Many Of Our Candidates Are Winning. But Do They Have An Advanced Policy For Economy Democracy?

Our Weekly Editorial

By Carl Davidson

Leftlinks Newsweekly, August 7, 2026

A small and largely unheralded event took place last week in Washington. H.R. 9931 — the American Manufacturing Renaissance Act — was introduced into the House of Representatives. It arrived without fanfare, without a press conference, without the usual Beltway theatrics. Retiring Rep. Jan Schakowsky of Chicago and her staff finally got the text into the hopper after years of work.

Going forward, the primary sponsor will be Rep. Ro Khanna of California — known for forcing the bill requiring full release of the Epstein files to unanimous passage and widely assumed to be positioning himself for a 2028 presidential run. He has recently joined Justice Democrats and is strongly favored by Progressive Democrats of America,

On the surface, H.R. 9931 looks like a modest industrial policy bill. But beneath it lies something deeper — a quiet shift in the American political economy, and a rare moment when a progressive-informed deep structural reform has slipped into the bloodstream of Congress.

The bill did not emerge from a K Street think tank or a corporate lobby. It was drafted by a small, diverse alliance called the Federation for a Manufacturing Renaissance. The founding core was Dan Swinney of the former Chicago-based Center for Labor and Community Research; myself, Carl Davidson, a founder of the Solidarity Economy Network; and Alan Minsky, a national leader of Progressive Democrats of America. We quickly pulled in allies from Quebec, Australia, and the Mondragon Cooperatives in Spain’s Basque Country — the latter being one of the most successful worker-controlled industrial ecosystems in the world. Other US organizations like the American Sustainable Business Network, the Century Foundation, the Urban Manufacturing Alliance (Mechanism) also became allies.

This is not the usual cast of characters shaping U.S. economic legislation. These are people who have spent decades wrestling with the real contradictions of American capitalism — not in theory, but in shuttered factories, union halls, and community meetings where workers fought to keep their livelihoods alive.

The Long Arc of Defeat and Persistence

Dan and I began this work during the plant-closing crisis that gutted Chicago’s industrial base in the late 1970s and 1980s. We saw tens of thousands of unionized manufacturing jobs evaporating as capital fled to low-wage regions or into pure speculation. We fought to save Stewart-Warner, a major Chicago-based auto-parts producer, through worker control. We were on the cusp of victory when a key ally — the United Electrical Workers — backed out, offering the excuse that “we’re not in the business of running capitalism better than the capitalists.” It was a tragic misreading of transformative political economy, and a missed opportunity. The UE has since reversed that stance, but the old idea still lingers on in parts of the left: that structural reform is merely a distraction from the “real” revolution, which is always imagined as somewhere in the distant future or on matters other than who controls the economy.

Too many self-described progressives and other leftists still have no practical understanding of how workers actually encroach on the means of production, and have every right to do so. They treat it as a romantic horizon rather than a concrete task. They forget that “the development of the productive forces” is a precondition for a democratic and progressive economy, not an afterthought.

After Stewart-Warner, Dan and I didn’t give up. We shifted into the emerging global social and solidarity economy movement — first rising in Brazil, then spreading across Latin America, Africa, and Europe before finally reaching the United States. We worked to popularize the Mondragon cooperatives as a key wing of it, not because co-ops are fashionable, but because Mondragon is a living example of workers controlling manufacturing, banking, education, and technological development at scale. Father Arizmendi, the priest who founded MCC, made ‘Labor is Sovereign’ as the first of ten values. It is a structural reform that alters power relations and creates new wealth — the very thing too many of the U.S. left have too often failed to grasp.

We worked on many related projects, including the ill-fated Austin Polytechnical Academy on Chicago’s West Side — an attempt to build a high-road manufacturing school rooted in community control. That is another story that deserves its own editorial.

