Gar Alperovitz: Internationally, there are countries going well beyond...

For 40 years, my argument has been that democratizing ownership of wealth has been the key to egalitarian society and the goals of egalitarian society. But you start at the local level, both at the workplace, community and other institutions and you reconstruct the egalitarian democratized structure as well as participatory structure. And as this happens, we learn more how to move toward the vision that is much larger than just the community level.

Gar Alperovitz

keys years moving

There are areas using what's called the "checkerboard strategy." They are different cities where you can move around the "checkerboard," doing things you can't do in every square, that you can do in some of them, building a mosaic of these kinds of practices. There are about 400 cable television networks, for example, that are publicly owned. That's a big fight for big private companies. In some areas, this is a political struggle, in some it's conventional common sense.

Gar Alperovitz

fighting struggle moving

We've been following many forms of democratized ownership, starting with co-ops, land banks at the neighborhood level, municipal ownership and state ownership of banks - there's a whole series of these that attempt to fill the small-scale infrastructure that can build up to a larger theoretical vision.

Gar Alperovitz

vision levels land

If you don't have a way to speak to ordinary Americans, you're not in the game.

Gar Alperovitz

games ordinary way

The reality of the world we live in is that people sometimes aren't interested in many circumstances; no matter how much young radicals yell at them, that isn't what they want to do right now.

Gar Alperovitz

reality people world

There has been a change in consciousness that makes this one of the most interesting periods of American history, maybe the most interesting. There's a loss of belief in the corporate system; there's a recognition that something is fundamentally wrong, So there's an opening to a whole different vision of where to go forward. I think that's where we are in the question, so let's not blow it; let's see what we can develop over time.

Gar Alperovitz

blow loss thinking

The top 400 people own more wealth now than the bottom 185 million Americans taken together. That is a medieval structure.

Gar Alperovitz

taken together people

We need to learn to listen to what the people need and want and not try to impose on them a whole schema that they may not. This is historically difficult stuff: how do we balance the project of raising consciousness, advancing a vision of utopia, with the real and honest engagement in real-world experiments?

Gar Alperovitz

vision real people

Worker-owned co-ops, on their own, floating in the market, tend to replicate the behavior of worker-owned capitalists in some circumstances. They sometimes develop positive participatory schemes, sometimes not. We know from the studies of worker-owned plywood companies in the US, they can tend to develop conservative attitudes, not socialist attitudes. So even though I'm an advocate of further democratization of the workplace, we also need to be building larger structures.

Gar Alperovitz

floating attitude needs

The federalism term is a good term, but it's just below the surface; it's just about to come up into wider public understanding that these practices are happening and are politically viable.

Gar Alperovitz

federalism understanding practice

I am interested in the political economy of institutional power relationships in transition. The question is one of "reconstructive" communities as a cultural, as well as a political, fact: how geographic communities are structured to move in the direction of the next vision, along with the question of how a larger system - given the power and cultural relationships - can move toward managing the connections between the developing communities. There are many, many hard questions here - including, obviously, ones related to ecological sustainability and climate change.

Gar Alperovitz

political community moving

Worker ownership is only one form of democratizing ownership.

Gar Alperovitz

ownership workers form

In America, we need to go forward in nationalizing several large corporations: I think that's possible; we nationalized General Motors; we nationalized several of the big banks, de facto; we nationalized Chrysler; we nationalized AIG. I think there will be more crises, and at some point, rather than being bailed out by the government, the public may keep the corporations it has to rescue.

Gar Alperovitz

government america thinking

In America, we need to develop communitywide structures of democratic ownership, we need to work out cooperative development, we need to work out participatory management, we need new ecological strategies developed at the local city, state, regional level.

Gar Alperovitz

work-out cities america

Parecon is a very tough-minded economic vision and model, and it sets a standard for us to look at.

Gar Alperovitz

tough vision looks

As we move toward the pluralist commonwealth, economic interventions that stabilize communities - for instance by localizing the flows of goods and services or by promoting worker ownership - not only have immediate practical benefits but provide the necessary preconditions for the growth and development of a renewed culture of sustainable democracy that can serve as the basis for still further transformations at larger scales.

Gar Alperovitz

growth community moving

Finding ways to organize work in which people are not locked into unequal power relationships is very important. Having said that, it's not easily done, and it's complicated.

Gar Alperovitz

important done people

Internationally, there are countries going well beyond the course, with airlines, transportation. There are systems around the world that have explored mining, rail transport, television, communication, Internet service - there very common examples around the world that we can draw examples from.