FOREWORD

In moments of crisis, when the system around us stops working, cracks in our understanding appear—we come unmoored, unable to explain how the world works and indeed what our place in it is. But these gaps don’t stay empty for long. Fear, dividing and turning us against each other, rushes in to fill the cracks—unless we can fill them with hope first.

Hope is what makes it possible to just say more than “no” in times of crisis. Don’t get me wrong, saying “no”—to the rise of oligarchs and authoritarians around the globe, to the cages at the borders, to a rapidly accelerating climate crisis—is a moral imperative. But hope—credible hope, grounded in vision and strategy—is what turns reactive movements into transformative ones. We need to know what we are for as well as what we’re against, illuminating the path forward with a clear and powerful vision of the world we want. That’s what hope is—the light we throw on the future by our ability to dream together.

To be sustained, hope needs a foundation. It’s not enough to imagine that another world is possible; we need to be able to picture it, experience it in miniature, feel and taste it. What Marjorie Kelly and Ted Howard do in the pages that follow is give us the concrete stories and real- world models that we need to truly believe in this new world.

These stories—of cooperatively owned workplaces; of cities committing to economic policies rooted in racial justice; of ethical finance and investing; of communities on the frontlines of crisis building the new—combine to show us that a different economy is not just a theoretical possibility, or a distant utopia, but something already under construction in the real world. To be sure, the road from our current economic system—extractive, brutal, and fundamentally unsustainable—to a system grounded in community, democracy, and justice remains uncertain, and there are no shortcuts. But the stories in these pages help us to understand that we can make this road as we walk it, starting by taking a first step together beyond isolation and despair.

In the stories Kelly and Howard tell, we see vital leadership emerging from those for whom the current system never worked—introducing us, for instance, to a new generation of Oglala Lakota leaders building a remarkable “regenerative community” out of the depths of poverty on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Those most brutalized and excluded need to be in the lead, yet that doesn’t leave everyone else off the hook. Changing everything means that everyone has a role to play, so Kelly and Howard tell the stories not just of activists and grassroots leaders, but of the unlikely accomplices of the democratic economy, where the seeds of a future beyond corporate capitalism are being planted in hospital procurement departments, pension fund offices, and even a few company boardrooms. And it’s not that radicals have snuck in to subvert these economic institutions—it’s that the failing system all around us is making what was once radical seem more like common sense, including for those with the power to move significant resources out of the current system and into the next one.

There’s a saying activists in South America use often, about making a revolution from below as trabajo de hormigas (“the work of the ants”). That’s an apt way to understand the work of the community wealth builders Kelly and Howard explore—working below the surface, coordinated without central control, digging tunnels to what comes next.

Kelly and Howard approach all this with humility—the work of the ants is done by human beings, not superheroes or prophets; the way the authors acknowledge their own failures and missteps along the way gives us space to be OK with our own. Failure is important here because a democratic economy is a work in progress, built on and learning from experiments, some wildly successful, some not. Kelly and Howard tell us about a new economic system emerging from these experiments in the laboratories of democracy, where the hard work of inventing and testing alternatives at the local level lays the groundwork for the new institutions that can emerge at scale when the political opening presents itself. This has happened before—it’s how the New Deal was built in the US, and how Canada’s single-payer system came to be. Something powerful is at work, but we need to be ready to build for the long haul, committed to a lifetime of engagement.

It’s fitting that the title of Kelly and Howard’s book calls to mind the work of the great British historian E. P. Thompson, whose Making of the English Working Class insists that the working class didn’t emerge from nowhere as a complete social and cultural identity, nor was it simply fashioned passively by history. Thompson, on the contrary, insists that the English working class was “present at its own making”—building itself through its own agency, its own acts of resistance, and its own ability to dream of a better world. A democratic economy, too, is present at its own making. It’s not something that just hovers as an abstract possibility on the horizon, nor is it something that’s going to happen automatically—it’s something we need to start building, together, now.

But we need to hurry. Patience and time have run out for so many of our collective struggles. It’s past time to reckon with and repair the damage done by slavery and colonialism, and it’s past time to take bold action to prevent catastrophic climate change. As Kelly and Howard point out, making space to build the world we want in the face of these crises means that slow experimentation isn’t enough—we need to be ready for big steps that give that new world the breathing room it needs to come into being. For instance, in the last financial crisis, our governments conjured hundreds of billions of dollars out of thin air to save the financial sector. Why can’t we use that kind of power to attack the climate crisis at its extractive root, by buying out and winding down the fossil fuel companies—and by prioritizing the most marginalized communities in the transition?

If one thing is certain, it’s that more crises are on their way. We know that the shock doctors of the old system are making plans to take advantage of these crises—laying the foundations for more repression, for more extraction, for more austerity, for more Flints, more Puerto Ricos, more Brazils. We need plans and models, too. The more we build the democratic economy today, the better prepared we are to grab the wheel of history and swerve toward the next system. This book arrives just in time.

— NAOMI KLEIN, Canadian social activist, filmmaker, and author of No Is Not Enough, This Changes Everything, The Shock Doctrine, and No Logo

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