A New Left Without Factories

A new young left emerged with Bernie Sanders and AOC. DSA now holds over 250 elected offices at the local and state levels. They all need an advanced manufacturing industrial policy to deploy in their district or metro areas. But they came of age in a country where 90% of workers had never been in a union, and where manufacturing had been hollowed out by neoliberalism. Most had never held a manufacturing job. Instead, they were radicalized by debt, precarious service work, and the climate crisis — not often by the shop floor.

The neoliberals in both parties had no plan to rebuild manufacturing. Trump’s right-wing bloc had empty slogans and false assertions, but no strategy. Meanwhile, the U.S. economy faced a deep structural crisis: deindustrialization, supply-chain fragility, declining productivity, and the erosion of skilled labor. Real wages had flatlined since 1980, and, despite a few upticks, both union density and manufacturing jobs fell.

If the new DSA and other progressive mayors, legislators, and organizers were going to contribute to solving these crises, they needed a crash course in political economy. The old Alinsky model — transferring wealth from top to bottom — was necessary but insufficient. It was redistribution without production, a band-aid on a hemorrhage. What was needed were Mondragon-style reforms that democratized production itself.

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Swinney’s Strategic Cuts in Capital

One of Dan Swinney’s most important contributions was reframing the terrain of struggle within capital itself. Instead of the old distinction between monopoly and anti-monopoly capital, he drew a sharper line: speculative capital versus productive capital.

Speculative capital — the Wall Street casino — makes money the same way my father did when he had a good day at the racetrack. It is the logic behind the business cliché: “I’m not in business to make steel; I’m here to make money.” Under this logic, you gut the mills and speculate in pork bellies, oil futures, or crypto. You destroy productive capacity to chase paper financial returns.

Productive capital — advanced manufacturing — actually creates new wealth. It requires skilled labor, stable communities, and long-term investment.

Dan then made a second cut: high-road versus low-road production. Low-road capital races to the bottom: anti-union, anti-environment, anti-community. High-road capital sees a benefit in investing in training, clean technology, and cooperative relationships with labor.

The implication was clear: the left could form tactical alliances with high-road productive capital to curb speculative finance and rebuild the industrial base. This was not class collaboration; it was a strategic struggle. Workers and their allies must fight for structural reforms that expand their power within production — not ‘Waiting for Lefty’ on a distant rupture that rarely arrives.

The Bill as Structural Reform

Which brings us back to the American Manufacturing Renaissance Act.

If passed, it will create the conditions for a new, ecological, high-wage, worker-centered industrial economy. It will support advanced manufacturing, workforce development, community-based industrial planning, including public bank funding of municipal and cooperative ownership models. It will give cities and states tools to rebuild supply chains, create green industrial districts, and anchor manufacturing in communities rather than in the whims of global finance.

It is not a revolutionary bill. But it is a bill that makes both progressive and revolutionary reforms possible.

It is a bill that treats manufacturing not as nostalgia but as a necessary foundation for democratic economic power.

It is a bill that recognizes that workers cannot seize the means of production if those means of production no longer exist.

The Left Must Catch Up

For this bill to succeed, the left must understand the deeper thinking behind it — not the caricature, but the real thing. They need to deal with factories, capital flows, productive forces, and the concrete organization of labor. They need to see structural reform as a battlefield, not a detour.

The false assumption that worker control is a matter for the distant future has crippled generations of organizers. The future is built in the present. The means of production are seized not in a single dramatic moment, but over decades of struggle, structural reform, experimentation, and institution-building.

The American Manufacturing Renaissance Act is one such moment. Quiet, modest, and easily overlooked — but carrying within it the seeds of a new political economy.

If the left takes it seriously, it could mark the beginning of a long-delayed industrial reconstruction — one rooted not in corporate power or nationalist nostalgia, but in democratic control, ecological responsibility, and the dignity of skilled labor. In short, the governing power of a Third Reconstruction needs a dynamic economic foundation, as envisioned in this bill.

If it is ignored, it will become another missed opportunity in a century already full of them. The choice, as always, belongs to those willing to do the work.