Building Beyond Extraction
Communities, power, and imagination
There are two consistent themes I come back to often. The first is the need to switch away from our extractive economic model. The second is the importance of place and community. The former is fuelling the climate crisis and sparking a new wave of fascism and imperialism globally. The latter is a potential path out of this mess.
Of course, moving away from a dominant economic paradigm is easier said than done. Our current system is bound up with every aspect of how our society and politics functions. Any clean break would require a complete rewiring of, well, basically everything.
However, that rewiring needs to be done.
To do that, we need to imagine new futures and new ways for our economy, society, and politics to work.
This is where place and community can come in.
Neil McInroy, a Global Lead at The Democracy Collaborative, has a great piece on his newsletter about how Community Wealth Building can be a “pathway of evolutionary reconstruction.”
McInroy argues that it is a strategy that begins to:
build the institutions, relationships and capacities that can reduce our dependence on extractive growth while improving people’s lives in the present. It does not ask us to wait for a future economic settlement. It starts where we are and begins to reshape the economy from within.
This is then done through five interconnected pillars:
Inclusive and Democratic Enterprises
Progressive Procurement
Fair Work
Locally Rooted Finance
Just use of Land and Property
I absolutely agree with the importance of all of those, and the broader argument that we need to recentre communities and place in how we think about economic change.
However, as Ruha Benjamin has argued:
when we work to cultivate a collective vision for transforming the world, we must be careful not to fetishize imagination as somehow operating magically and independently from other powerful ingredients, like strategizing and organizing, to make our vision a reality.
For me, this is an essential thing to internalize. When we get to the sharp end of pushing a non-extractive, community-focused agenda forward, we cannot forget about power. We have to strategize and organize to be able to overcome entrenched power structures that protect the status quo.
The importance of this is illustrated by past examples of community focused initiatives, such as the Ontario NDP’s Community Economic Development (CED) agenda during the Bob Rae administration in the early 1990s. It was a program not dissimilar from that which McInroy sets out.
Unfortunately, as Steven High argues in his book on that government, it had relatively limited impact, and did nothing to address the wider structural challenges facing Ontario at a time of deindustrialization and globalization. In part this was because the process was co-opted by existing local economic elites. Robin Murray, the influential economist who was brought in to lead the CED Secretariat, wrote at the time how:
[Communities] too, like all social organisations, have their power structures, based on gender, age, class and knowledge. The concept of community is in short ambiguous and problematic. Shifting power to communities does not in itself solve the problem of economic democracy but rather poses it at a different level. Nor does it solve the problem of inclusiveness. Communities by their very nature exclude as well as include, and within themselves they privilege some and marginalise others. This is not to say that the project to shift economic power to communities is a mistaken one, nor that the concept of community is not useful. Rather it is to recognise the difficulties, the tensions and the tasks in the making of communities. This is the key point. Communities are not a given. They are made and remade.
That is crucial. We need to remake our communities at the same time of shifting more attention to them, to ensure that we do not perpetuate the existing power structures and divisions that have got us into our current mess. There needs to be a laser focus on power, who has it, who does not, and how we shift the balance more equitably. Most importantly, we need to be damn quick about it, because the extraction machine is only getting more ravenous.