Our New Polanyi Moment
October 29, 2025
TDC President Joe Guinan spoke at a panel at the Global Social and Solidarity Economy Forum (GSEF) in Bordeaux, France, on the nature of the current political moment in North America and the vital role of practical economic alternatives.
Thank you to GSEF for convening us and bringing me here. I’ll get straight into it.
The Democracy Collaborative is a U.S.-based think do tank working to build community wealth and a democratic economy. We function as a research and development lab, creating models, building networks, and identifying pathways to create a next system beyond capitalism.
We are twenty-five years old this year, which is also the twentieth anniversary of our creation of the term “Community Wealth Building,” and you’ll be hearing from my colleague Matthew Brown, leader of Preston City Council in the North of England, about some of that on Friday.
Community Wealth Building is our expression of a strategy for starting — beginning with what we already have, and with resources and levers that are already available to us — the work of transforming the ownership and flows of wealth in the economy. We seek to build local and regional economies that are democratic by design and capable of producing better social, economic and ecological outcomes through fundamental change and transformation of our political economy. That’s our objective.
“We seek to build local and regional economies that are democratic by design and capable of producing better social, economic and ecological outcomes through fundamental change and transformation of our political economy.”
We’re part of the global movement for economic system change that organizes under a number of different banners – the solidarity economy, the new economy, at TDC we tend to use “the democratic economy” — but the terminology doesn’t matter. The fundamental commitment to a changed economy on the basis of transformed ownership and control is what matters.
We are a global organization these days in terms of networks and footprint, with partners working all around the world, from Britain and Ireland to Poland, South Korea and Australia. We have a global academic research network on Community Wealth Building. Next year will see the enactment into law of the first national Community Wealth Building Act of its kind, in Scotland.
But our primary focus remains on the United States. We have networks now of practitioners in cities and communities across the United States, from Seattle and Denver to Atlanta, St Louis, Richmond, and Chicago. We engage in peer learning and technical assistance and capacity building as well as strategy, policy design, training and movement-building.
Our New Polanyi Moment
In terms of priorities, there can be no greater priority than the task of rising to the challenge and meeting the moment historically.
Ten years ago, we launched our Next System Project, which was based on the observation that a society half democratic and half plutocratic could not endure for long, that one half would eventually have to consume or displace the other.
That’s what we see today in the United States and elsewhere in the world – political democracy is being undermined and overthrown by billionaire plutocracy. We need to reverse that, and suffuse democracy into our economy, building the new political-economic system now necessary for our survival.
We no longer have the luxury of working at the margins to augment capitalism with some nice cooperatives or social enterprises. We are in a systemic struggle for the nature and shape of the future.
The current U.S. Administration poses particular new threats and challenges, but it is a symptom rather than cause of the crisis, which is a systemic crisis of our economy, of society, and of the biosphere itself.
We’re here in the Salle Karl Polanyi, so it seems fitting to acknowledge that we’ve been here before, and that Polanyi warned us about what we’re facing, which is the disembedding of our economy from our society, and our society from nature.
The great Victorian age of globalization followed a similar arc. Few establishment observers saw the end then, either. From celebrating the fruits of capitalist globalization and spread of culture and consumption, that system – based on what Polanyi called the ‘stark utopia’ of the universalization of the market – reached its breaking point:
“Such an institution,” Polanyi admonished in The Great Transformation, “could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness.”
One after another, the ruling institutions of nineteenth-century civilization – the gold standard, the Great Power system, the liberal state – collapsed under pressure. In the end, the horrors of imperialism and deep conflicts that had been brewing – financial crisis, deflation, mass unemployment, beggar-thy-neighbor trade wars – erupted into the charnel house of the twentieth century.
“One after another, the ruling institutions of nineteenth-century civilization – the gold standard, the Great Power system, the liberal state – collapsed under pressure. In the end, the horrors of imperialism and deep conflicts that had been brewing – financial crisis, deflation, mass unemployment, beggar-thy-neighbor trade wars – erupted into the charnel house of the twentieth century.”
Today, we’re once again in a Polanyi moment. The vast disruptive power of markets and globalization unleashed upon people, communities, and regions now requires a massive “re-embedding” of the economy in society and nature if we are to avoid a catastrophic spiral into fascism and environmental collapse.
That’s the task ahead of all of us, the task of political-economic systemic change, the meaning of our moment in history.
