse border areas rather than in predominantly affluent White neighborhoods. Such findings complicate claims about the SE's emancipatory potential and underscore the need for its realignment towards people of color and the poor. We conclude with examples of how the SE might more fully address racial injustice. Resumen: En los debates sobre la política post-capitalista se ha prestado cada vez mas atención a la economía solidaria (ES), marco teórico que reúne diversas prácticas que abarcan desde cooperativas hasta huertos comunitarios. A pesar del compromiso de los proponentes con la inclusión, las divisiones raciales y de clase permean el movimiento de la ES. Utilizando trabajo cualitativo de campo y un levantamiento de datos original, este artículo examina la composición geo-espacial de la ES en el contexto de la segregación espacial de Filadelfia. Observamos que aunque la ES como un todo está ampliamente distribuida por toda la ciudad, está ausente en los barrios pobres de color, con la excepción de los huertos comunitarios. También identificamos grupos de ES en zonas fronterizas, racial y económicamente diversas, más que en barrios predominantemente ricos y blancos. Estos hallazgos complican las afirmaciones acerca del potencial emancipatorio de la ES y subrayan la necesidad de su realineación hacia las personas de color y los pobres. Concluimos con ejemplos de cómo la SE podría abordar más plenamente la injusticia racial.

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This article examines how ride‐hailing companies like Uber have disrupted not only the mainstream taxi industry but also progressive efforts to remedy that industry's shortcomings. The article focuses on Alliance Taxi Cooperative (ATC), a failed taxi worker cooperative in Philadelphia. ATC was deeply committed to economic democracy, living wages, and outreach to underserved communities. Its ambitions were nevertheless thwarted by regulatory obstruction and market disruptions caused by Uber. Drawing on relational poverty theory and literature on solidarity economy and platform capitalism, I suggest that ATC's story offers more than a cautionary tale about the pitfalls facing small taxi start‐ups. It also illuminates a great deal about the exploitative conditions and discriminatory geographies of the taxi and ride‐hailing industry, the biases of regulatory agencies, and the complicated ways that platform capitalism is refiguring class dynamics.

Transportation network companies (TNCs) such as Uber and Lyft have drawn scrutiny for the way they have upended urban transportation systems and heightened the precarity of taxi drivers. Less attention has been paid to their implications for democratic workplaces. This article provides a comparative study of Uber and Lyft's impacts on taxi worker cooperatives in three cities: Philadelphia, Denver, and Austin. Drawing on interviews with drivers, regulators, and other transportation stakeholders, we observe three major effects. First, TNCs have opened doors for cooperatives by undercutting taxi oligopolies and lowering regulatory barriers to entry. Second, they have intensified market pressures that make it difficult for start‐up co‐ops to survive. Finally, competition from TNCs has led co‐ops to shift resources away from democratic decision making and toward financial bottom lines. These findings paint a complex picture of workplace democracy's potential and limits as a response to the sharing economy's competitive and neoliberal underbelly.