Decoupling Wealth & Power
“All struggles Are essentially power struggles. Who will rule, Who will lead, Who will define, refine, confine, design, Who will dominate. All struggles Are essentially power struggles.”
- Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower
Wealth gaps are widening. Individuals worth more than $1 million (1.1% of the world’s population) hold 47.8% of global wealth, and those lines are drawn along lines of bias & prejudice: anti-Blackness, race, caste, religion, ethnicity, gender, and more around the world.
Organizations have been setting off the alarms about the gap for decades — and many have been working to close it, too. If you go by stated intentions, including public, quasi public, and NGO funding, the figures are in trillions. But capital is not working the way people want. Because the more wealth you have, the more structural power you have to design systems that prioritize your interests. The system skews in your favor and helps you accumulate even more.
For too long, the choice of who has structural power has been in the hands of individuals who have it and have little reason to give it up. While we keep on trying to close the wealth gap, we must also pilot alternative systems that address the power dynamic and contractually decouple power and wealth so that vote or voice aren’t bigger just because salary or wealth are.
“When you get these jobs you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.”
- Toni Morrison
Today, MJN is focused on studying how small systems, like collectives, co-ops, nonprofits, and investment funds, are changing how a system’s governance, contracts, pledges, and norms can be designed to redistribute power.
While some models are well studied — like co-ops and unions — others, like community led investment funds and collectives, have fewer available blueprints. MJN hopes to identify the characteristics of each that serve justice so we can apply them no matter what organizational tax structure we live in.
Example Models
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Sustainable Economies Law Center developed and embodies a worker self-directed nonprofit model, which they blueprinted for others, that applies elements of co-ops to the nonprofit 501(c)(3) model.
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Organizations including Black Farmer Fund, Boston Ujima Project, Potlikker Capital, and Fair Food Fund are recalibrating how they make investment decisions by shifting power to people who most understand the impact their dollars will make.
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Community benefits agreements (CBA) are a tested system innovation demonstrating how groups can unify to hold big business accountable to meeting community conditions.
A CBA is a contract between a coalition of community organizations and the developer of a proposed project or a bank. In exchange for the coalition's public support, the business agrees to meet specified community expectations that become codified in the contract. CBAs aren’t required by law. But when the contract is signed, it's legally binding.
In the processes of coalition building, negotiation, and implementation, power dynamics unfold. Could tools like catalytic capital shift power further toward community?
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The International Co-Operative Alliance defines a co-op, as “an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social, and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly-owned and democratically controlled enterprise.”
Co-ops are a well studied model that distributes power by distributing ownership, a form of wealth. And more recently, investment funds like Midnight Oil Collective, have adopted this model. How can organizations of all kinds apply the best of co-ops, while also recognizing that we need to decouple wealth from power in systems where wealth is hierarchical?
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Around in the US since the 1930s, unions are “teams of individuals coming together to guarantee the things you care about like decent wages, affordable health care, job security, safe and respectful workplaces, and fair scheduling,” says the AFL-CIO.
An essential and well-developed tool for shifting power, what characteristics of unions can be applied to other organizational models? And how does democratic governance work in this context?
"Power, properly understood, is the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political, or economic changes. In this sense power is not only desirable but necessary in order to implement the demands of love and justice. One of the greatest problems of history is that the concepts of love and power are usually contrasted as polar opposites. Love is identified with a resignation of power and power with a denial of love. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love."
- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
