Gar Alperovitz is the author of What Then Must We Do?, America Beyond Capitalism, and The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, and an advocate for a new, community-sustaining economy.
It is increasingly obvious that the United States faces systemic problems. Income and wealth disparities have become severe and corrosive of democratic possibilities. Unemployment, poverty, and environmental challenges deepen day by day. Corporate power now dominates decision-making through lobbying, uncontrolled contributions, and political advertising. The planet itself is threatened by global warming. The lives of millions are compromised by economic and social pain. Our communities are in decay.
Is there any way forward?
In this accessible introduction, Gar Alperovitz and Steve Dubb outline the principles of an emerging alternative system, one based on projects emerging all across America which democratize wealth, decentralize power, rebuild communities, and help create a sustainable future.
As Mitt Romney and the Republican establishment continues to attack President Obama for daring to claim that business owners depend on public infrastructure to make a profit, many commentators on the left are pointing out the irony of how such and such Republican business person decrying the “you didn’t build that” line received such and such direct subsidy from the government. But this misses the larger point: in a technologically advanced society like our own, gains in productivity are overwhelmingly attributable first and foremost to the rapidly growing common inheritance of human knowledge, a point I explored in depth in my book with Lew Daly, Unjust Deserts.
The biggest “theft” by the 1 percent has been of the primary source of wealth - knowledge - for its own benefit.
Knowledge? Yes, of course, and increasingly so. The fact is, most of what we call wealth is now known to be overwhelmingly the product of technical, scientific and other knowledge - and most of this innovation derives from socially inherited knowledge, at that. Which means that, except for trivial amounts, it was simply not created by the 1 percent who enjoy the lion’s share of its benefits. Most of it was created, historically, by society - which is to say, minimally, the other 99 percent.
Basically the story is that we have moved from a labor-intensive, small-scale farming economy to a knowledge-based information economy. In the process, the sources of growth have changed, but it’s important to understand that individuals have not really changed. We work no harder today than our ancestors did in 1800 or in the ancient past, and just the same, we are no more intelligent, in terms of basic brain capacity and reasoning ability. The cave paintings of earliest human culture are works of roughly the same basic intelligence as the theory of relativity. Let’s hold that thought: Essentially, we work no harder and are no more intelligent than our ancestors from the near or even the ancient past.
And yet our economy is more than 1,000 times larger than it was in 1800, and the best measure of prosperity, per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP)—the amount of output the economy generates for every person—is twenty times higher today than it was in the early nineteenth century (it was $42,000 in 2006, the equivalent of almost $170,000 for a family of four). The key to this growth, experts agree, is rising productivity, usually measured in terms of the amount of output per hour of work, which rose more than fifteen-fold since 1870.
Americans face a unique challenge in solving the climate crisis. Unlike other Western countries and Japan, where population is projected to be relatively constant, the U.S. population is set to grow by at least 100 million—and likely 150 million—people by 2050. Where and under what conditions these people live present serious challenges to sustainability planning. American cities today are so spatially and economically unstable that anything beyond superficial sustainability planning is impossible.
Alternatively, we can radically change existing community and regional planning strategies to more sustainably house and serve the growing population. Fortunately, emerging approaches are capable of helping with this shift. One involves building local economies that anchor capital in place through community, worker, or public forms of ownership—so-called green community wealth strategies. By linking such stabilizing forms of economic organization to democratic forms of local, regional, and national planning, cities can regain the capacity to target jobs and investment to specific locations.
Beyond Throwaway Cities
A good starting point is a clear understanding of America’s “throwaway city” habit. Simply put, as jobs move in and out of cities in uncontrolled ways we literally throw away housing, roads, schools, hospitals, and public facilities—only to have to build the same facilities elsewhere at great financial, energy, and carbon costs. All the while, the instability makes it impossible to carry out coherent transportation and high-density housing planning.
The most dramatic examples are places like Detroit and Cleveland, where the devastated landscape in many areas looks like bombed-out World War II cities. But these cases are not exceptional. Of the 112 largest U.S. cities in 1950 with populations over 100,000, 56—fully half of them—had experienced population decline by 2008. The people moved elsewhere, where all the usual facilities had to be built anew to serve them—and, built under conditions that were inherently likely to be subject to future instability and disruption. Read More »
I had the honor of being invited to speak to the audience of the New Economics Institute’s “Strategies for a New Economy” conference from June 8-10 at Bard College in New York:
"This book offers by far the most serious, intellectually grounded strategy for system-changing yet to appear. It could be the most important movement-building book of the new century..."
—Daniel Ellsberg, author of Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers
"Concrete and feasible ways to reverse the ominous course of the past several decades and to open the way to a vibrant democracy with a sustainable economy…
A marvelous book…I recommend it all the time"
—Noam Chomsky
"Highly readable; excellent for students…. A tonic and eye-opener for anyone who wants a politics that works."
—Jane Mansbridge, President-Elect, American Political Science Association, Adams Professor, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
AMERICA BEYOND CAPITALISM
Agenda
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