The Democratic Economy

Here at SCDT we are inspired by the work of people like Ted Howard, Marianna Mazzucato, the Mondragon Corporation , Mathew Brown in Preston and earlier attempts to build “model” communities by the Chartist movement and the ideas of Robert Owen that led to the Cooperative movement.

Naomi Klein in her foreword to “The making of a Democratic Economy” by Ted Howard and Marjorie Kelly makes the case for one of our primary beliefs . That it is not enough to oppose or protest against the current system we need to propose alternative models of economic and social development. This also involves the adoption of a “can do” attitude when faced with what seems an enormous task, the reshaping of the world economic system and the prevailing orthodoxy.

The current environmental crisis provides the key to much of that understanding that economic systems like natural ecosystems need to be sustainable both today and in the long term. For too long the idea of relentless growth and “trickledown economics “ has been propped up by the socialisation of losses often on an international scale, where resources are extracted from far away places used to create “wealth” and then the destructive by products of that wealth creation are imposed upon the poorer parts of our own societies or even exported to distant countries.

The impact of global warming, resource wars and the resultant problems of conflict and the huge movements of peoples from countries blighted by war or environmental degradation to the comparative safety of developed countries will only increase, as we continue to extract more wealth and resources from the planet than it can sustain.

The Democratic economy harks back to earlier models of society and earlier civilisations in particular the Native American Indians who understood implicitly the concept of sustainability and that land and resources needed to be managed in the interests of the whole community if the community was to survive into the future.

Robert Owen writing in 1816 about unemployment remarked how “national education and employment could alone create a permanent rational, intelligent and wealthy population, and that this could be attained only by a scientific arrangement of the people, united in properly constructed villages of unity and co-operation. They, on the contrary, desired to convert me to their views of instructing the people without finding them national employment, and of a thorough system of individual competition. The political economists advocated individualism and they succeeded in converting the government and the public”.

This rampant individualism at the expense of the vast majority of the population has led to a position where our whole political and economic system is designed around extracting the maximum profit for the minimum of individuals. This extraction economy is unsustainable and eventually will create chaos and disorder that will threaten our very existence on this planet.

But the ideas behind the democratic economy set out to prove that there is another road and that many people and organisations despite the prevailing winds have set out upon this journey already and the success of the many different manifestations of these social enterprises , model communities, and new ideas is a movement gathering pace. This battle is another phase in our understanding of what it is to be human. The battle for universal suffrage throughout the last century democratised politics and now the battle is on to create that same democratic mandate in the economy. Hidden beneath the surface the sands are shifting and change is gonna come.

Eddy Morton