At The Democracy Collaborative we’re determined to do our part in meeting the challenge.
Assault on Civil Society
There are external barriers and threats, and then there are internal ones.
Externally, there is no point sugar-coating things. There is a broad attack in the making and in some respects already underway on civil society across the United States.
We are a nonpartisan nonprofit organization working with a charitable purpose, and not a political or campaigning organization. As such, we were a recent signatory to a letter from around 4,000 nonprofits in opposition to the incoming attack on the sector as a whole from the Administration. This has shaped up in Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, a directive which threatens to use the designation of terrorism and political violence to go after a broad range of political speech and opposing viewpoints far beyond its supposed target of “Antifa.”
This is in keeping with the strategy of the Trump Administration across the board, which has previously attacked public sector unions and universities and is also attacking – literally, using an armed paramilitary policy force, ICE – Democratic-run, Black-led American cities.
Let’s be clear, our Black and brown neighbors are the ones bearing the brunt of these attacks.
At the same time, there is also an assault on the federal government that is itself is unprecedented, a form of what has been termed “ungoverning.”
We are witnessing the wholesale attempt to turn the American people against the administrative state by stripping it of all capacity to govern in their favor.
One thing we are doing at TDC to help ourselves and our allies to understand and respond strategically to the crisis is to understand what is happening in a clear-sighted fashion. We have developed a weekly tracker tool, Tracking the Crisis, which is a one–per-week, one email summary, about twenty minutes or so of reading, that summarizes the Administration’s actions and movement responses. You can sign up at trackingthecrisis.org.
This gives us a means of getting past the intentional “Shock and Awe” and monitoring, week to week, what is actually happening.
Last week it was interesting to see that more than a hundred Republican lawmakers signed a letter to the Administration imploring them to reverse the firings of all staff at the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, a program supporting small businesses that is highly popular in and beneficial to rural communities.
What we are facing is not a monolith, and is riven with contradictions. But we as a movement are not doing a good job of responding to this crisis with what we are calling with my friend David Cobb here a “strategic orientation” to the opportunities as well as the challenges of the moment.
Lacking the Politics?
Which brings us to our own internal barriers.
Neither neoliberalism, which is the dying and decaying order we’ve lived under for forty years, nor neofascism can offer any real material answers to the deep Polanyian crisis of our economy, society, and relationship to the natural world.
For us, in the global movement for economic system change, this ought to be our moment.
To put it quite frankly, we have the models, the demonstration projects, the institutional innovations and designs (and of course some very old models like cooperatives) but we do not have the right communications and movement-building strategies.
“To put it quite frankly, we have the models, the demonstration projects, the institutional innovations and designs (and of course some very old models like cooperatives) but we do not have the right communications and movement-building strategies.”
Sometimes, in my darker moments, I wonder if we have the right politics – not in terms of commitments, but in terms of our relationship to the great mass of ordinary people, which is another way of saying to democracy.
It’s one thing to build some nice models and experiments at the margins, and at TDC we have done some of that ourselves. I am all for experimentation and innovation and demonstration projects.
But the moment we are in is beyond that. We are now, whether we like it or not, in a struggle to win or lose the whole thing. And we are not yet playing to win.
Let me be concrete about our failure. The social and solidarity economy in the United States today, if looked at in institutional terms, is not marginal. It is massive:
Over ten thousand American businesses are now owned in whole or part by their employees, involving more than 10 million workers – more than are members of private sector unions.
More than one in three Americans – 130 million – are members of urban, agricultural, and financial cooperatives.
Credit unions – one-member, one-vote democratic banks – collectively serve 90 million Americans, while holding around $1 trillion in assets, making them as large, taken together, as one of the biggest Wall Street banks.
There are also 2,000 publicly-owned utilities that – together with cooperatives – provide some 25 percent of America’s electricity.
Over 500 communities have established full or partial public broadband.
And on and on.
The failure is not that the alternatives don’t already exist at scale, it’s that we haven’t made that mean what it needs to mean yet in political terms.
All of this institutional development does not have social weight, so to speak, commensurate with its scale.
We cannot win the whole thing if we are not on the board and in the game in a serious manner. And we are not yet.
“We cannot win the whole thing if we are not on the board and in the game in a serious manner. And we are not yet.”
