March 5, 2025
Franziska Paul and Andrew Cumbers – University of Glasgow
Before his untimely death in September 2012, Neil Smith, Distinguished Professor of Geography and Anthropology at City University of New York, and a leading contemporary Marxist theorist, was working on a radical notion of hope that found its way into the titles and contents of a number of his conference contributions and public lectures. Smith’s way of expressing this notion of hope and possibility was by asserting that “the Future is Radically Open”. This notion referred to a marked shift in the world in the early 2010s. The financial crisis of 2007-08 had wreaked havoc on capitalism and the established (and until then little questioned) neoliberal order. The volatile reverberations of the crisis were in full swing, felt hardest by those who were least responsible for them. Unsurprisingly, given Smith’s prominence, he spoke about the future and its radical openness at an Occupy May Day rally in Madison Square Park, New York City on 1 May 2012. He discussed how global mobilisations such as Occupy, which were springing up around the world and not just in New York, were presenting a key moment of change, opening a window of possibility to shift the “dead weight of neoliberalism” in the US and beyond.
But what does a 2012 rally contribution from a Scottish Marxist have to do with this roundtable on public banking? Although Smith doesn’t mention public banking, he was fundamentally concerned with discussing the state of neoliberalism and its many contradictions and crisis tendencies. In his words, “dead but dominant,” he contended that neoliberalism seemed to have no answers to the crisis while new alternatives were rising to challenge its dominance. This is where his contribution lies.
The idea of public banking is of course much older than Occupy Wall Street or the financial crisis, with public banks relevant to contemporary discussions first being established in the 19th and early 20th century in Europe as well as the US. While these institutions partly still exist in Europe, such as the German Sparkassen (savings banks), in the US only the Bank of North Dakota remains today. Outside the US, public banks now exist in many places on all continents as part of a wider ecosystem of alternative financial institutions. While public banks can be transformative, they are not necessarily progressive (or anti-neoliberal) and are best understood as dynamic, evolving and often contested spaces. In the contemporary US context, the public banking debate is relatively new for three reasons. Firstly, public banks are being proposed at different scales beyond the state-level, notably at the municipal or city level in more advanced campaigns such as those in California. Secondly, there are strong efforts to coordinate and share best practice between campaigns, through an emerging ‘supporting infrastructure’, including the Public Banking Institute, a non-partisan research and advocacy organisation established in 2011, and increasingly regional groups, such as the Californian Public Banking Alliance established in 2018. Thirdly, and relatedly, there is a wider push towards a networked, multi-scalar public banking landscape with the power to finance community needs across the US. Importantly, too, when we try to map the emergence of the relatively youthful public banking movement in the US, we return to the same place and time, the Occupy Wall Street protests, that Smith and others identified as a key moment of change 13 years ago.
Occupy Wall Street was a grassroots protest movement, which started in New York City’s Zuccotti Park in September 2011 and rapidly spread into a global movement. At its core, Occupy was challenging economic inequality, both remonstrating the effects of the ‘Great Recession’ on the living standards of working- and middle-class people across the world, and drawing attention to an ever-widening wealth and income gap that went back to the late 1970s. Occupy’s slogan, “we are the 99%,” resonated strongly with the wider public and sparked a shared conscience and public conversation around economic inequality and injustice. Occupy protesters identified a clear culprit for these conditions: the US’s financial sector, and more specifically Wall Street banks such as JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley. Yet Occupy also showed that government(s) had a key role to play in the causes and consequences of the crisis. Decades of under- and de-regulation in the financial sector, lack of oversight, and a politically-supported notion that many financial institutions, no matter their mismanagement, were “Too Big To Fail” had neglected to hold corrupt corporations, their executives, and irresponsible financial markets to account. This, too, was the first time in decades that Wall Street banks and the increasingly complex and technical financial machinery they operate had been in an uncomfortable global spotlight. Indeed, some of the systemic problems were the financial systems’ opacity and lack of effective public scrutiny and understanding of its activities.
The Occupy Movement was of course not the first to highlight and object to the harms that banking and financial practices can inflict. Divestment (or disinvestment) for social goals, that is, the practice of (re)moving assets for social, political and ethical reasons, has a longer history dating back to the mid to late 20th century, when initiatives prominently targeted the South African apartheid government, as one prong of a three-pronged strategy of Boycott, Disinvestment, and Sanctions. By the turn of the 21st century, divestment had become a tool to disrupt harmful industries, including tobacco, weapons and arms manufacturing, and increasingly fossil fuels. The energy emerging from the Occupy movement and its mass mobilisations around the 99% slogan buoyed concurrent initiatives, including the international environmental organisation 350.org, which, in 2012, started their global divestment campaign Go Fossil Free. Thousands of individuals and institutions committed to divesting their portfolios in the following years, including educational institutions and universities, faith-based groups, governmental organisations, and pension funds. The Global Fossil Fuel Divestment Database estimates institutional divestments to the value of $40.76 trillion from 1667 institutions. Beyond monetary value, the growing attention and consensus behind divestment from fossil fuel companies also creates stigma for the industry, its associates and its funders and investors. And for the second time in only a few years, various Wall Street banks were exposed to an uncomfortable global spotlight for the harmful activities their investments and holdings are bankrolling, with some even doubling down on their commitments to fossil fuel finance.
