Category Archives: Movements, History, Economic Power and Transformation: A Conversation with Gar Alperovitz

(This is the complete interview, in one file, that has previously appeared here as individual segments)
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In this segment, I explain the overall political economic philosophy behind Cleveland’s Evergreen Cooperatives, which I helped develop as a part of the Democracy Collaborative. By reinscribing worker ownership within a community framework, cooperatives like these can not just build a more equitable economy, but can help us get past the growth imperative and stave off ecological crisis.

Watch previous segments:

• Part 1: Inequality
• Part 2: “Socialism”
• Part 3: The Politics of the New Economy
• Part 4: New Possibilities, New Alternatives
• Part 5: The end of liberalism? Deadlock and decentralization

Interview shot and produced by Jordan Karr-Morse from Softbox Digital.

In this segment, I trace the path that led to our current political impasse, in which the scale of the economic and ecological crises we are facing continue to grow at the same time that we are increasingly unable at the federal level to democratically arrive at solutions to address them. One way out of this deadlock, which is in part occasioned by the impossibility of meaningful participatory democracy on a continental scale, might be a process of decentralization, devolving decision making down the regional level.

Watch previous segments:

• Part 1: Inequality
• Part 2: “Socialism”
• Part 3: The Politics of the New Economy
• Part 4: New Possibilities, New Alternatives

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In this segment, I emphasize the importance of having a real vision of the world we wish to see; if we don’t have an answer to the question “If you don’t like capitalism, and you don’t like state socialism, then what do you want?”, then there’s no reason to take what we’re saying seriously. My claim in the segment below is that we can ground our vision of this new system in existing economic practices of cooperation and community building…

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In this segment, I explain how we may be moving beyond the liberal model which seeks to regulate capitalism to something more egalitarian, participatory, and decentralized, grounded in the emerging new economy. Here, as in my book America Beyond Capitalism, I call this possible new system “the pluralist commonwealth.”

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