With the advent of globalism and neoliberal policies, Brazil is experiencing one of its biggest crises, resulting in further worsening unemployment levels in the country. The informalisation and precarisation of work is becoming more acute, leading the worker to subject his productive strength to lower wages and to a reduction in various social rights, forcing the federal government to develop public policies to support the quota at the margins of the labour market. Civil initiatives have developed differentiated models to structure popular means of production, making it possible to strengthen associations, self-managed companies, fair trade and community banks, based on the concepts of self-management, cooperation, equity and sustainability. These pillars of the solidarity-based economy base the logic of various forms of organisation of collective alternatives which point to another dynamic of the economy, geared towards fair and sustainable development. The aim of this work is to reflect on solidarity-based economy initiatives in Brazil and public policies for job and rent generation, looking at developments in the Ivaí-PR Valley region. On the basis of interviews and visits to the municipalities of that region, it became clear that, although the solidarity-based economy carries a critical theoretical and political view of the capitalist system with a view to overcoming it, it cannot yet be credited with the current system’s ability to break. There can be no evidence of concrete conditions for an explicit and declared social revolution, because of the constant dependence and links to the current system.