Building the Democratic Economy Now

The economic infrastructure we need - before we win

I was briefing the program officers of a foundation and one of the audience members asked a question to which I did not have a strong answer. This was a question that serious people in the democracy movement don’t ask often enough, and it goes something like this:

*When we win, when the authoritarian project fails, when pro-democracy forces break through and begin consolidating democracy, what kind of economy are we consolidating into?

Most of the time, we don’t ask the question. We’re too focused on the immediate work: the organizing, the resistance, the protection of what remains of democratic institutions. The economic question feels like it belongs to some future we haven’t earned yet.

That instinct is understandable. It is also, historically, one of the most dangerous mistakes a democracy movement can make.

The lesson every democratic transition teaches

The warning embedded in every democratic transition that failed to take hold is the same: political breakthrough without prior economic transformation is partial and reversible.

Spain after Franco is the clearest case. The democratic opposition won political power but left Francoist capital essentially intact. That capital simply purchased the new democracy, shaped its parties, constrained its policies, and colonized its media. Which is why Spanish democracy remained economically constrained for decades after the dictatorship ended.

South Africa is even starker. The ANC won the state but the economic architecture of apartheid remained. The mines, the banks, the land - most of the ownership structures that defined who had power - survived the political transition almost entirely undisturbed. South African democracy is now in serious crisis, not primarily from external threats but from the internal weight of an economy that was never democratized.

The counter-model is the Nordic countries, and particularly Sweden. The Swedish labor movement built its cooperative institutions, its union density, and its worker-ownership infrastructure before it achieved political dominance, not after. When Social Democrats took lasting political power in the 1930s, they weren’t starting from scratch on the economic question. The skeleton of a democratic economy already existed and could be scaled using state resources. Consolidation moved at speed because the organizational work had been done during the long years of building power.

That is the sequencing that works.

Why economics is politics

Antonio Gramsci wrote from a fascist prison about the “war of position” - the long struggle to build hegemony in civil society before you can win the decisive battle. He meant moral and intellectual leadership: the capacity to make your vision of society feel like common sense to people who haven’t yet committed to your side.

But economic institutions are how a class reproduces its hegemony materially. They are not neutral. Right now, the economic institutions of oligarchic capitalism are doing active political work for the authoritarian project, and most of that work happens not through ideology but through dependency.

People who depend on hostile employers for their healthcare don’t go to protests. People who are one missed rent payment from eviction don’t take political risks. People who owe their livelihoods to a single corporation that has made its political preferences clear make political calculations accordingly. Economic dependency is political control. It doesn’t require a surveillance state or a secret police. It just requires that the basic conditions of life remain in the hands of those who benefit from passivity.

The infrastructure we need to build inverts that relationship. It reduces the leverage that hostile economic actors have over ordinary people. It creates communities of people with material stakes in democratic outcomes. It demonstrates - concretely, visibly, in people’s daily lives - that another kind of economy is possible.

And when breakthrough comes, it becomes the skeleton for rapid consolidation: institutions that don’t need to be invented under crisis conditions because they already exist and are already working.

What to build, in priority order

First: Labor density

Union membership is the single most proven mechanism for distributing economic power in a capitalist economy, and the one with the clearest democratic spillovers. High-union-density societies are more democratic, more resilient to authoritarian capture, and more economically equal by every measure we have.

The attack on labor is not incidental to the authoritarian project. It is foundational. Because unions are not just economic institutions, they are the organizational infrastructure through which working-class people exercise collective power, develop civic habits, and build the cross-racial solidarity that makes broad democratic coalitions possible.

The immediate build is worker centers for the non-union economy: the gig workers, the domestic workers, the agricultural workers, the warehouse workers who can’t easily unionize under current law but can be organized into economic advocacy and mutual aid. Worker centers were the seedbed of some of the most successful union campaigns of the past two decades. They’re also organizing infrastructure in the deepest sense in that the skills, relationships, and habits of collective action developed in a worker center translate directly to broader civic participation.

