omniharmonicEconomic Democracy
Economic democracy is the principle that economic institutions and decisions should be subject to democratic governance by those they affect. Just as political democracy extends the franchise to citizens in the civic sphere, economic democracy extends it to workers, communities, and ecosystems in the economic sphere. It challenges the foundational assumption of capitalism that capital ownership confers the right to govern productive enterprises and allocate resources.
The absence of economic democracy represents the deepest contradiction in liberal democratic societies: citizens are told they live in a democracy while spending most of their lives in workplaces governed as autocracies, in communities shaped by investment decisions they have no voice in, and in ecosystems degraded by externalities they never consented to. Economic democracy addresses this by proposing that worker-cooperatives govern enterprises, community-land-trusts govern land, participatory budgeting governs public spending, and community investment vehicles govern capital allocation.
Economic democracy is the economic expression of participatory-democracy and connects to the well-being-economy as the institutional infrastructure for centering flourishing over growth. It is also the practical foundation for regenerative-economics: when communities govern their own economic institutions, they are far more likely to prioritize long-term ecological health over short-term extraction. The concept provides the throughline connecting local institutions like cooperatives and land trusts to the systemic vision of a post-capitalist economy.