Reclaiming Capital: Democratic Initiatives and Community Development 9781501725326

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Reclaiming Capital

Also by Christopher Gunn:

Workers' Self-Management in the United States (1984) Alternatives to Economic Orthodoxy: A Reader in Political Economy (co-edited with Randy Albelda and William Waller, 1987)

RECLAIMING CAPITAL Democratic Initiatives and Community Development

Christopher Gunn Hazel Dayton Gunn

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

Copyright© 1991 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 1991 by Cornell University Press First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 1991 International Standard Book Number o-8014-2323-6 (cloth) International Standard Book Number o-8014-9574-1 (paper) Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 90-55725 Printed in the United States of America

Librarians: Library of Congress cataloging information appears on the last page of the book. Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. Paperback printing

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Contents

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Preface Social Surplus Tracking Social Surplus Alternative Institutions of Accumulation: Gaining Financial Resources Alternative Institutions of Accumulation: Building Assets in the Community Constraining Capital: Contentious Issues in Local Reforms Creating Public Assets Collective Action, Communities, and Social Change Selected Bibliography Index

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Preface

In the summer of 1985 we went to the Pacific Northwest to update research with the workers' cooperatives Christopher wrote about in Workers' Self-Management in the United States (1984). Conversations with old acquaintances and new recruits to cooperative work all turned, sooner or later, to the region's slow recovery from the Reagan-Volcker recession of 1982-83. Mill towns and major cities were in rough shape, and community activists were searching for appropriate responses. Recruit new investment, hope the economy could be diversified, try to shape local politics to help those most in need, and wait it out: these were the most common strategies. These people's sense of frustration stayed with us. As we drove east across Montana we learned that economic activity there had yet to return to the state's 1979 level. Our own discussions turned to basic questions. What made for development? What could sustain a place not favored by investment from outside? What, in a global economy, could a community do for itself? We returned to the East and began to inquire into what was being done by professional planners, community activists, and foundation staff members. Many felt they were reacting to changes willynilly, with little sense of how to ground their efforts and formulate longterm strategy. Basic principles of radical political economy were our starting point. Social surplus could provide a conceptual framework to analyze the roots of development problems and how they might be overcome. The challenge was how to bring that abstract concept down to earth.

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Preface Our review of the academic field of development economics provided us little insight. Studies of community, local, and regional economic development and underdevelopment that we had known of a decade earlier seemed to have come to a halt. Development economics had become a specialized corner of a discipline turned inward on itself. We were looking for foundations for community-based decision making in an era in which markets were thought to reign supreme. Yes, they are important, but they also reward some communities and impoverish others. We were also reminded that development itself involved far more than economics, that political and social issues were important parts of its process. Our work began in earnest: traditional field research on successful and unsuccessful local development projects and debate with their proponents, opponents, and doers. We studied projects, conversed with and questioned people from the Rio Grande to the St. Lawrence, and from the Northwest to North Carolina. What follows is a selective distillation of our research. We do not argue that the world can be changed by local, smallscale activity. We offer this book in the hope that it will help guide the expenditure of progressive energy to projects that can be affected at the local level, and that it will help those engaged in this work to understand better the systemic roots of the problems they confront. From that understanding may come new forms and levels of action for social change. Conversations with people in m