The medium-term goal is sectoral bargaining - the Nordic model of industry-wide wage agreements that lift conditions across an entire sector regardless of whether individual workplaces are unionized. This requires legislative access, which requires political power, which is exactly why the organizational infrastructure that sectoral bargaining would require needs to be built now, during the war of position, rather than improvised after a breakthrough.

Second: Alternative financial infrastructure

Capital is a pillar of support for authoritarian consolidation. The large banks are not ideologically neutral. They direct credit in ways that reflect and reinforce existing power structures. A democratic economic strategy requires democratic financial institutions.

Credit unions already hold $2 trillion in assets in the United States and are democratically governed by their members. They are an underutilized asset of the democratic economic ecosystem, in part because most credit unions don’t think of themselves as political actors. Making the connection explicit, connecting credit union networks to movement infrastructure, and building their scale is achievable work.

Community development financial institutions (CDFIs) direct capital to communities and institutions that commercial banks won’t serve. They are already doing democratic economic work by financing affordable housing, worker cooperatives, community health centers, minority-owned businesses, but most are underscaled and largely disconnected from the political organizing ecosystem. Bridging that gap matters.

Public banking at the state and municipal level is the biggest structural play, and the most durable. The Bank of North Dakota has operated for over a century, surviving every political transition, directing capital to North Dakota priorities rather than Wall Street returns. California has passed public banking enabling legislation. Several other states have active campaigns. When democratic forces control state governments - now and after any breakthrough - establishing public banks should be among the first priorities. They’re hard to reverse, they create permanent alternative capital infrastructure, and they demonstrate that democratic government can be an effective economic actor.

Third: Democratic ownership

Worker cooperatives and employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) shift the fundamental question of who owns the economy. When workers own their enterprises, their material interests change: they have a stake in stable governance, rule of law, and the regulatory environment that protects their collective investment. Worker-owners are also harder to coerce. You can fire an employee, but you cannot fire an owner.

The Mondragon cooperative network in the Basque Country, comprising over 80,000 worker-owners across more than 90 cooperatives was built during Franco’s dictatorship, deliberately, by a priest named José María Arizmendiarrieta who understood that economic institution-building and political resistance were the same project. He didn’t wait for political freedom to start building. He built economic democracy under fascism as preparation for the political democracy he believed was coming.

The most immediately actionable opportunity in the American context is business succession. Roughly half of American small businesses will change hands in the next decade as baby boomer owners retire. Without deliberate intervention, most of those businesses will be sold to private equity, stripped for parts, or simply closed. The employees - often long-tenured workers who built those businesses - will be left with nothing. ESOP conversions offer an alternative that is already well-supported in tax law (ESOPs carry some of the most favorable tax treatment in the code) and require no new legislation. A national campaign to convert retiring-owner businesses to employee ownership is achievable, scalable, and strategically significant. This is among the most underutilized opportunities in the democratic economic toolkit.

Platform cooperatives deserve specific attention because platform capitalism is the fastest-growing form of economic extraction. Uber, DoorDash, Instacart, and their equivalents extract enormous value from workers while denying them the basic protections of employment. Platform cooperatives, including driver-owned ride networks, cleaner-owned home services platforms, freelancer-owned creative agencies already exist: Up&Go in New York, Drivers Cooperative, Eva in Canada. They need capital, regulatory support, and connection to the political organizing ecosystem to scale. When the democratic economy can offer gig workers ownership rather than exploitation, it changes their relationship to the political project in ways that no amount of messaging will.

Fourth: Land and housing

Housing insecurity is political insecurity. The relationship is direct and measurable. Research consistently shows that housing-stable people participate in civic life at substantially higher rates than housing-insecure people. Eviction, the threat of eviction, and the constant anxiety of unaffordable rent are not just personal hardships. They are mechanisms of political demobilization.

