Customer Reviews

America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty, and Our Democracy

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

The year 2004 has seen a heartening upswing in progressive activity, largely in response to the abuses of the Bush Administration at home and abroad. But whichever way the election turns out, all those who care about progressive values have some difficult questions to ponder: why, in spite of our best efforts, do things seem to be getting worse, not better, on so many fronts, from environmental destruction to runaway consumerism to heightened poverty to international violence?

Gar Alperovitz has had his eye on the bigger picture for a long time, and in "America Beyond Capitalism" he shares with us a hopeful yet hard-headed vision of what a dramatically reformed political economy might look like, a political economy which could reinforce, not undermine, democratic aspirations. In the process, he encourages liberals and progressives to see beyond the obvious and depressing fact that mainstream liberalism in the U.S. is a spent political force, and recognize other promising avenues for bottom-up change, such as the emergence in the last 30 years of a slew of grassroots-based democratic econoimc alternatives.

But this book is much more than just cheerleading for progressives. It also makes a major intellectual contribution by tackling the fundamental structural issues that a healthy 21st century democracy must confront: the question of scale and the proper locus of political authority; the question of wealth inequality and who controls our vast technological inheritance; the question of time and how we might convert productivity gains into greater free time; deep-seated gender inequalities that are reinforced by our current organization of work and space; and perhaps most difficult of all, the question of how to achieve ecological sustainability. Many writers have dealt with one or two of these issues, but this is the best effort yet to discuss all of them in an integrated fashion...and to do so in a sober, politically realistic way that doesn't assume that achieving serious change will be an easy proposition or that mere exhortation is enough. I experienced reading this book as an intellectual breakthrough on many levels, and I'm sure others will as well.

Finally, it should be noted that you don't have to think of yourself as on the "left" or even as progressive to find great value in this book. Show this book to friends disillusioned by politics, to political moderates who are worried about the ability of our political system to deal with our most pressing problems, and to honest conservatives who recognize that the new corporate state threatens traditional conception of entrepreneurial liberty. Show this book to anyone willing to take a hard look at the problems and possibilities the 21st century will offer to Americans.

Ultimately, this book is an invitation to a far-reaching civic conversation about the future direction of our country. Large-scale changes in American society in the next half-century are inevitable; the only question is what form they will take. "America Beyond Capitalism" persuaded me that there is a REAL possibility in the coming generations for far more dramatic progressive change in the U.S. than most of us have been willing yet to imagine.

I give this book five stars for orginality and scholarship and three for the quality of the writing.

The ideas presented here hold the key to future progressive political success. Unfortunately, most political activists on the Left are not aware of the rich history of democratic localism that progressives can draw on to win a progressive governing majority. This book is the antidote to this lack of awareness. By studying "America Beyond Capitalism" progressive thinkers and activists can learn how to develop popular policies that will earn the trust of the American electorate.

However, the quality of writing leaves much to be desired. The writing style too frequently degenerates into tiring catalogues of examples that could be easily summarized, allowing the curious reader to more easily absorb the main theme, while still having the option of researching examples by looking at the original sources cited. This is why I give it only three stars for the quality of the writing.

Overall, I give this book four stars and I highly recommend it to any progressive who is seriously interested in building a progressive governing majority in the 21st century.

I just saw author Gar Alperovitz interviewed on C-Span this morning about his new book, "America Beyond Capitalism."(The program is now available on line on the site's archive section, if you didn't see it.) In these days of political obfuscation, spin, and government policies that bear little relationship to reality, Alperovitz's common sense analysis of the shortcomings of the American political-economic system, and alternative ways of organizing our country's work and wealth, is a breath of fresh air.

Progressives will find this book particularly insightful, inspiring, and thought-provoking (something we need in these dark political times). Much more than an indictment of our national ills, "America Beyond Capitalism" offers a serious vision of what America could be like if we began living up to our treasured national values of liberty, equality, and democracy. The book is based on a wealth of data and a comprehensive review of the literature (more than 70 pages of end notes for you scholars out there), but it is one of the most accessible and personal books about "politics" you will ever read, based on the author's own political involvement since the early 1960s.

