U N DERC U RRENT S CO MMUN I TY E CO N O M Y

Pluralist Commonwealth
Gar Alperovitz explains why building a more democratic and
community-sustaining economy is the big imperative of our time

he knowledge that neither

growth-dependent corporate
capitalism nor the state
socialist model will ever
produce more sustainable social,
economic and ecological outcomes
has led many thinkers and activists to
embrace a small is beautiful agenda
that draws its underlying inspiration
from the insights of Leopold Kohr and
E.F. Schumacher. It is an agenda that
I share.
However, Schumacher did recognise
that large-scale organisation is here
to stay, making it all the more
necessary to think about it and to
theorise about it.
Here are two quite distinct issues.
The first has to do with technologies
that may simply require larger
scale. Not everything can be done
in small communities, and anyone
who has travelled by rail or air must
acknowledge the need for someone
to build large-scale locomotives and
aircraft. The truth is we have very
little good information as to which
industries and technologies simply
require large-scale, but some certainly
do. The question then becomes what
role they might play in an alternative
economic system, and how they might
be democratically organised.
The other major issue posed by
the problem of scale has to do with
geographic reach. The United States,
for example, is a very large country. It
now numbers more than 315 million
people, and is indeed continental in
scale almost 3,000 miles from east to
west. All of Germany could be tucked
into the state of Montana. Countries
like India and China will also have to
grapple with the question of scale.
The appropriate principle in the case
of technology and of geography is that
of subsidiarity which is to say, begin
at the bottom and only increase scale

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Resurgence & Ecologist

Cooperatives challenge profit-driven corporate enterprise

Illustration by Ian Whadcock www.eastwing.co.uk

when there is a powerful reason, technological or other, to

move to a larger scale.
Two other important criteria must also be considered:
how are we to nurture and sustain a culture of democracy
and community from the ground up, and how are we to
undercut the pressure to grow and to externalise costs,
including those related to climate change?
One answer for large-scale industry, as Schumacher (who
was an economic adviser to the UK National Coal Board)
understood, was to maintain large firms as public utilities
and run them on a not-for-profit, non-growth-driven basis.
That other forms might be possible was also acknowledged.
Schumacher really only began that exploration; it is our
responsibility to continue the effort.
A central issue concerns culture and democratic practice
and this also requires rebuilding both from the bottom up.
Here small is not only beautiful but also absolutely essential.
But so too is stability: in many American cities, corporate
development has resulted in radical destabilisation, and
sometimes in cities of 900,000 being reduced to 400,000
when corporations move to more profitable areas. Genuine
democracy built from the bottom up is not possible in such
circumstances and often the answer requires dealing not

September/October 2013

only with small industry but also with larger-scale planning.

My own emphasis begins with the fundamental conviction
that we must aim at every level to achieve a communitysustaining economy. I suggest four critical guidelines:
democratisation of wealth, community as a central theme,
decentralisation and democratic planning.

Democratisation of Wealth. Cooperatives, worker-owned

firms, land trusts, municipal enterprise, publicly owned
enterprise, small private businesses: all these challenge
dominant ideologies that hold that large-scale (often global),
profit-driven corporate enterprise offers the only possible way
forward. They open up practical approaches to widespread
democratisation. Such wealth-building forms can also
contribute directly to building progressive political power
through displacement of corporate institutions or by offering
local officials alternative strategies. Critically, such locally
anchored forms also help stabilise local community economies.
Although little reported by the press, there has been an
explosion of such efforts in recent years.
Latin America has been the hub of much
of this exploration, although Europe is
no stranger to the institutions involved,
many of which can be traced back to
the struggles of the 19th-century labour
movement. More surprising to some will
be the magnitude of developments in the
United States. 130 million Americans
are members of cooperatives. There are more than 10,000
worker-owned firms of one kind or another, with 3 million
more individuals involved than are members of trade unions
in the private sector. There are some 5,000 neighbourhood
corporations, several thousand social enterprises, numerous
land trusts and a variety of other enterprises exploring
various forms of full or partial democratisation.

points in modern history. Going forward, the critical

question being asked by many nations is almost certainly
how to regionalise: what powers to maintain at the centre,
what powers to delegate to new regional structures, and
what powers to devolve even further. Some of the same
issues are being explored in a European context, for
example in Scotland and Catalonia.

Democratic Planning. This is an important principle,

especially with regard to large firms and economic growth on
the one hand, and ecological sustainability and community
stability on the other. In these cases, planning can alter the
relationship between firms and the community, as well as the
market. Democratic planning promotes a design in which
community is a central goal, but with worker-ownership as a
subsidiary feature. Since there are much broader community
benefits including rebuilding the local tax base, and a
better local economic environment for independent small
businesses, co-ops and worker-owned firms support for the
larger community-building effort is both
socially and economically important.
Recent government bailouts and
takeovers usually resulted in an eventual
return to private hands once the public
had bailed the company out and turned
its fortunes around. In the future such
interventions might lead to the firms
involved being structured as a joint publicworker-community effort with a new mandate to address
longer-term green infrastructure needs such as public transport,
thereby also helping reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. In this
way we might also begin to come to terms with community
economic stability, an absolutely essential requirement not only
of sustaining a democratic and cooperative culture, but also of
dealing with climate change. It is impossible to do serious local
sustainability planning that reduces a communitys carbon
footprint if such planning is disrupted and destabilised by
economic turmoil.
Stability is also important in achieving high-density housing
and in transportation planning. Unplanned corporate
decision-making eliminates jobs in one community and
leaves behind abandoned houses, half-empty schools,
roads, hospitals and public buildings, only to require the
rebuilding of the same in the new location to which the jobs
have been moved.
Viewed in the broadest terms, the requirements of a
community-sustaining model suggest a mix of differentscale institutions that democratise the ownership of capital
in different ways: cooperative, neighbourhood, municipal,
regional, national. Hence a plurality of forms of common
ownership. Or a Pluralist Commonwealth.

The critical question

being asked by many
nations is how to
regionalise

Community. In economic terms, building community means

introducing and emphasising more integrated communitysustaining ownership models that build on such forms to
achieve a more coherent local systemic design, vision and
theory. A practical example involves Cleveland, Ohio,
where a linked group of worker-owned companies has been
developed, supported in part by the purchasing power of large
hospitals and universities, which in turn receive substantial
public support. The central institution is a community-wide,
neighbourhood-encompassing, non-profit corporation. The
basic principle is that the effort should benefit the broader
community, not simply workers in one or another co-op.
The initiative is partly modelled on the 83,000-person
Mondragn cooperative network in the Basque region of
Spain, itself an example of a democratic institution.

Decentralisation. A continental-scale nation (such as the

United States) is too large to deal with complex, large-scale
economic arrangements and institutions. What remains is
the intermediate-scale unit we call the region a unit of
organisation much discussed in serious theoretical work
by radicals, conservatives and social democrats at various

Issue 280

Gar Alperovitz is Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political

Economy and co-founder of The Democracy Collaborative at
the University of Maryland. He is the author of What Then Must
We Do? Straight Talk about the Next American Revolution.
This is the second article in the series on holistic economics,
commissioned by Stephen Lewis.

Resurgence & Ecologist

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