Relatedly, renewed attention to the investments and dealings of big financial actors played a role in some of the US’s most intense energy struggles in recent times, including the Keystone XL and North Dakota Access pipeline protests. Here, too, the public awareness and sense of possibility created by the Occupy mobilisations generated momentum for broad-based resistance, with multi-actor grassroots coalitions forming around these energy struggles. Neither struggle was straightforward. Keystone XL protests began in 2011 but it would take a decade of dedicated action by environmentalists, farmers, ranchers and indigenous communities to defeat the planned crude oil pipeline linking Alberta, Canada, to the US Gulf Coast. Similarly, the Standing Rock or No Dakota Access Pipeline (#NoDAPL) protest targeted the construction of a pipeline to carry crude oil from North Dakota to Illinois, but was ultimately unsuccessful. The indigenous-led protest built a broad-based coalition with farmers and ranchers, environmental and climate justice activists, and local communities, utilizing various tactics including petitions, marches, and the Sacred Stone protest camp. One key strand of the campaign was linking Standing Rock to divestment, especially highlighting the role of Wells Fargo and 17 other Wall Street banks (including JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs) in funding DAPL. As Standing Rock gained more attention, solidarity campaigns spread across the country, with divestment initiatives springing up in Seattle, New York as well as Los Angeles, particularly targeting Wells Fargo.
In Los Angeles, the social media hashtag #DivestLA kicked off a nine-month long struggle to divest the city from Wells Fargo in solidarity with Standing Rock and in response to the bank’s account fraud scandal. Importantly, the successful conclusion of the LA divestment campaign neatly marked the beginning of the Public Bank Los Angeles (PBLA) initiative in 2017, which campaigns for the creation of a Municipal Bank of Los Angeles. As a diverse group of activists were fighting together for their city to divest, many in the campaign had come to realise that an alternative institution and wider system was needed, one that would support socially and environmentally driven investments and had the power to cut ties with harmful industries. PBLA, alongside similarly motivated campaigns in San Francisco, the East Bay and San Diego among others, soon formed the California Public Banking Alliance (CPBA) to aggregate resources. CPBA played an important role in leading the campaign for the California Public Banking Act (AB 857), collecting endorsements from over 100 organisations including trade unions, political parties, sustainability and climate justice groups, housing advocates, racial justice organisations and many more.
When we interviewed public banking activists and campaigners in California and beyond in 2022, we were interested in how they had identified public banking – a seemingly niche and highly technical issue – as their chosen political cause and project. We soon realised that the movement’s emergence aligned with many struggles and protests at a conjunctural crisis of neoliberal capitalism. While there had been smaller technically-focussed public banking discussions in expert circles in the US, the popular call for public banking had emerged as a solution, a tool to address a broader sense of discontent and an interrelated set of demands. While our contribution here has mapped a genealogy of the public banking movement based in economic, environmental and indigenous justice movements and struggles (from Occupy Wall Street, to Divestment, and Standing Rock), similar legacies connect the movement to recent histories of activism in housing struggles and Black Lives Matter. It is in this moment of conjuncture, or more broadly a global rupture in the existing economic system, that public banking offers a solution that goes beyond fighting the symptoms of late-stage neoliberal capitalism and moves towards implementing wider systemic change. Across the globe people have started to reject the neoliberal ‘common sense’ that had prevailed for decades, and, over the past decade, are moving from resistance to the search for public alternatives for finance, essential service provision, and much more. This is where the wider impact of public banking discussions in the US lies.
Importantly, we can see this trend not only in the US but also as a global trend. People and places are taking back ownership over public provision across a wide range of sectors. This wider movement has demanded that services, assets and infrastructures be returned to democratic public ownership including but not limited to energy, water and sanitation, waste management, local government, transportation, communications, health and social care predominantly at the local or regional scale. As part of our work interrogating this global de-privatisation trend, we map and collect cases in the Public Futures Database which features over 1700 cases across 78 countries and 91 diverse essential services as of January 2025. Out of the significant global challenges and crises we face, across the world people are working together to build up public alternatives to create more equitable, democratic and sustainable services, infrastructures and assets for their communities.
“The future is radically open” becomes a rallying call to, in Smith’s words at Occupy May Day, “not only seize the alternatives that present themselves, but to make them.” From Occupy, through Divestment, and energy struggles such as Keystone XL and Standing Rock, people have seized alternatives. With the example of the emerging US public banking movement, people are indeed making and creating alternatives. The energy generated by over a decade of resistance and mass movement is coalescing into popular calls for public banking in the US, as activists realise that they can build up alternative financial institutions with the power to advance a wide range of their demands including affordable housing, climate adaptation, racial and indigenous justice, and local economic development. The emerging demands for public banking in the US are in many ways moving beyond the original movements and struggles that inform them, from economic and environmental justice concerns to housing and indigenous rights. The public banking movement is formulating an alternative local economic development, in opposition to a destructive global capitalism, with a vision that supports sustainable, green and just transitions.