Community Wealth Building: From Crisis Response to System Change
July 18, 2025
In this companion piece to their lively, in-depth conversation (below), The Democracy Collaborative’s CWB Global Lead, Neil McInroy, and President, Joe Guinan, discuss the nature of the present crisis and the need for systemic responses.
The nature of the present crisis
There has been a slow, steady buildup over half a century of economic, ecological and social crisis caused by neoliberalism, and by the emergence of the latest manifestation of capitalism, what some are terming techno-feudalism. We have come to understand – even be somewhat comfortable with – aspects of this crisis, even as it unfolds and deepens. But what we are now facing is a new political emergency layered over that multifaceted crisis. An emergency where, as we reach the limits of economic inequality without causing social backlash, we are spilling over into the inevitable political response. And the political response, as it's manifesting in the United States at the moment, is a reappearance of a far-right political formation, a form of fascism, also understood as Trumpism.
For as long as we can remember, crisis has been a constant. In a very real sense, capitalism is crisis. We've lived with persistent poverty, inequality, and racial injustice for around half a century, while the ecological crisis is longstanding. And in the last 20 years a sort of uneasy settlement has been in place. Transfer payments were made, gestures were offered toward these crises, and while discontent and injustice remained, they were contained.. There was a prevailing belief—culturally and politically—that liberal reform could make things better. That belief sustained a semblance of progress.
What we are observing is an acceleration and amplification of an ideological political positioning, which is actively against a progressive political economy and economic democracy.
More specifically, Donald Trump’s presidency is marked by an attack on the administrative state, and a dismantling of the democratic oversight of political decision making. Indeed, Trump is destroying those very things progressives used to believe they could use as vehicles for change. Things that while imperfect nonetheless supported some people and some communities to help stop them falling through the cracks.
As well as dealing with the urgent surface manifestations of this new democratic crisis, we have got to simultaneously not be distracted from strategies that are aimed at getting at the fundamental deep structural drivers. The way that the economy is operating – the privatization of ownership, the concentration of wealth in a very few hands, the regional disparities, the increasing financialization of everyday life. Even when the headline economic indicators—GDP, stock markets—appear to be rising, the lived reality of most people is one of financial pressure. Incomes are increasingly squeezed, with a growing share diverted toward interest payments, fees, the inflated cost of essential assets and into the underlying inflation of assets that become ever more difficult to own in an asset-based economy.
What that means is that we need to contend with those deep structural forces that are driving inequality, concentrating wealth, putting ownership of the economy into the hands of the billionaire plutocrats, and to do so in a way that begins to change those fundamentals. Because without doing that, there's no way to actually produce short-term material benefits within our blocked and deadlocked, essentially unreformable political system.
Importantly, the progressive side of the political spectrum had an opportunity to respond to this crisis, to try and lay out a populist economic response. We could call that the Bernie Sanders moment, and the revolt within the left of the Democratic Party. But because those movements were shut down by the Democrat establishment and its funders, the baton was passed to the Right. And the Right now has an opportunity to have a reactionary break with the status quo. What we are seeing flowing from that – the slashing of federal employees, the assault on the administrative state – is the elements of that attempted reactionary break. It is a complete unleashing of the forces of corporate economic plutocracy: looting, pillaging, destroying and smashing up elements of the status quo.
This is a real challenge because it is very problematic to take an adversarial position that in any way depends upon arguing for retention of the status quo. In fact, this is an unfortunate feature of some of the ongoing political protests. The “Hands Off” framing, while understandable, is really about leaving things be. People are unlikely to tolerate that because over half of Americans can’t access the bare minimum for a rewarding life. Unsurprisingly then that these material conditions are now spilling over into a politics of reactionary backlash, setting us on a very dangerous course.
We now need to step up and not just rely on the semblance of “macro democracy”.
We need to dig a lot deeper. We need to have democracy that runs through our streets, our people, our families, our neighborhoods, our workplaces. We no longer can rely on those macro democratic processes, because they are failing us and they have been captured by the very forces that actually created the crisis in the first place.
Community Wealth Building has operated quite stealthily in the orderly, social democratic modus operandi that is half dealing, half failing to deal with the crisis. Perhaps at times we downplayed the radical economic system change element because that was the easier pathway to get buy-in with centrist and mainstream social democratic politicians who partly assisted the amplification of our model and the changes it triggers. Now we have to pivot because we cannot just rely on politicians who may pick up the mantle of CWB.