The book is also filled with mind-boggling facts about our society that most of us - even those who follow the daily news and are deeply involved in politics - simply are unaware of. For example: 2/10ths of 1% of us made more money selling stocks and bonds in 1999 [the latest year available] than all other taxpayers put together; corporate taxes as a share of Federal revenues fell from 35% in 1945 to 7.4% in 2003; the country's top tax bracket fell from 91% after World War II to 35% after the Bush tax cuts; the top 5% of wealth holders in America own 70% of stocks, bonds, and private businesses. The author convincingly demonstrates that this growing concentration of wealth is continuing and escalating. The result: America's democracy is being subverted by rampant inequities. And yet neither major political party is proposing anything meaningful to address the fact that our nation is becoming what amounts to a feudal/medieval society.

The most important contribution of the book, in my view, is that the author begins to sketch out the framework for a new "system" - neither capitalist nor socialist, liberal nor conservative. (As an historian, Alperovitz notes that political-economic systems come and go; though we may think our corporate-dominated market economy is "the end of history," he argues that our era is already witnessing pressures that will force the U.S. to undergo historic system change.) To advance the creation of this new system, he offers concrete proposals for alternative ways to hold wealth that could benefit the great majority, and suggests ways that political participation could be expanded, how work could be organized so that we have more leisure, how the environment could be protected, and much more. This is a compelling book; highly recommended; a perfect catalyst for stirring debate and discussion.

This author asks the right questions, difficult questions. What would a vision worth fighting for look like? What are its elements? How do we create a new vision that might mobilize people? What really makes sense if we want an equitable, sustainable democracy?

It then offers some really interesting answers, based on real-world experiences. It also offers a pathway or a strategy to achieve real change. This is not just another list of wished for policy-prescriptions, nor is it utopian (except in the very best sense of the word).

The author offers a powerful critique of our current situation. But then ... and I am repeating myself because I think it is soooo sorrowfully rare ... it offers a vision, an achievable, real-world vision, of how to reconstruct our political economic system as if democracy and equality really matter.

If you read one "political" book this year, this should be it. It will introduce you not only to Gar Alperovitz's ideas but also to many of the most interesting experiments, critics, and thinkers from all over the political spectrum.

The author is concerned that at this point in our history our ideals of liberty, equality, and democracy have been seriously eroding as never before. By far the most relevant development given by the author is the growing concentration of wealth in the US among the richest 1 percent and thereby their immense power to control the political-economic system. In this highly tilted environment, traditional popular political approaches are largely ineffective - systemic changes are needed. However, the author's proposals scarcely go "beyond capitalism," being reformist at best, and do little to enhance the little "d" democracy that is so important in a democracy.

Because wealth-holding is so central in our society, the author proposes changes in forms of ownership and the distribution of capital. He gives examples of ownership by municipalities, non-profits, and other non-government entities mostly in the areas of low-income housing and utility ownership, none of which are particularly economically transforming to the citizenry. He suggests that ESOPs are empowering to workers, yet he readily admits that most ESOPs do not even have voting rights. There have always been worker cooperatives and direct worker ownership in the US, but hardly at the level of being a countervailing force to huge for-profit corporations owned by anonymous stockholders. His suggestions to decentralize the US into regional political entities, like virtually all of his proposals, do not enhance participation for citizens.

The author notes that major crises in this nation, such as the Great Depression or WWII, have spurred the most profound changes. The author hints at the fact that it may well be the excesses of elites and corporations that will generate the next significant political-economic changes. Forces of globalization, the cheap labor afforded by immigration, growing perceptions of unreasonable inequality, a health care industry increasingly at odds with the health of the American public, the diminishment and jeopardization of retirement income, and perpetual war - all may well combine to stimulate profound changes. As the author acknowledges, it is likely that the situation may have to get worse before action is taken.

The book, though not particularly long, manages to be repetitious and tedious with excessive cataloging of various agencies, programs, and advocates. The book is hardly a far left treatise. Capitalism may get a strong rebuke, but that is the extent of it. His vaguely presented schemes to redistribute wealth are highly bureaucratic, bypassing worker control. Overall this book is a disappointment in its lack of specific suggestions for empowering citizens in all areas, public and private.

This book is remarkable in that it advocates a dramatic societal transformation, but does so in a practical and realistic manner. Gar describes the new social order as a "Pluralist Commonwealth", a society based on civil liberty, means of shared wealth ownership, and decentralized, democratic institutions.

