Boy, oh boy, do we need this book? The Left, it seems, has been in headlong retreat - politically, ideologically, and intellectually - for decades now, with the end of the postwar boom, the fall of Communism in the East and the (still unfolding) crisis of Social Democracy in the West, accompanied by a full-blown counterattack by capital. We are all familiar with the results: falling wages, the energy crisis, recession, the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, the "financialization" of capital, the Third World debt crunch, the decline of organized labor, cutbacks in social provision, downsizing and global restructuring, deregulation, privatization, and the sorry tale of a quarter-century's political and ideological swing to the right. What's left of the "official" Left (American liberalism, the rump of the European social democratic movements whose leaderships sold out long ago to become the craven servants of power) is - at best - still splashing away far downstream from where the real action is, seeking a way forward among the muddy puddles of 'tax-and-spend' transfer policies and modest redistribution left behind by the high tide of Keynesianism and the welfare state. The antiglobalization movement may have brought with it some renewed sense of energy and hope that "another world is possible," but often seems to lack any convincing comprehensive vision of what an alternative political-economic system might look like.
Into this valley of ashes steps Gar Alperovitz with a vital new progressive vision and a realistic politics of how to get there. Better known as a historian and author of the definitive book on the decision to use the atomic bomb, Alperovitz is also a distinguished political-economist, and this is obviously where his heart really lies. A veteran of the Civil Rights and Antiwar movements who also spent considerable time in the halls of power on Capitol Hill (nearly averting the Vietnam War single-handedly when he almost succeeded in getting his boss, Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, to amend the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution!), he was a prime mover in attempts to protect rustbelt communities from the terrible effects of industrial decline through the development of viable economic alternatives. The initial fight for worker-ownership in the Steel industry was lost, but in the process Alperovitz began to ponder the lessons and to develop a more coherent and systematic alternative political-economic model for the long haul.
Alperovitz eschews the all-too-common habit of progressive writers of lapsing into a litany of complaint, though at the same time his unsparing eye ranges over the deteriorating trends with regard to liberty, wealth ownership and equality, social mobility, working time, environmental protection and democratic participation. His accounts of the growing fiscal crisis - with even the most conservative estimates showing a deteriorating fiscal environment in which the projected federal deficit for the coming decade is $5 trillion, or as much as $7.5 trillion if the surplus in the Social Security Trust Fund is set aside - and of the coming crises in retirement and health care and the "squeeze" on the middle class are devastating in their implications, both for traditional progressive strategies of 'tax-and-spend' and for the social health of the nation as a whole. Without another way forward, the U.S. in the coming decades will face a crumbling economic and social infrastructure and an even more starkly polarized society of "haves" and "have-nots," lorded over by a now even more egregious version of the "super-elites" who did so well out of the corporate hogwallow and looting spree of the 1990s.
Against this grim canvas, however, Alperovitz paints the picture of a veritable explosion of institutional innovations at the grass-roots level in which worker-owned firms, community development corporations, land trusts, public pension funds and municipal enterprises are proliferating on the ground, accompanied by an ever-more sophisticated academic literature pointing to the way in which new principles of wealth-ownership can be used to benefit small and large publics over time. The implications of Alperovitz's argument are immense: just as capitalism itself was a sixteenth-century development of institutions that had grown up in the cracks and interstices of the old feudal order, so it is that the economic institutions and arrangements of the next economic system will, in all probability, come from late capitalist innovations.
This book, then, is an absolute gem - laying out, in broad brush-strokes (though supported on every page by a wealth of data and analysis), what might seem ludicrous if it wasn't so well-reasoned and tightly-argued: that we are beginning to approach the point where we will have the institutional and political basis for the transformation of American capitalism into a system truly capable of sustaining liberty, equality, democracy, community and environmental sustainability. Add to this the possibility of a knock-on effect that breaks the "iron triangles" of corporate and elite power behind the recent resurgence of militarism and imperialist adventurism in the United States, and we may just have the recipe for a wholesale rejuvenation and reanimation of the political Left as a force capable of - and with a programmatic agenda for - system-wide political-economic change. Much will depend on the widespread dissemination of the powerful and original ideas at the core of this careful but vastly ambitious book.
As Alperovitz himself acknowledges, his book is intended as the beginning of a serious conversation about long-term change, not the end. Where actual experiments with alternative economic institutions have been attempted on the ground, they have been closely studied and a rich academic and activist literature has built up. This is only a start. We need the equivalent of Che Guevara's "two, three, many Vietnams," a rich proliferation of real-world experiments with new economic models and institutions. We need to reanimate the idea of an alternative political economy for the twenty-first century, based on values of justice, equality, democracy, solidarity and sustainability. The capitalists and their usual pack of running dogs and apologists will no doubt scorn and resist each and every one of our attempts along the way: in return, as Alperovitz shows by the shining example of his deeply moral vision, we need only the simple determination that, whatever else may happen, they shall not impoverish our imaginations too.