Often, unfortunately, Community Wealth Building has been seen as a luxury that people want to add to the existing model looking to address its shortcomings, like a little clean up around the edges but without speaking to the fundamentals.
That was never the lens through which CWB should be seen. One of the perils of not positioning Community Wealth Building as ambitious and forthright enough is that – if it continues to occupy that space – is that it will very quickly fall down people's lists of priorities. Not least given the emergencies many are facing in terms of resources: the fiscal crunch at city, community, and neighborhood level.
We have always been – and we should always be – motivated by movement generosity and extending a hand to our progressive allies. But there are some swimming in the same pools that need to be called out. There are some false dawns in the progressive movement, people and organizations who don’t have the same commitment to economic system change as we and our close allies do. They might be overly lodged in the idea that the old social democracy will win through in the end. And we need to call those out because their solutions are not going to work and are increasingly standing in the way. They give hope to those still believing that a few tweaks to the system will fix these recurring crises. They serve as an escape to those who find the talk of a new economic order somewhat scary. But it is complete folly to repeat the mistakes of the past believing there is something left in the mainstream social democratic approach that is ready to change the world.
How does the context change the approach?
Community Wealth Building, or CWB, in this context has lost some of its pathways and we are going to have to pivot. We will need to be much more activist in our stance, standing alongside campaigning groups, particularly those on the knife’s edge. Our principles must stay the same, while our work and application of CWB needs to dig deeper. We need to have models, strategies and activities which start to play into this macro range of crises. We can't boil the ocean, so we have to be tactical.
We need to start gathering forces. We need to start gathering activity that begins to turn the dial on system change. In that strategy, Community Wealth Building offers a roadmap in which we can actually start to expose the drivers of our economic system’s crises but also start to do something about them. Because in a world of woe, it's not enough to just explain the pain, we need to step confidently, armed with something, which actually starts to turn the dial and positively improve things. And CWB does just that because it asks the question: “What can we do from our place as workers, citizens, community, that starts to actually turn the dial and play into economic system change?”
Community Wealth Building grasps the economic system change moment and brings together existing practice, wherewithal, and understanding of the crisis. It works with the activism, policies and strategy that are already there, but makes them go deeper.
In this way, CWB is not just a model and a practice, but also a movement for bigger, broader base change. It is practical, imbued with activism, but keeps an eye to the longer-term systemic horizon, scanning the historical moment and conjuncture we are in.
In some senses this is a two-sided coin. On the one hand, there is a new set of negative developments that are impacting some of the institutions, policies, approaches and resources that are available with which to make change. The good work that was being done – even if not on a scale sufficient to move the needle on the crisis – is now under assault, seeing the funding it relied upon to run those programs evaporate. There is a deepening sense of emergency settling upon some of the allies – individuals and institutions – that we now need to recruit into the CWB movement who were already sympathetic or actively engaged.
But the other side of the coin may be that a lot of the old is being unceremoniously and mercilessly swept away, clearing the field of battle of distractions and impediments. For many people the U.S. administrative state has not been a net positive in their lives for a long time. We lament the loss of all the people caught up in the buzzsaw of DOGE, but it may open up a space into which we could step forward with something much more democratic and intentional in meeting real needs and responding to deeper aspects of the crisis.
Because of the ongoing crisis, there is also a more receptive audience for the types of solutions we have in our pocket. There are people out there feeling like the administrative state has abandoned them and that only the community can help itself. The crisis is unleashing a new spirit of activism, of collectivism, of coming together to build something better. And there are progressive neighborhoods and cities looking across CWB’s Five Pillars, looking at our tried and tested models, looking for appropriate alternatives and solutions to their local problems. The crisis is challenging us at The Democracy Collaborative to go back to our roots and argue that no one is coming to save us. We are under attack, collectively, as a community, so how do we marshal our resources in a way to meet the moment?
Additionally, there are many more people who previously didn't have their backs against the wall – the middle classes, homeowners, people who never used to face climate events or the climate crisis – providing the opportunity to create new alliances. We need to get better at articulating how Community Wealth Building can offer solutions to people right here, right now, tapping into this new sense of solidarity with your neighbor, with your co-worker, with other people feeling the pain.
Talking about opportunities in a context of so much pain is a challenge. But we do have to push ourselves to respond to the moment. Community Wealth Building has a dual potential of responding to the emergency, but also to rebuild steadily and surely over time, laying the foundations of something new that can actually respond to the crisis and take us out of it: A new political-economic place to stand.