The book's real strength is that it does not rely solely on theory. Even though much time is devoted to developing Alperovitz's perspective on the adverse effects of wealth concentration (a perspective backed with an avalanche of statistics), most of the book is a broad overview of presently existing, but quite obscure, institutions. Credit unions, worker coops, municipally owned housing, non-tax based government revenue, individual development accounts, and community development corporations (just to name a few institutions mentioned) are all studied in both historical development and contemporary application. It becomes easier to envision a new society when the nascent institutions which, the new society will be based on already exists. No abstract theory here, just tangible examples of alternatives to the neo-liberal order.

The book's title should not discourage conservatives though. Act's of conservative activist and politicians are also touched down on and praised for utilizing pluralist commonwealth principles. This is truly a book for everyone.

Just what the doctor ordered for someone seeking answers to the US problems. Gar clarifies routes we can take to ensure the US retains at least some of the characteristics for which it was created. I especially smiled when he showed the reasoning behind attempts to use the Constitution as a guide and not as a pacifier, the way the right does.

Now, I'm a card-carrying progressive, and I watch every liberal documentary and read every progressive/leftie/ecological book that comes down the pike. But this book is blazingly boring. I bought it because it has great blurbs on the back, and it has a promising index (any book that has Herman Daly, Juliet Schor, and Kirkpatrick Sale in its index has to be good, right?). But the content has no soul whatsoever. I had never read anything by Alperovitz before, so I don't know if his prior work is any better. But this one is a yawner. I mean, I never skip through passages of liberal policy books, but I just had to scan through significant portions of this stuff. It's just that dry and uninspiring. I guess maybe this is for policy wonks only. But if you're a layperson, don't bother. Pick up "Going Local," or the new annotated version of "Small is Beautiful" instead. You'll find it much better going.

Gar Alperovitz is a rare individual who combines a razor-sharp mind with a solid academic training, a public service background in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, a political activist working with Rev. Martin Luther King and other inspiring progressives, and a life-long commitment to thinking creatively about fundamental social change.

Alperovitz summarizes his vision of a Pluralist Commonwealth alternative to American capitalism in four points (p. 233). First, "there is no way to achieve movement toward greater equality without developing new institutions that hold wealth on behalf of small and large publics." Second, "there is no way to rebuild Democracy with a big D in the system as a whole without nurturing the conditions of democracy...in everyday life---including the economic institutions that allow and sustain greater stability of local community life." Third, "there is no way to achieve democracy...without radical decentralization". Finally, "there is no way to achieve meaningful individual liberty in the modern era without individual economic security and greater amounts of free time---and that neither of these, in turn, is possible without a change in the ownership of wealth".

Alperovitz' Pluralist Commonwealth is thus a radical vision of an extremely democratic, participatory, economically and politically egalitarian alternative to our present system. It is perhaps not unfair to say that this vision is a mature and elaborated development of the famous Students for a Democratic Society's Port Huron Statement of 1962---a document that inspired a generation of phenomenally successful youth movements that overturned the staid conservatism of mid-Twentieth century America and gave us racial emancipation, gender equality, and the termination of the Vietnam War. The beauty of the Port Huron vision was that it is a thoroughly democratic and populist alternative both to capitalism and the sort of socialism preached in Europe or practiced in the Soviet Union and China of the period. Alperovitz speaks for real progressives today, providing a proactive vision rather than a list of defensive gripes (anti-globalization, anti-global warming, anti-World Trade Organization, anti-child labor, etc.).

In a larger sense, Alperovitz presents a Jeffersonian vision of a possible future in which the little guy reigns supreme, and the Hamiltonian financiers and their ilk are cut down to size. Samuel Bowles and I affirmed this tradition in our book "Capitalism and Democracy" (Basic Books, 1985), and elaborated upon the theme using the key concept of "productivity-enhancing asset-based redistribution," which is a redistribution of assets that both increases wealth equality and improves the efficiency and productivity of the economy (Alperovitz cites our work in developing the theme of wealth equality). A central example is land reform, in which peasants move from being share-croppers and wage workers to being small farmers. Such a move is egalitarian because it shifts ownership from large landlords to landless peasants, and is efficiency-enhancing because peasants work more efficiently when they are residual claimants on their activities than when the landlord is the residual claimant.

