We’ve both had the honour of serving as members of the UK Labour Party’s Community Wealth Building Unit, and we are grateful to our colleagues at the unit for stimulating and comradely discussions. Thanks in particular to Mary Robertson and Maryam Eslamdoust of the office of the Leader of the Opposition for creating such a constructive venue for thinking through the potential of Community Wealth Building.
Carys Roberts kindly invited us to publish a preliminary version of parts of Chapter 2 in IPPR Progressive Review, and offered helpful comments on earlier versions. Martin is grateful to audiences at the University of Cape Town and the University of York, who gave helpful feedback to talks on ‘philosophical foundations for Community Wealth Building’.
The far-sighted funders of The Democracy Collaborative have made many things possible, and Joe is particularly grateful to the Kendeda Fund and NoVo Foundation for their generous longstanding commitments. For financial support, Martin is grateful to the Independent Social Research Foundation (ISRF), a wonderfully agile and imaginative research funder. A Mid-Career Fellowship during the 2017–18 academic year gave valuable space for thinking about issues of power, voice, and economic democracy. From the ISRF, Louise Braddock, Rachael Kiddey, and Stuart Wilson have been wonderfully wise and supportive. Thanks also to the ISRF and the University of York for jointly funding a stimulating conference on ‘Equality and Democracy in Local and City Government’ in York in January 2019. Parts of this book were written in the delightful Art Nouveau surroundings of the Writers’ House Residence in Tblisi. Martin is grateful to that fascinating institution for its century-old mission of providing a great venue to get some writing done.
We want to give special thanks to two comrades in arms with whom we’ve worked particularly closely. As Research Director at The Democracy Collaborative, Thomas Hanna has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the democratic economy, and is a brother in the struggle for a postcapitalist world. As Director of European Programs at The Democracy Collaborative, Sarah McKinley has taken the UK work in hand adeptly in her inimitable style, all the while insisting that we have fun – and that the only revolution worth being part of is one in which there is dancing. We’re glad to be counted among ‘McKinley’s Fusiliers’!
Last but not least, we’d like to thank our families. Martin thanks Mary Leng and Tommy, Joe, Olwen, and Rory O’Neill for being the best gang of which one could possibly be a member, and for their patience, love, and sense of fun. Joe sends love to his sister, Lisa North, whose work on the frontlines of our failing system gives her an appreciation of the need for community, and to Roux Robichaux, Peter Harvey, Barbara Harvey, Spencer Rhodes, James Rhodes, Marcia North, and Shane North. He thinks every day of his late father, Martin Guinan, and his unconquerable mind in the service of socialism and peace. And he thanks Emily Robichaux for her support along the way.
Finally, this book is dedicated with much love to our mothers, Pat Harvey and Liz O’Neill, two tough-minded, practical, egalitarian women, from whom we’ve learned more than we can say.
Introduction: Economic Change, Starting at the Local Level
A new model of economic development is emerging in our cities and communities. Offering real, on-the-ground solutions to localities and regions battered by successive waves of disinvestment, deindustrialisation, displacement, and disempowerment, it is based on a new configuration of economic institutions and approaches capable of producing more sustainable, lasting, and equitable economic outcomes. Rooted in place-based economics, with democratic participation and control, and mobilising the largely untapped power of the local public sector, this emerging approach is also striking for being a transatlantic agenda, one that can find – and is increasingly finding – powerful application in both the United States and United Kingdom. This approach has been termed ‘Community Wealth Building’.
Community Wealth Building is a local economic development strategy focused on building collaborative, inclusive, sustainable, and democratically controlled local economies. Instead of traditional economic development through locational tax incentives, outsourcing, and public-private partnerships, which wastes billions to subsidise the extraction of profit, often by footloose multinational corporations with no loyalty to local communities, Community Wealth Building supports democratic collective ownership of the local economy through a range of institutions and policies. These include worker cooperatives, community land trusts, community development financial institutions, so-called ‘anchor institution’ procurement strategies, municipal and local public enterprises, and public and community banking.
Based upon the centrality of alternative models of ownership, Community Wealth Building offers the local building blocks by which we can set about a transformation of our economy. Instead of the ongoing concentration of wealth in the hands of a narrow elite, Community Wealth Building pursues a broad dispersal of the ownership of assets. Instead of icily indifferent global markets, it develops the rooted participatory democratic local economy. Instead of the extractive multinational corporation, it is recirculatory, mobilising large place-based economic institutions – such as local government, hospitals, and educational institutions – in support of socially oriented firms that are often democratically owned and controlled by their workers or the community. Instead of outsourcing and assetstripping privatisation, it turns to plural forms of democratised collective enterprise. Instead of austerity and private credit creation by rentier finance, Community Wealth Building looks to the huge potential power of community and state banks and public money creation. And on and on. Viewed in this way, Community Wealth Building is economic system change, but starting at the local level.
In this short book, we explore the history and rapidly emerging potential of this radical approach to local economic development. Chapter 1 explains the central features of Community Wealth Building as a strategy for economic development, and charts the recent history of this approach. Chapter 2 looks at the justification for this kind of strategy, grounding a case for Community Wealth Building in values of social justice, equality, and democracy, while also responding to some important lines of criticism. Chapter 3 concludes by considering Community Wealth Building in the context of what we call the ‘institutional turn’ in radical approaches to political economy, examining its potential as part of a broader overall strategy for forging a new political-economic system capable of responding to the large-order threats of the day, from ecological breakdown to the perilous rise of the neo-populist far right.
As is inevitably the case with such a brief work, we offer what follows as a starting point for these important discussions