Joe Guinan - The Case for Community Wealth Building

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.

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 1explains the central features of Community Wealth Building as a strategy for economic development, and charts the recent history of this approach. Chapter 2looks 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 3concludes 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 rather than any kind of claim to definitiveness. This book is certainly not the last word on Community Wealth Building, but we do hope that it will be a helpful stimulus to further debate and discussion on this exciting, radical, and rapidly advancing agenda.

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