On May 25, 2012, Steve Dubb writes on AlterNet on Salon.com about how community wealth building is gaining traction among businesses, cooperative and non-profits across the country. This article originally appeared on AlterNet. It is part of a five-part series, New Economic Visions, in which creative thinkers come together to explore the exciting ideas and projects that could sweep away outmoded economic models.
“As resistance has grown to America’s widening gulf between the “1 percent” and the rest of the population, something new has exploded in America’s communities; “community wealth building” is an explicit strategy to democratize the ownership of wealth from the ground up. With traditional regulatory and tax-and-spend approahes faltering at every level, the notion that we should create new democratic economic institutions to build wealth, community by community, is quietly gaining traction. We now have the potential for larger and longer-term transformation throughout the nation.
“The central idea is simple: people join together through some form of public, community or employee-ownerd business to meet local needs and thereby regain a measure of local economic democracy and control. Partly self-helf, partly community mobilization, and partly sketches for future system-wide expansion, community wealth-building efforts can be found in virtually every region of the country. The range of efforts is vast. Community wealth-building institutions include community development corporations, community development financial institutions, social enterprises, community land trusts, employee-ownerd enterprises, and cooperatives. All pool capital in ways that create new jobs and anchor jobs in communities.
“The efforts also define a new approach to challenging corporate power––a strategy that changes who owns, controls and benefits from the underlying economic wealth of the system. It involves not merely replacing private capital, but displacing it through developing community ownership of business. In other words, profits should flow to workers, consumers or the community––rather than outside investors. And these businesses need to succeed! Increasingly, too, ecological concerns are structured into the very core of many models”
Binary economics and democratic capitalism, or what could be termed economic personalism, embraces the concepts of “community wealth building.” Democratic capitalism is founded on the principal that economic power has to be universally distributed amongst individual citizens and never allowed to concentrate. It is a value system based on the importance and dignity of every human person.
The “pursuit of happiness” phrase in the Declaration of Independence was interchangeable in those times with the word “property.” The original phrasing was “the right to life, liberty and property.” “The pursuit of happiness” phrase was a substitute for the “property” phrase. In the forerunner of the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights, the 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights declared that securing “Life, Liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing Property” is the highest purpose for which any just government is formed. Democratizing economic power through broadening private, individual ownership of future productive capital assets embodied in productive land, structures, machines, superautomation, robotics, digital computerized operations, etc. will return us to the pristine innocence and economic power diffusion we had in a pre-industrial society where labor was the principal factor in the creation of wealth.
In simple terms, binary economics recognizes that there are two factors of production: people (labor workers who contribute manual, intellectual, creative and entrepreneurial work) and capital (land; structures; infrastructure; tools; machines; computer processing; certain intangibles that have the characteristics of property, such as patents and trade or firm names; and the like owned by capital workers). Fundamentally, economic value is created through human and non-human contributions.
http://www.salon.com/2012/05/25/wealth_reimagined_salpart/?source=newsletter
