Economics for the Many by John McDonnell

Author:John McDonnell
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC (Publisher Services)

A New Wave of Democratisation: The United States

Mondragon, Emilia Romagna and Québec are only the most prominent longstanding attempts around the world at building a more democratic economy. Recent decades have also seen a more general uptick of interest in economic democracy, and of experimentation with its institutions and approaches – especially with the onset of neoliberal crisis and austerity.

The collapse of the Argentine economy back in 2001 saw unemployment soar to 25 per cent, prompting the emergence of the sin patrón (‘without bosses’) movement, numbering over 10,000 workers in around 200 recovered workplaces – ‘an old idea’, as Naomi Klein remarked, ‘reclaimed and retrofitted for a brutal new time’.6 More recently, new waves of factory occupations have followed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, especially in Europe (in Spain, Italy, France and Greece) but also in Egypt and the United States.

The shuttering of Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago and its reopening (after two occupations) under cooperative worker ownership as New Era Windows garnered international attention, as did the experiment in economic and ecological self-management at the Vio.Me factory in Thessaloniki, Greece. Such crisis-driven, worker-led transitions of previously capitalist enterprises into collective ventures offer hope for a new future rising out of the ashes. The growing sophistication of older cooperative networks in Spain, Italy and Canada, described above, demonstrates the ongoing viability of such models over time and at scale.

In the United States, deepening structural problems and the inability of traditional politics and policies to address fundamental challenges are now fuelling an extraordinary amount of experimentation along similar lines, much of it unreported by the corporate media. As federal and state transfers dry up, social pain is intensifying in communities that have long suffered high levels of unemployment and poverty. Precisely because large public expenditures for jobs and housing have become increasingly impossible politically, more and more people are turning to economic alternatives in which new wealth is built collectively and from the bottom up.

The Democracy Collaborative has been tracking and promoting the growth of these innovations across the United States for almost two decades, under the rubric of ‘community wealth building’. They include cooperatives and municipal enterprises, non-profit community-owned corporations and land trusts that keep housing affordable over the long term, as well as community financial institutions responsible for US$60 billion a year in local investment. Employee ownership now encompasses over 10 million US workers, around 3 million more than are members of unions in the private sector. Fully a third of Americans (over 100 million people) belong to various urban, agricultural and financial cooperatives, including credit unions that have around 111 million members and manage US$1.3 trillion in assets – more than Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs.

Worker co-ops are emerging in every sector of the economy. In New York City, a coalition of grassroots community organisers and cooperative advocates – including the New York City Network of Worker Cooperatives, an affiliate of the United States Federation of Worker Cooperatives, and the Working World (which originated

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