From community wealth‐building to system change

an article by Joe Guinan (Next System Project; The Democracy Collaborative) and Martin O'Neill (University of York, UK) published in IPPR Progressive Review Volume 25 Issue 4 (Spring 2019)

For the first time in a generation, a radical agenda for systemic economic transformation is taking shape on the British left at the level of both ideas and practice. Offering real, on‐the‐ground solutions to communities and regions battered by successive waves of disinvestment, deindustrialisation, displacement, and disempowerment, it is based on a new configuration of institutions and approaches capable of producing more sustainable, lasting, and democratic outcomes.

Rooted in place‐based economics, democratic participation and control, and mobilising the untapped power of the local public sector, this emerging new political economy is also striking for being a transatlantic agenda – one that can find, and is increasingly finding, powerful application in both the UK under a number of ambitious local authorities, and in the US via the emboldened left politics of Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio‐Cortez and the Justice Democrats.

The stakes could hardly be much higher. In the face of what is clearly a growing systemic crisis – encompassing deepening social and environmental calamities and a decaying neoliberal economic model that continues to generate dangerous inequalities of wealth and power – this bold but practical agenda for a renewed 21st century socialism is one of the few bright spots in an otherwise forbiddingly bleak international scene.

With a far‐right backlash against the existing order evident from Italy to India and from the US to Brazil, much will depend on how and whether this fledgling approach can be further developed and advanced, and then taken to full scale and impact over the coming years. As a left alternative to both extractive neoliberalism and xenophobic nationalism, and as an agenda that is capable of being taken up and rapidly implemented, it looks at present to be the only game in town. And the UK is at the very tip of the spear globally in bringing this radical new economics to the threshold of national‐level state power.

Full text (PDF 11pp)

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