Cure for “bads” of capitalism outlined by economist Richard Wolff in 15-minute video

To cure the “bads” of capitalism, change how the system of production is organized

No 698 Posted by fw, March 19, 2013

Employment’s up, wealth’s up, but the benefits of both are increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few. Welcome to capitalism, says Richard Wolff. In a 15-minute interview, Wolff provides an easy to understand explanation of the “bads” of capitalism and suggests some alternatives, including “worker self-directed enterprises”, which have the potential to democratize the economy, and US society.

Watch Laura Flander’s interview with Richard Wolff below, followed by my own transcript with added inline links, highlighted text, and SEE ALSO links. Alternatively, watch Laura’s GRITtv version, without a transcript, by clicking on the following linked title.

Rick Wolff: A Cure for Capitalism? Laura Flanders in conversation with Richard Wolff, GRITtv, March 12, 2013

TRANSCRIPT

Laura Flanders (LF) – Guess what the most searched terms were in the Merriam-Webster online dictionary in 2012? – capitalism and socialism. Well, seeing that, I realized clearly there is a need for more definition and understanding. So who better to talk to about what some of these words mean and to give us a primer on where we are economically speaking as we enter 2013 than our next guest, GritTV regular. Rick Wolff is a professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and he’s the author most recently of Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism, just out from Haymarket Press.

Let’s start with the “s” one, socialism. What’s it mean?

Defining socialism

Richard Wolff (RW) – Basically, it’s an alternative to capitalism. That’s how it arose. It was the idea that capitalism focuses on the individual entrepreneur and the individual worker and an awful lot of people said that gave short shrift to the larger community of which every individual is a part. So they used this word ‘socialism’ being interested in their community. So socialism developed as an alternative. Another way to put it is that capitalism as a system that took over from feudalism and became the dominant system in the world always produced people who were critical of it alongside people who thought it was great. And the people who were critical took this term ‘socialism’ as a kind of catchall term to talk about those ideas and those features of our society that folks who were critical thought were a problem. In simplest terms, maybe the way to put it, if you were a person who lives in capitalism but has concluded that the world can do better than capitalism, you’re probably a socialist.

Defining capitalism

Capitalism is a peculiar arrangement for the economy. A worker cuts a deal with an employer. I agree to come to work, 9 to 5, five days a week, you agree to pay me and out of this agreement we will get together. The problem is, when you do that of course, that you put conflict right at the core of the system because the employer wants to get as much out of you while paying you the least possible and the worker wants to get the biggest salary possible, so there’s conflict built in. And that means a lot of people who are supervisors and forepersons to watch because it’s a conflicted system, but it is a way of organizing production, for example, from the old way, landlord-serf as in feudalism, or master-slave as in slavery, and we have a system in which everything then is a deal. And the deal of the worker and the employer is matched by the other big deal – buying and selling.

LF – Well, so where does the extra come from? And I mean if I’m giving you some of my labor in return for a salary and you’re getting in return for my labor a thing getting made that you can sell, how do stockholders, shareholders get rich?

Capitalism is a system which pays you less than what your labor produces

RW – It’s called a surplus, a very old idea; it’s been as old as capitalism because capitalism is a wonderful example. You know, you know, I know, everybody knows that if you go and sit down with an employer and you discuss the job you’d like to get, and you and the employer finally work it out and now comes the big one – how much am I going to get paid? – and you work that out, and let’s say it’s, oh, $20 an hour. So you agree to come forty hours a week typically, you will get paid $20 an hour. What do you already know? You know that the employer would never pay you $20 an hour if in that hour that you worked you didn’t produce more than $20 worth of extra for your employer to sell, because the way capitalism works, is you use your brains and muscles to work. You produce goods and services. At the end of the day you go home, the goods and the services stay there. And if you take them with you people in blue uniforms come and bother you. So you know, you leave it there. And you know, too, that they would only pay you $20 an hour, or fifty or a thousand if in that hour you added more of what they sell than it cost them to hire you. You produce more than you get. And I know this upsets particularly Americans who watch these explanations because we would all like to believe that we would never work for anyone who doesn’t pay us what we’re worth. Capitalism, however, is a system that cannot and will never do that. It will only pay you less than what your labor produces for them. And that’s where profit comes from. And that’s where the stock market is manipulative to get its hands on that profit.

LF – How do we get to a situation where we find ourselves – such as the one we find ourselves in today – where we have 400 families earning essentially the equivalent of a 180 million other people, because clearly the little bit extra that you’ve talked about doesn’t necessarily lead to this setup that we have here? Or does it?