Community land trusts remove land from the speculative market permanently, creating affordable housing that is neither dependent on continued government subsidy nor vulnerable to gentrification. The Champlain Housing Trust in Burlington, Vermont is the oldest major model; there are now over 300 community land trusts in the United States. They grow slowly, as land acquisition is capital-intensive, but they create permanent infrastructure that compounds over decades. Land trust residents are often among the most civically engaged people in their neighborhoods precisely because they’ve made a long-term investment in their community and have a real stake in its governance.

Fifth: Democratic information infrastructure

The collapse of local news is not just a market failure. It is a democratic infrastructure failure. The removal of the mechanism through which communities understand themselves, hold local power accountable, and develop the shared factual basis for collective decision-making is an attack on democracy. Authoritarian consolidation depends on information fragmentation and the replacement of shared reality with competing tribal narratives. Local accountability journalism is the antidote.

Local news cooperatives, reader-supported journalism, and nonprofit media are not charity projects. They are civic infrastructure. The Salt Lake Tribune converted to nonprofit status. The Philadelphia Inquirer became a public benefit corporation. Dozens of local news cooperatives operate across the country, most on shoestring budgets that vastly undervalue what they produce. Building these out as a conscious democratic infrastructure project rather than simply as responses to market failure requires investment from foundations and movement funders who currently treat media as a communications line item rather than an organizing priority.

Data cooperatives represent a newer but increasingly important front. The platform economy runs on data - on the continuous extraction and monetization of personal information that workers, consumers, and citizens generate every day. Cooperative data governance, which involves communities owning their own data and controlling how it’s used, is nascent but growing. It matters strategically because data is increasingly a pillar of support for the platform surveillance economy that fuels authoritarian political infrastructure.

The consolidation architecture

When breakthrough comes for democracy, and the historical evidence from Erica Chenoweth’s research and others is clear that sustained nonviolent resistance campaigns do achieve breakthrough, the democratic forces that win will face an immediate and dangerous consolidation challenge. The most vulnerable period in any democratic transition is the first two to five years, when the old order retains economic power and is actively working to recapture political power.

The institutions built during the war of position become the skeleton for rapid consolidation:

- Worker centers become the organizational infrastructure for labor law reform at scale

- CDFIs become implementation mechanisms for public investment in underserved communities

- Community land trusts absorb resources from a revived affordable housing program

- Platform cooperatives receive favorable regulatory treatment that allows them to compete

- Public banks are established in additional states with federal support and technical assistance

- Local news cooperatives receive the public funding that PBS and NPR proved is both feasible and durable

The lesson of the New Deal is instructive here. Franklin Roosevelt had to build many of these institutions from scratch in the middle of a crisis, which made them more fragile, more dependent on political will, and ultimately more vulnerable to reversal. The lesson of the Nordic countries is that preparation during the war of position made consolidation faster, deeper, and more durable. They came to power with the institutional framework already built. We have the opportunity to do that preparation now.

What this has to do with the resistance

There is a temptation, in movements under pressure, to treat economic institution-building as a distraction from the urgent work of political resistance. That temptation should be resisted.

The work described here is not separate from organizing. It is organizing, just with a longer time horizon and a more explicit theory of power. Every worker center is a training ground for civic action. Every cooperative is a community whose members have a material stake in democratic governance. Every public bank is a demonstration that democratic government can be a competent economic actor. Every local news cooperative is a mechanism for accountability and shared reality.

The Mondragon cooperatives were built in a dictatorship - not as a retreat from politics but as preparation for democracy. The Swedish labor movement built its institutions during decades of minority status - not as a consolation prize for losing but as the foundation for winning durably. The civil rights movement didn’t just organize marches. It built insurance companies, credit unions, newspapers, banks, and legal defense funds - the full institutional ecosystem of a community that intended to survive and eventually to govern.

These are not different projects. They are the same project, operating at different registers. Joy and ownership are both forms of belonging. The freedom song and the worker cooperative are both saying the same thing:

“We are not just subjects of this economy. We are its authors.”

The window to do the preparation work is open. It will not be open forever.