Rewiring the economy
The existing patterns and flows of wealth are fundamental to understanding the inequalities in our system. At The Democracy Collaborative we like to say that we're creating a new hydraulic system, a new pattern of how wealth flows and, in so doing, a new pattern of who has control, a say and a stake over it. What we are seeking in that “replumbing” of our economic system is to actually make sure that there are no deserts, that there is no drought, that the wealth does not flow immediately out of our localities into the wide ocean of the global economy where it is spirited away to corporate headquarters and investors and tax havens.
Instead, we want wealth to pool, to collect, to form rivulets and streams and collecting basins and new reservoirs and rivers of community ownership and control, where the water reaches the roots of everyone in the community and sustains democratic and community life.
Through economic democracy and Community Wealth Building we aim to create flows that nourish all communities, all neighborhoods, all places, and the planet as well.
One of the principal features of the current economy is that the ownership of assets is the source of wealth through a capital gains economy, in which land and financial assets are being deliberately pumped up, inflated, to benefit the elite owners of financial assets at the expense of everyone else. You can see this happening in the data. The accumulated financial assets of the super-wealthy are the economic squeeze upon, and growing debt burden of, the rest. They are, quite literally, two sides of the same coin.
What Community Wealth Building sets us on, is a course towards an ownership revolution, a great transition of ownership from the hands of the few to those of the many. This is done through a bottom-up process of broad dispersal of economic ownership, whether through an enterprise or through public ownership at the municipal or regional level. This then begins to build up a different pattern of ownership, with a different set of economic flows associated with it. Community Wealth Building has a deep abiding purpose and mission to end extractivism, abolish concentrations of wealth, throw off the yoke of plutocracies and "economic royalism,” and make sure that the wealth that is produced by all of us is enjoyed by all.
In the previous five years there was a lot of economic intervention, federal activity, the big programs of Bidenomics and so on. But it all proved insufficient in getting at those fundamental drivers of economic concentration, of ownership, and of financial extraction. We can now more easily make the case that, in order to save our democratic politics, we actually have to build an economic foundation in which people can have their basic material needs met by a system that doesn’t pitch us into a climate crisis and right-wing political backlash. This new kind of social settlement, this new economy and politics, is not –p cannot – be a better version of social democratic or liberal redistribution. Instead it must come through the channels of pre-distribution of an economy that in and of itself is producing better outcomes and allowing people to live decent lives.
And what about the challenges?
We actually are in a constitutional moment where we're going to have to refound the basis of economics, of democracy, and of community. And in that sense, the battle lines are becoming ever more clearly drawn. But unlike the dominant strains of our popular culture, which is fatalistic and remains more capable of imaging apocalypse than transformation, we want to focus on the optimism of the human spirit. We want to counteract fatalism, because fatalism is the killer, the hole below the water line, the spanner in the works. What is worse: fatalism plays into the hands of the plutocrats and billionaires, obsessing over bunkers for the climate apocalypse or actually leaving planet earth itself because they think these crises are unresolvable. Fatalism is our biggest challenge.
Against that vision we need to counterpose an actual solution for the people and the planet. A solution that can build community, build democracy, and allow us to escape the death spiral we are presently caught up in. In his seminal book, Capitalism Realism, Mark Fisher quotes the adage “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than an end to capitalism”.
This paucity of imagination, this thinness of what can be done, is where Community Wealth Building plays in. It provides a map towards economic democracy, tapping into the imagination of people, illustrating what is possible.
It has that ability to tap into the moment we are in in a very practical way, overcoming fatalism and that sense that there is nothing we can do about it.
Imagine an economy in which, when we wake up each day, we can know that in and of itself the economy will produce better outcomes. Greater equality. More democracy. Healthier people and communities. A cleaner environment. It’s hard to imagine – but not impossible. And more and more people are doing it.
And so what we absolutely have to do at this stage is generalise the response and make sure that more and more people are becoming aware of our tried and tested models that have decades of experience around them, and knit this together to offer a vision and a pathway out of both the immediate and the long-term crises.
We know what needs to be done. Now it's a matter of what Gar Alperovitz, the co-founder of The Democracy Collaborative, a longstanding political economic thinker who helped give birth to Community Wealth Building, calls “Just work”; the application of the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair. We need to just work on generalising our solutions and responses to the crisis, as a response to the generalisation of the crisis itself.