The People’s Network for Land and Liberation Is Building Alternatives to the Current ‘War-and-Empire Global Economy’

This consortium of community-based organizations is working toward decolonization and economic democracy.

By Damon Orion

In 1989, 22.8 percent of America’s total net worth belonged to the top 1 percent of the nation’s wealth holders. By 2024, that share had risen to 30.8 percent, according to the online publisher Visual Capitalist.

Underscoring this imbalance, an Economic Policy Institute report stated that in 2023, CEOs earned 290 times more than the average worker. Between 1978 and 2023, while the salary of CEOs rose by 1,085 percent, the workers’ pay only saw a 24 percent increase.

American economist Arnold Kling argues that disparities like these are inevitable pitfalls of capitalism, which prioritizes materialism, creates winners and losers, and erodes communities. Meanwhile, Scientific American has presented mathematical models demonstrating that “the natural inclination of wealth is to flow upward, so that the ‘natural’ wealth distribution in a free-market economy is one of complete oligarchy.”

The People’s Network for Land and Liberation (PNLL) is designed to support community members facing these inequities. This coalition strives to re-empower the citizenry by decommodifying land and housing and building local worker-owned cooperatives. Its administrator, David Cobb, says PNLL also aims to use art to imagine a post-capitalist world and offer political education “to help people understand what, how, and why we are doing what we’re doing to move to a post-capitalist economy and return to the ways that existed before industrialism, capitalism, and the enclosure movement.”

Cobb describes PNLL as a consortium of six community-based organizations across the U.S. that are “deeply embedded in their community, where they live, work, play, and pray together.”

Cooperation Jackson, a self-described “emerging vehicle for sustainable community development, economic democracy, and community ownership,” launched PNLL in 2020 and is one of the six organizations comprising PNLL. Cooperation Jackson helps improve conditions for residents of Jackson, Mississippi, which has the largest number of unhoused individuals in the state, according to 2023 data provided by the City of Jackson.

A 2025 analysis by World Population Review stated that Mississippi is the poorest state in the U.S. based on median household income. Jackson-based television station WJTV, meanwhile, reported that roughly 23.6 percent of children in Mississippi “faced or dealt with hunger” in 2022. “Of the 159,370 Mississippi food-insecure children, roughly one in five live within five counties… [in] the Jackson metro.”

Besides Cooperation Jackson, PNLL’s constituents—“nodes,” in the organization’s terminology—are Northern California’s Native Roots Network (NRN), Community Movement Builders (CMB) in Atlanta, Georgia (which has played an integral role in the Stop Cop City movement), Wellspring Cooperative in Western Massachusetts’ Pioneer Valley, Cooperation Vermont in the Northeast Kingdom of rural Vermont, and Incite Focus/Lake County Merry Makers in Idlewild, Michigan (also known as Black Eden).

Cooperation Jackson’s site explains that PNLL “was established to deepen the shared practice of its members toward the development of cooperatives, community land trusts, mutual aid and emergency relief networks, community production centers, and other practices of solidarity, common regeneration, and collective care. Our aim is to fortify the people’s movements for decolonization, self-determination, and economic democracy to enable the development of an ecologically regenerative society.”

A commentary by Adelphi University sociology professor Melanie E.L. Bush, published in the International Journal of Critical Diversity Studies in February 2025, cites the work of Community Movement Builders as an example of PNLL’s efforts to house individuals and build community. “Like the other nodes in PNLL, they are working to develop a land trust to address the lack of housing in their communities and to decommodify land,” Bush writes. “CMB owns four homes that are used as workforce housing for community organizers in southwest Atlanta. CMB is also developing workers’ cooperatives and gardens to grow food and to build production capacity.”

In 2024, PNLL’s impact investment fund provided a recoverable grant for the Native Roots Network’s purchase of a 1,200-acre parcel of land for use as “a learning and traditional practice site, perfect for traditional food and fiber gathering and processing,” NRN’s website says. “The 1,200-acre ranch is a place that still holds undisturbed cultural sites, space for housing, ecosystems for traditional food sovereignty, land restoration, and the nurturing of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (T.E.K.). These all will converge to form a living, breathing place where the principles of Indigenous stewardship and regenerative enterprise can be expressed.”

“We would like to recover [the grant], but there is no interest on it, and there is no foreclosure,” Cobb explains. “If they can’t pay it back, so be it, but the request is to pay it back so other [PNLL] nodes can use that money.”

Cobb says that one of PNLL’s goals is to establish community production centers using digital fabrication technology such as 3D printers and laser cutters. “If we don’t democratize this technology, a couple of billionaires will be created, but the superstructure will remain.” He adds that this was the case when digital technology transformed the communications and computing sectors. “We are in the early stages of the digitalization of manufacturing and fabrication. We are serious about figuring out how to meet our needs and to create and ultimately link up localized supply value chains.”

Outside of PNLL, Cobb is a co-founder of the solidarity economy nonprofit Cooperation Humboldt, the advancement manager for the Wiyot Tribe’s Dishgamu Humboldt Community Land Trust in Northern California, and a co-coordinator of the U.S. Solidarity Economy Network (USSEN), which is closely tied to PNLL.

Cobb maintains that USSEN “helped create the notion of a solidarity economy framework, which is explicitly post-capitalist. That is because we know that capitalism as a politico-economic system is literally destroying the planet that we depend upon for life. As if that’s not bad enough, it’s creating a racist, sexist, and class-oppressive society.”

He adds that ecological collapse is not coming; it has begun and is accelerating. “We used to say, ‘This is late-stage capitalism,’ but I believe now we have to acknowledge that this is end-stage capitalism,” he says. “All of the inherent contradictions of capitalism are becoming so acute that they are untenable. We are destroying Mother Earth faster than she can replenish herself.”

Cobb believes automation technology like robotics and artificial intelligence will end capitalism in its current form, which “creates profits by extracting the surplus value of the labor of the worker.” With increasingly fewer workers needed to produce goods and services, capitalism will “morph as surely as the enclosure movement morphed into feudalism, which morphed into nationalism, which morphed into industrialism, which morphed into financialism. I think techno-feudalism is the best way to understand [the new form the system is taking], but at the end of the day, what we need to confront is that the system itself is failing. That’s the reason fascism is rising in the U.S. and globally—and I want to be clear: We should not say ‘oligarchy’ or ‘authoritarianism.’ This is fascism. We can’t confront it merely with electoralism.”

However, he notes that the Trump administration is “an acceleration and amplification of the empire [already] in collapse. Obviously, Trump’s absolute assault is a worsening by far, but we have to come to grips with the fact that the neoliberal ideology, the corporate-controlled leadership of the Democratic party, created these conditions that allowed this to happen.”

Cobb adds that he and his cohorts at PNLL have “no illusions that anybody is going to come and save us but ourselves. We need to build a movement that takes us away from this war-and-empire global economy. You can think of the six nodes of the People’s Network for Land and Liberation as building lifeboats or liberated zones where we are trying to create examples of alternatives not just to Trump’s fascist dystopia but also the neoliberal iron fist in a velvet glove. Imagine these local nodes springing up all over Turtle Island and ultimately recreating the supply chains that existed before colonization, and we have peacefully transformed the entire political economy.”

Damon Orion is a writer, journalist, musician, artist, and teacher in Santa Cruz, California. His work has appeared in Revolver, Guitar World, Spirituality + Health, Classic Rock, and other publications. Read more of his work at DamonOrion.com

This article was produced by Local Peace Economy.