At the heart of our approach is a recognition of the centrality of ownership. Who owns and controls capital is among the most fundamental questions of any political economy. Our deepening problems are not accidental but hardwired into how our economy functions.  

The institutional arrangements at the heart of today’s economy – private ownership, credit creation by commercial banks, global capital markets, giant publicly traded corporations – together form a powerful engine for the extraction of value. These relationships drive the outcomes we are seeing in terms of economic inequality, the racial wealth gap, and growing climate danger.

A political economy is a system, and our system is programmed not to meet basic needs but rather to concentrate virtually all the gains in the hands of a tiny elite. If we are serious about addressing real economic challenges then we need a different set of institutions and arrangements capable of producing better outcomes – a new paradigm, a democratic economy in support of a democratic polity.

Fortunately, the elements of this new direction are already emerging, across the country and around the world, in a series of powerful models: publicly-owned banks, municipally-owned utilities, worker-owned firms, community-owned energy, and many other practical efforts that are rooted in the core value of community.

The democratic economy is not a pipe dream but exists already all around us – a spontaneous response to social pain by people in some of our poorest communities. Traditional policies and approaches have demonstrably failed, and as a consequence more and more people are beginning to turn to genuine economic alternatives in which new wealth is built collectively and from the bottom up.

Recent years have witnessed an explosion of interest in and practical experimentation with a variety of alternative institutions and models that are capable of fundamentally altering patterns of ownership – and of producing greatly improved economic, environmental, and social outcomes.

These alternative economic institutions include worker ownership, cooperatives, municipal enterprise, community land trusts, public banks, benefit corporations, social wealth funds, and more. They represent ways in which capital can be held in common by workers, communities, and localities. They illuminate how practical new approaches can generate innovative solutions to deep underlying problems.

They embody alternative design principles, relying not on regulatory fixes or “after the fact” redistribution but on deep structural changes in the economy and the nature of ownership and control over productive wealth that go right to the heart of our current difficulties. New forms are constantly emerging, as well as ideas as to how innovative combinations might produce still more powerful results.

Taken as a whole, these institutions and approaches form the mosaic of a new democratic economy in the making. They suggest the contours of a next system beyond the extractive economy, and some pathways for getting there.