This article originally appeared in the June 11, 2012 issue of The Nation magazine , and was coauthored with Thomas Hanna. It’s time to put the taboo subject of public ownership back on the progressive agenda. It is the only way to solve some of the most serious problems facing the nation. We contend that it is [...]

Originally published  at Alternet. Activists, theorists, organizations and ordinary citizens are rebuilding the American political-economic system from the ground up. As our political system sputters, a wave of innovative thinking and bold experimentation is quietly sweeping away outmoded economic models. In a special five-part series edited by AlterNet’s Lynn Parramore, in partnership with political economist Gar Alperovitz of the [...]

History is paradoxical: Our politics are stalemated, our economy stagnating. But precisely because of this, literally thousands of new social and economic initiatives suggest the possibility, over time, of literally rebuilding the system from the bottom up.

Originally published in Shareable In this interview, Shareable publisher and editor Neal Gorenflo and P2P Foundation’s Michel Bauwens chat with Gar Alperovitz , the Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland and co-founder of the Democracy Collaborative . NG: In your book, America Beyond Capitalism, you say that 120 million Americans are involved in citizen-controlled cooperatives and credit [...]

AlterNet.org – Facebook’s founder is about to be worth $21 billion — thanks to the American public. Shouldn’t we get our share, too? On Monday, Bloomberg News estimated that Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s 27-year-old founder, will be worth about $21 billion based on his company’s forthcoming initial public offering. Although he won’t qualify (yet) for a slot among [...]

(This first appeared in  The Washington Post on March 7, 2012) This piece is part of an  On Leadership special feature exploring the present-day Iran tensions in the context of leadership lessons from crises confronted by Presidents Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy. First the shock of the atomic bomb, and then: a shock of questions. Though often taken for [...]

Local governments can find sources of revenue through innovative leveraging of public assets. This op-ed originally appeared in the Baltimore Sun and the Progressive City finances have long been under pressure, but the Great Recession and steady attacks on federal and state spending have compounded local financial difficulties. The National League of Cities’ annual research brief, City Fiscal Conditions, [...]

Inspired by the Occupy movements around the country, nearly two-thirds of a million Americans joined credit unions in the brief five weeks between the beginning of October and “Bank Transfer Day,” November 5, 2011. The mass movement created $4.5 billion in deposits – another sign that large numbers of people, fed up with Wall Street, are [...]

Here’s two videos making the connections between informed economic critique and the #Occupy movement/moment (I appear in some capacity in each of them). The first is from Econ4.org; it’s a powerful video version of the Economists Statement in Support of Occupy Wall Street: http://vimeo.com/32597394 The second is an interesting attempt to provide a “”Crash” Course for Occupy [...]

This article originally appeared in the November/December 2011 issue of Dollars and Sense. It is drawn from the new introduction to the 2011 edition of my book, America Beyond Capitalism . “Black Monday,” September 19, 1977, was the day 34 years ago when the shuttering of the Youngstown Sheet and Tube steel mill threw 5,000 steelworkers onto the [...]

The “occupations” now building around the country are a necessary and justified response to the outrages of a political-economic system that substitutes posturing for decision-making, and looks the other way as the top 1 percent runs off with almost a  fourth of the nation’s income and more wealth than the  bottom 90 percent taken together. The largely youth- [...]

In this segment, I explain the overall political economic philosophy behind Cleveland’s Evergreen Cooperatives , which I helped develop as a part of the Democracy Collaborative . By reinscribing worker ownership within a community framework, cooperatives like these can not just build a more equitable economy, but can help us get past the growth imperative and stave off ecological [...]

“Occupy Wall Street”—More of the same? Or Beginning of an “Evolutionary Revolution”? Asking: “What does ‘Occupy Wall Street’ want?” many commentators have jumped in with their suggested “practical demands”—everything from a “ financial transaction tax” and protecting “Dodd-Frank” to canceling mortgage debt and investigating Wall Street. Important as they are, traditional reforms clearly do not address the underlying issue that [...]

In this segment, I trace the path that led to our current political impasse, in which the scale of the economic and ecological crises we are facing continue to grow at the same time that we are increasingly unable at the federal level to democratically arrive at solutions to address them. One way out of this [...]

In this segment, I emphasize the importance of having a real vision of the world we wish to see; if we don’t have an answer to the question “If you don’t like capitalism, and you don’t like state socialism, then what do you want?”, then there’s no reason to take what we’re saying seriously. My [...]

In this segment, I explain how we may be moving beyond the liberal model which seeks to regulate capitalism to something more egalitarian, participatory, and decentralized, grounded in the emerging new economy . Here, as in my book America Beyond Capitalism , I call this possible new system “the pluralist commonwealth.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vLUZ3X6Eeo Watch previous segments: Part 1: Inequality Part 2: “Socialism” Interview shot and [...]

In this second segment, I examine the history of the idea of “socialism,” tracing out how the ideal of an egalitarian society has animated religious as well as secular movements for change. I also discuss the relationship of “socialism” to the state, and how the caricatured understanding of this relationship—where socialism is synonymous with ‘Big Government’—gets [...]