Rebuild the economy through community ownership

As we rebuild the economy after the Covid-19 crisis, the deficiencies in our response to the crisis may be deliberately underplayed by those few who have built up great capital wealth in the decades since 1980. In the call for resilience in the United States, some basic changes have been advocated,

resilience in the United States

The free market neoliberalism that has built large personal wealth for the few has shown North Americans that those marginalized wage earners, deemed “essential” by governments in health care, food distribution, and transportation also bear the heaviest toll in sickness and death in the pandemic. Unfortunately, when we look in society for organizations in support of marginalized wage earners, we find the influence of trade unions to provide living wages, job security, health benefits, work safety, work-life balance, and just hours of work has waned greatly since the 60’s and 70’s.




The “progressive agenda” for the renewed economy in Canada has been publicized. 

progressive agenda

To be sure, a couple of items in the list will light fires under the well funded neoliberal globalists. Ironically, a modification of capitalism focuses on ownership of property by those who have been eliminated from access to private capital since the 19th Century times of Charles Dickens to become wage slaves to the Industrial Revolution and, in our time, to the service economy. The Antigonish Movement originated in the St.F.X. Extension Department. They organized and led a series of actions intended to produce a particular end, namely a self-sustaining cooperative system in eastern Nova Scotia rooted in the community and supported by a citizenry enlightened by adult education. Adult education was learning brought directly to the workplaces and homes of the people. This teaching method, organized by intensive fieldwork, became a technique for mobilizing adults for continuous study, by means of small and serious social action study groups. The end result was the generation of new economic cooperation for the common good. What ensued in Antigonish in the 1930’s and 1940’s can be thought of as a ‘movement’.




The concept of the “ownership of the means of production” is frequently associated with Marxist economics. In the Maritimes, co-operative fish plants owned by the fishers loosened the control of traditional plant owners on the compensation for their food production. In a similar manner, co-operative farming ventures supplying food directly to the people of the local communities, improved the return to farmers for their efforts. In the United Kingdom and the United States, at about the same time, G.K. Chesterton and Dorothy Day worked on an economic model that was neither monopoly capitalism nor Marxist socialism. The method of Distributism, advocated by G.K. Chesterton, was based on the wide distribution of the ownership of property, particularly to those who are currently wage slaves of monopoly capitalism. Co-operative ownership in resource communities is also a form of small scale local capitalism appropriate for larger developments.



What can advocates for social justice and greater economic equity draw from these earlier ideas? The Antigonish Movement certainly puts emphasis on adult education in how to manage local economic activity. A land base for economic development has been a demand for indigenous reconciliation in Canada. Many examples of successful indigenous enterprises have been started when this “land base” is available. The return to local management of economic resources through small scale private ownership and co-operative ventures is another “take away” worth studying.