Name: America Beyond Capitalism
ISBN: 9780471790020

America Beyond Capitalism

In America Beyond Capitalism, noted political economist and historian Gar Alperovitz argues that the first decade of the 21st Century is producing conditions that will force the United States to undergo historic changes. Neither Democrats nor Republicans have until now had coherent responses to these challenges.The book builds upon the latest scholarship, theoretical and empirical as well as practical developments at the state and local level to produce systematic proposals for the progressive rebuilding of a democratic America. (From the author's web site.)

What Hacker News says

dbinghamNov 2017

Worker co-ops in and of themselves aren't a novel idea. Universally replacing the stock corporation (thus doing away with the mechanism of equity financing) in favor of worker co-ops is an idea that seems to be largely absent from our public debate. There are definitely people exploring it, The Next System Project [1], Democracy Collaborative [2], and Foundation for a New Economics [3] have all toyed with it to varying degrees.

But I don't know that I've really seen anyone make a strong case for it (in a way digestible to the layment). Richard Wolff wrote about it in Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism but not in a way that was very digestible for the average reader. Gar Alperovitz has also written about it in What Now Must We Do? and America Beyond Capitalism, but in both cases he wasn't specifically making the argument for universally replacing the Stock Corporation with Worker Cooperatives, but more generally increasing the prevalence of cooperatives (worker, member, and multi-stakeholder) and decreasing the power of capital.

I'd really like to write a book, digestible by the average American, making the case for the universal replacement of the stock corporation with the worker cooperative and speculating about what impacts that might have on society (using evidence to support the speculation as much as possible).

[1] https://thenextsystem.org/ [2] https://democracycollaborative.org/ [3] http://neweconomics.org/

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dollarFeb 2014

More socialist propaganda.

The Economic Policy Institute was founded in 1986 by Jeff Faux, who was previously the co-director of the National Center for Economic Alternatives (NCEA). As its name suggests, the NCEA specialized in offering “alternatives”—alternatives characterized as “radical” in The New York Times—to mainstream U.S. domestic policy.

NCEA‘s co-director was Gar Alperovitz, now a University of Maryland professor and author of America Beyond Capitalism. Prior to working at the NCEA, Alperovitz co-authored the essay collection Strategy and Program: Two Essays Toward a New American Socialism, where he advocated using socialist ideas to make the United States a “fairer” nation.

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