Many potential readers will reject Alperovitz' argument out of hand because, however plausible his claim that a Pluralist Commonwealth could work, we can never get there because people are too short-sighted, conventional, and timorous. This would be a mistake. As Alperovitz stresses, social change is often in fact very rapid. Indeed, no one would have believed in 1970 that we live in a world without a Soviet Union, where socialism is dead, where China and India are rising capitalist powers, and where gender and racial inequality have been dealt death blows in the advanced capitalist world. Alperovitz is correct is claiming that anyone with a really good idea for a social alternative has a fighting chance to see it adopted.

Are Alperovitz' ideas sufficiently cogent that his Pluralist Commonwealth is a viable alternative? Let me say first that I think this issue deserves much more consideration by serious economists and policy makers; indeed, it would be great if about half of those whose social vision is limited to minor alteration in the status quo shifted their efforts towards assessing and validating or rejecting Alperovitz' suggestions, and where he falls short, of supplying workable alternatives. That said, I am not convinced that a Pluralist Commonwealth is either feasible or desirable.

Alperovitz' starting point is that our current system is falling apart, with increasing inequality, political cronyism, and the concomitant alienation of the citizenry. For this reason, we desperately need an alternative or our society will fall apart in coming years. I do not believe that this is at all the case. First, while there is more inequality that in previous periods (e.g., the 1970's), inequality is an abstraction that has virtually no political meaning. People simply don't care about inequality. They care about justice, legitimacy, opportunity for advancement, and helping those who suffer. The fact that there are monstrously wealthy people around is no more disturbing to the average voter than the fact that there are fabulously successful entertainment and sports figures. The idea that being very rich is in itself a social pathology is simply not entertained by most citizens. Of course, if wealth is achieved through illegitimate means, then there will be a public backlash, as in the case of obscene CEO salaries in periods where most people are forced to cut back. However, it is not the case, and it is not perceived to be the case, that the distribution of wealth is substantially the product of illegitimate behavior.

Similarly, citizens in the United States have deeply ambivalent feelings about politicians and are wary of corruption and special interest group power. However, these failing can be substantially mitigated by electoral finance and lobbying reform, and voters are likely to make themselves heard in achieving such reforms if they really care enough. The idea that we must move to a radically decentralized political system to achieve democratic accountability is simply not plausible. Moreover, there is an important fact to which progressives appear to be congenitally blind: there is much more room for corruption and favoritism in local politics than in national politics. The notion that the average citizen has more political power in a decentralized participatory democracy than in our standard representative democracy is just wrong. Local politics is generally monopolized by as small minority of individuals with the skill and inclination of spending long hours in meetings and making deals.

Alperovitz' support for worker-owned firms as a building block of a Pluralist Commonwealth is, unfortunately, misguided and unsupported by the facts. Alperovitz gives many examples of successful worker- and community-owned enterprises, but these are just isolated examples, incapable of being generalized to the whole economy. The problem with worker-owned firms that such firms cannot benefit from portfolio diversification in the way capitalist firms can. Except in a few cases, workers have no interest in sinking all their assets in the firm in which they work, because this doubles their risk exposure: if the business does poorly, they not only lose income, but their wealth base as well. Indeed, industrial capitalism took off precisely when limited liability was instituted, so firms could benefit from the separation of ownership and management of the enterprise.

One of Alperovitz' points, make long ago by proponents of wealth redistribution with the context of a private enterprise market system, is that the modern corporation separates ownership and control, so there is no efficiency loss in redistributing ownership broadly to citizens, rather than a wealthy elite. This argument, however, is incorrect. When ownership is really separated from control, the managers of the firm will exploit the owners ruthlessly, as we see in the current rash of corporate managerial scandals. Large stockholders---the very rich---play a key role in disciplining the firm's managers. A broad redistribution of ownership would have to be accompanied by some social mechanism for disciplining those who control the firm, be they workers or managers.

My remarks may seem like I am trying to rain on Alperovitz' picnic, and indeed, I certainly do not want to dissuade potential readers from diving into the exciting issues he raises in this engaging book. Rather, I believe there are more mundane tasks that we might address and solve successfully before we take on the system as a whole. These include poverty, world-leve inequality, political authoritarianism, patriarchal cultures, global warming, and environment sustainability. I fervently hope these issues can be addressed without total system change, because total system change is not feasible in the foreseeable future, even if one remains well aware of the rapid pace of historical social change.