Systemic barriers block community economic agency—how structural power shapes who decides and who suffers
Original framing: “Why people should work together to shape the economy” — Nature
The tension between community economic agency and extractive capitalism is not new—it dates back to the enclosure movements of the 17th century, which privatised common lands and forced peasants into wage labor. The cooperative movement of the 19th century, from Rochdale to Mondragon, emerged as a direct challenge to industrial capitalism’s exploitation of workers. More recently, the Zapatista uprising in Mexico and the Rojava revolution in Syria have demonstrated how communities can build parallel economic systems outside state control. These historical precedents reveal that 'working together' is often a survival strategy in the face of systemic exclusion.
The article’s call for 'working together' to shape the economy is a partial truth that obscures the deeper systemic forces—colonial land dispossession, financial extraction, and legal frameworks designed to concentrate power—that prevent such collaboration from flourishing.
Indigenous models like *kaitiakitanga* and cooperative histories from the MST to Mondragon reveal that community economic agency is not a utopian experiment but a proven alternative to extractive capitalism. Yet these alternatives are systematically undermined by state-corporate alliances that criminalise dissent and co-opt grassroots movements, as seen in the suppression of Standing Rock or the criminalisation of land defenders in the Global South. The trickster’s lens exposes the absurdity of framing 'working together' as a novel idea when it is the foundation of most human economies—while the solemn framing of the article serves to depoliticise what is, in reality, a struggle for survival against systems designed to isolate and exploit. True systemic change requires dismantling the legal and financial architectures of extraction, centering marginalised voices in economic governance, and reclaiming the tools of collective action that have always been the bedrock of resilience.