As every now knows — primary thanks to the Occupy movement — American society is more unequal than ever. The wealth gap is even far worse than most Americans think, with, for only one example, the ration of the pay of CEOs of major corporations to that of their average workers having gone from about 40 to 1 in the early 1970s to now more than 400 to 1 by most reports. And this wealth gap has both been created by explicit political actions (and non actions), as carefully analyzed by Hacker and Pearson in their excellent book, Winner Take All Politics, and reshaped the political landscape through gerrymandering, right-wing corporate domination of talk radio, the stacking of the courts, and a series of horrendous legal decisions, primarily the Citizens United case in which the court effectively abolished the ability of government to control campaign spending.
Thus, what has been the American vision, and self-understanding, of our democracy as a representative government characterized by “one person, one vote, has effectively become a corporate plutocracy, run by and for the “one percent.” And, as we organize and struggle to limit the disasters of such an effective corporate and right-wing “coup d’etat,” we recognize that this necessary and vital struggle is a long and up hill battle unless, and until, we change the underlying structure of our economy, which guarantees wealth and power to those at the apex of the global corporate conglomerates that control our economy and politics. So that while we continue to “fight in the trenches,” educating and mobilizing the populace to understand what has happened, and to limit, and where possible, to undo, the disasters of “one percent politics,” we need to begin to lay the groundwork for a more egalitarian and truly representative economy and politics.
In many places across this country, and often out of local necessity, that is fortunately already happening. We need to understand, popularize, and build on this emerging — “under the radar” — movement for “Building Community Wealth through Cooperative Community Economic Development.” The vision for this movement has been succinctly outlined by Gar Alperowitz in his book that I have taken as an organizing manual, What Then Must We Do? He has followed up that work with the creation of “The Next System Project.” These efforts are linked to many others, most notably The Democracy Collaborative and the Community Wealth web sites. I am seeking to implement this vision locally through the Long Island Progressive Coalition’s Task Force on “Building Community Wealth,” and statewide through the Citizen Action of New York’s Task Force of the same name.
Cooperative Development can be understood as a systemic effort to build an alternative democratic, effectively egalitarian, and truly representative economy within the interstecies of American corporate capitalism. (A suggestive understanding of this process is presented in Worker Cooperatives and Revolution, by Chris Wright.) Such a cooperative economy has numerous aspects, procedures, and structures, among which can be included movements supporting worker cooperatives, participatory budgeting, public banking, community land trusts, B corporations, credit unions, Mondragon-type integrated cooperatives — as with the Evergreen coops in Cleveland, linked to key community “anchor institutions” — and government-supported worker training and support centers. Of all of this, more to follow. But I invite everyone to start thinking of how you can participate wherever you are in this process of people taking control of their local economy.
dsprintz 