There is some resistance, but there is not yet a strategic orientation capable of pointing people to the real practical solutions and models that exist and with which we can build the new.
And this lack of building is inhibiting the resistance, because we have not yet answered the question: resistance for what? What comes next?
We know many of the answers. We have not yet communicated them or made them available to our fellow democratic citizens. If we aren’t careful, that barrier could be fatal.
Remembering the Future
There is a great danger, in moments of extraordinary political economic flux and change like the present, of reaching for the comfort of familiarity, of tried-and-tested mental models and ways of doing things.
My colleague Gar Alperovitz, in his book What Then Must We Do?, quoted the historian Lewis Namier, who once quipped:
“...we all tend to ‘remember the future.’ By which he meant that we don’t and can’t document what will happen in the future. Instead, most of us unconsciously project forward assumptions about what is possible based on our actual experience of the past. We ‘remember’ forward that which we unconsciously take for granted. This works most of the time, but it works terribly in times of great change.”
This is a massive challenge for our movement for economic system change. We are accustomed, are we not, to working under adverse conditions? To building at the margins and outside of the mainstream. To the habits we’ve developed to avoid be distracted by the day-to-day, to keep a long-term horizon, to build for the future.
These are good habits, but they can also become habitual, unexamined, and a source of our own hidebound conservatism, of clinging to our own version of the status quo.
We would all like the luxury of building for long-term change, but what if the long-term is being abolished before our eyes?
We are in a new form of crisis, a systemic crisis, which is different from that of the crises of the past, of the 1970s or the 1930s. For starters, the real ecological limits are hard ones, and cannot be re-negotiated. Plant, animal, biodiversity species loss means a Sixth Great Extinction is already underway.
In reaching for responses we need to be careful we don’t simply ‘remember the future’ and reach for old ways of doing things that are not commensurate with the newness and scale of the challenge. We need to be as radical as reality itself.
“In reaching for responses we need to be careful we don’t simply ‘remember the future’ and reach for old ways of doing things that are not commensurate with the newness and scale of the challenge. We need to be as radical as reality itself.”
The upcoming COP in Brazil is an exercise in rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. Our economy of billionaire plutocracy has already shown itself both capable and willing of “annihilating the human and natural substance of society” if it is not restrained and replaced. The official international institutional order has shown itself incapable of and unwilling to resist this outcome.
So it is up to us. We have the institutional knowledge and strategies to build a new social and solidarity economy locally, regionally, and – eventually, with some work – globally. We know this. These deep structural and transformative interventions are exactly what’s needed.
But politically, we are weak. Communicatively, we are not effective. Socially, we are not present enough in the communities in which we need to be most active, not least the working class communities in which we need to see off the challenge of the far right.
This past weekend, looking at the news, I saw glimmers of hope. Catherine Connolly as the president-elect of Ireland. Plaid Cymru, the Party of Wales, beating both the far-right Reform Party and its Labour government imitator in Caerphilly in the Welsh valleys. Zohran Mamdani’s campaign platform for New York mayor. When given an authentic political alternative, people will take it.
But we have to offer it in a new way. We are not doing enough.
We must reach deep into our past, where we have experience of building in the face of adversity and even fascism. Mondragon in the Basque country was built surrounded by fascism. There are similar histories to draw upon from Emilia Romagna, lessons also from Quebec.
There are also negative lessons we need to exchange internationally, because the far right is organized and exchanging internationally. There are models upon which Trump is building and seeking to extend, whether it’s Berlusconi in Italy at the turn of the century – who in many ways represents the prototype for this current wave of neofascist strongmen – or Orbán in Hungary, Modi in India, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Netanyahu in Israel, Milei in Argentina, and on and on.
From those of us who live and work in the United States, I would offer the following plea. We need your international solidarity. We may in fact need your practical help, even – God forbid – your sanctuary.
But the one thing we need most of all is your example, the solidarity economies you are building but which must now become more visible and more political with a small-p. We need the overwhelming power of your good example.
“The one thing we need most of all is your example, the solidarity economies you are building but which must now become more visible and more political with a small-p. We need the overwhelming power of your good example.”
We are in France, so let me borrow a phrase from Victor Hugo: “More powerful than the might of all the armies in the world is an idea whose time has come.”
We must make our ideas of a solidarity economy a model of a next system whose time – finally, and in the nick of time – is an idea whose time has come.
Thank you.
