Who Plans Our Political Economy? A Solidarity Economy Vision for Democratic Political Economy Planning.

The Democratic Party's current left-wing resurgence shows that significant popular support exists for an expanded vision of fundamental rights for all people: rights to public health care and higher education; affordable housing; living-wage jobs; and a Green New Deal that transitions human society to ecological sustainability while also reducing inequality. But what are the best institutional means to provide this expanded vision of fundamental rights? This paper argues that we must stop expecting or hoping that highly centralized state and corporate institutions, which reserve rights to ownership and control for the few, will produce any results other than those that benefit the few. I argue that in order to provide an expanded vision of fundamental rights we must create a democratic political economy comprised of institutions that are themselves democratic and controlled by the people they are meant to serve. Guided by Karl Polanyi's insight that the fictitious commodification of labor, land, and money has made human society an accessory of the economic system, I propose a vision for creating, starting at the city level, democratic systems for controlling land, labor, and money. The vision--inspired by global movements including the Zapatistas in Mexico, the Movement of Landless Workers in Brazil, the Kurds in Rojava in Northern Syria, and the municipalist movement in Spain--calls for democracy in the workplace through worker cooperatives, local democratic ownership and control of land through land banks, community land trusts, and a land value sales tax, and democratic banking through public banks at the city level. By demonstrating the viability of democratic political economy institutions at the local level, organizers can amass resources to build toward broader systemic transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]