Monthly Archives: February 2016

Democracy and Decentralization: UK Labour Leaders Reframe Socialism for the 21st Century

Screen Shot 2016-04-21 at 1.17.31 PMIn this op-ed for Truthout, originally published on February 25, 2016, Democracy Collaborative co-founder Gar Alperovitz and Next System Project director Joe Guinan discuss the propensity for true socialism in the United States, given the discussions swirling around the 2016 presidential candidates:

Bernie Sanders has made an unprecedented and extraordinary contribution to the US political landscape this election cycle. Whatever the outcome of the primaries, a whole generation has learned that talking about socialism, explicitly and proudly, is no longer as politically radioactive as once supposed. But can we not expect more from our economic populism than just knitting back together a frayed social safety net, kick-starting the engines of Keynesian demand with ecologically appropriate infrastructure and imposing some long overdue reforms on our largest financial institutions? Might the United States not be ready for a socialism that actually takes the question of “who owns the economy” seriously?

Though perhaps tactically understandable, given his own previous efforts, it’s a little surprising that Sanders has not made ownership (and new forms of ownership) more of a theme in his campaign. “I don’t believe the government should own the means of production,” he emphasized in his major speech on democratic socialism in November 2015, even though elsewhere he has given vociferous support for expanding the scope of the US Postal Service into retail banking. Community development advocates are scratching their heads, wondering why Sanders’ longtime support at the municipal and state level for transformative ownership strategies – employee ownership, community land trusts, cooperative low-income housing – haven’t shown up on the stump. Hillary Clinton’s tepid profit-sharing plan, where businesses could claim a tax credit for 15 percent of the amount of profit they share with their workers, and which grows out of Larry Summers’ “inclusive capitalism”framework, at least opens the door to a (very) weak form of ownership.

A look at what’s brewing on the other side of the Atlantic gives us some reason to dream a little bigger about what might be possible and also politically viable here, especially given the new direction socialist thought is taking all around the world.

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Do We Really Need a Billionaire Class? Gar Alperovitz on inequality and excess

Too Much LogoThe Institute for Policy Studies’ publication Too Much focuses on inequality and excess. In this interview originally published on February 21, 2016, Too Much editor Sam Pizzigati speaks with Democracy Collaborative co-founder and Next System Project co-chair Gar Alperovitz about his “long-haul perspective on how we can go about shearing inequality down to democratic size:”

Too Much: You see capital — who gets to own it, to benefit from it, and derive political power from it — as a key to both understanding and ending our staggering levels of contemporary. What do you mean by capital?

Alperovitz: In the formulation I use, capital amounts simply to wealth ownership of any kind, ownership that can be translated into power. You can sell it to get income. You can hire people with it. It’s another word for wealth ownership.

Too Much: We’ve become so unequal, you’ve also noted, that we’ll never become significantly more equal unless we have a fundamental shift in who controls capital, in who owns wealth. A shift to what?

Alperovitz: Wealth brings power, political power, institutional power. Wealth on its own gives people the capacity, as a friend of mine likes to say, to “rent” politicians and control the political process. Wealth gives the wealthy access — access to political levers that alter the way the economy works.

Wealth gives the wealthy the capacity to ‘rent’ politicians and control the political process.

In all the advanced countries, labor organizations used to provide a counterbalance to this wealth. On the shop floor and in the political system, unions directly challenged capital on wages and the distribution of income.

But in the United States we’ve always had a much weaker labor movement than most other advanced capitalist nations, and today our labor counterweight is disappearing. Increasingly, we have no institutional counter to the political power of capital.

Many activists today think that building a movement will solve this problem. We obviously need a movement. But at the heart of the movement that helped make America more equal in the middle of the 20th century, we also had an institution, labor unions.

Unless you can build both institutions and a political movement, you won’t have the power and wherewithal to really challenge capital.

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