Productive Sovereignty

Productive sovereignty is freedom from financial and lifestyle coercion achieved by owning and operating open, replicable means of production—energy, housing, manufacturing, and enterprise—rather than selling labor to extractive institutions.

It is structural independence through productive capacity.

Gig workers and the self-employed typically have labor autonomy, not structural freedom. They sell time instead of controlling production. They have little leverage over the economic architecture. In OSE terms, they are users of the system, not builders of an alternative. They have individual agency but no systemic power.