Little noticed by most Americans, Merriam Webster, one of the world’s most important dictionaries, announced a few months ago that the two most looked-up words in 2012 were “socialism” and “capitalism.” Traffic for the pair on the company’s website roughly doubled from the year before. The choice was a “kind of no-brainer,” observed editor at large, [...]

My new book, What Then Must We Do? Straight Talk About the Next American Revolution  is beginning to hit bookstore shelves, and should be available to ship online next week.  In the meantime, here’s an interview with Laura Flanders exploring the themes of the book: http://blip.tv/grittv/gar-alperovitz-we-are-living-in-the-pre-history-of-the-next-american-revolution-6545030 You can read the transcript of the interview here.  And mark your [...]

President Obama is Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” – the first Democratic president to receive two consecutive popular-vote majorities since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Yet these are clearly tough times for progressives. Everything progressives have fought for is seemingly on the chopping block nationally, and in many states and cities. Programs are being cut; public assets are [...]

Social pain, anger at ecological degradation and the inability of traditional politics to address deep economic failings has fueled an extraordinary amount of practical on-the-ground institutional experimentation and innovation by activists, economists and socially minded business leaders in communities around the country. A vast democratized  “new economy”  is slowly emerging throughout the United States. The general public, however, [...]

This post was originally published by Commondreams.org The workers of the just-formed  New Era Windows cooperative in Chicago—the same workers who sat in and forced Serious Energy to back down on a hasty shutdown of their Goose Island plant a few months ago, and famously occupied the same factory for six days in December 2008—not only are putting together [...]

Originally published on Truthout The recent Public Banking conference held in Philadelphia offered a message that is at once so simple – but also so bold – it is hard for most Americans to pause long enough to understand how profoundly their thinking had been corralled by the masters of finance – in ways far, far, [...]

The Cleveland Model: building green worker cooperatives within a community framework that leverages the procurement power of non-profit anchor institutions:

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- [...]