Corporations control the economy

RW – It does. That’s what people have to understand. First of all most of the business in the United States is done by a thousand or two thousand large corporations. I know we love to celebrate the mom and pop businesses, the little restaurant, the little workshop, and we have lots of those. And they’re important. But in terms of what controls the economy, it’s huge corporations who number employees in the hundreds of thousands. So now think about it. The major shareholders of most big corporations are a tiny number of people — ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred. That’s it. And a 100,000 people are working, each of whom is producing a surplus. You put all that together, you get that. And you know you shouldn’t be surprised. That’s not so different from ancient societies. Go back to ancient Greece, ancient Egypt. You had lots of people working but all the surplus that each of them produced ended up in the hands of somebody who could build over his entire lifetime the pyramids that we still see. It’s a little bit like that.

Capitalism is delivering the ‘bads’ year after year

The last quarter we produced less. Our economy went down. We are producing more but it’s going to a smaller number of people. And the stock market is doing well because our businesses are more and more dependent on other parts of the world where they’re doing business – China, India, Latin America. They’re making money there, and for them that’s the growth area, that’s the explosive future. The United States is becoming the backwater order for large corporations and it shows because they’re not interested in sustaining public services. They’re not interested and we’re watching a capitalism – which I like to put it this way because it shocks people – capitalism delivers the goods for a very small number of people. For the rest of us, capitalism is delivering the “bads” and it’s doing so year after year.

The first thing about a cure – like anyone will tell you – is you have to recognize that you have a problem. Right? You have to recognize that there’s something wrong, that there’s an illness, that there’s a difficulty, because if you don’t then a curse is going to work because you’re not set up for it. That’s why I think people are looking up capitalism [in the dictionary]. They know that the problem isn’t this or that official or this or that law or this or that decision by this or that company. There’s something bigger going on that involves a whole society. So the notion that system is broken is more and more in the air and they want to understand this system which they took for granted which they believed, with the propaganda, was the best thing that had ever been developed. And now they’re willing to ask. And that’s crucial. That opens the space for people like me to come in and say, you know there are alternatives. And I call it a cure because I want that metaphor of illness-cure to be in the air.

So what’s the cure? I think that rather than go to the old notion of cure – socialism, which for 50 years in this country has been bad-mouthed from here to tomorrow, has a bad name, a bad association, and, indeed, some of the countries like Russia and China that did things in the name of socialism, did things that nobody wants – and so with all of that going on it’s time to use a different language to describe what we want – to democratize the economy.

Old notion of socialism, change the ownership of enterprise, won’t work

The old notion of socialism had basically two dimensions: You should take – the socialists said, you should take the enterprises, the factories, the offices, the stores, away from the private owners and make them run by the state in the name of the people as a whole. So you should change the ownership of enterprises from private to public. And the second idea, you shouldn’t let the market decide. You shouldn’t let the goods go to the people with the most money, they should go to what people need. And do you should have government planning for the distribution of goods and services rather than a market. So socialism was different from capitalism because capitalism was private ownership, socialism was public, capitalism was markets, socialism was planning. And you’re right. That’s all about the context. That doesn’t say a word about how you organize production. It doesn’t say a word about the actual life lived by the average working person five days out of seven, 9 to 5 in the workplace. Those definitions of socialism were seriously deficient because of what they neglected, And my response is to say let’s focus on what they didn’t do because it’s a more realistic and more promising way to change a system that isn’t working for most of us.

So my argument would be to build on the old idea of the co-op, or the co-operative. Let’s reorganize enterprises in our society so that all the workers together make the decisions – what to produce, how to produce, where to produce and what to do with the profits. We will get much better economic outcomes for all of us if we organize it in this new way rather than going on with the old way that isn’t working and that has shown us that even with good laws and good regulations they get around them, they undo them and we’re back to square one.

LF – So you call them, in your book, Democracy at Work, you call them WSDE, Workers Self-Determined Industries

RW – Self-Directed

LW – Self-Directed Enterprises

RW — Right

LW – The acronym could do with a little work. How is it different from a regular co-op? Like a food co-op? Or a farming co-op?

RW – Well co-ops are a very old idea — thousands of years old. We’ve had them in the United States for a long, long time. My colleague, often, Gar Alperovitz, talks about co-ops as involving more than a hundred million Americans right as we speak. So there are lots of different co-ops. I think that the important thing that I’m talking about is that we’re interested not so much in co-ops, for example, food-co-ops are popular in America; a whole neighborhood or a whole part of a community gets together and realizes that if they buy groceries together in a big bulk they can get better quality at lower price than if they go to the local supermarket. So they band together, often doing, paying a little money to be a member, maybe doing a couple of hours work a month, or whatever they do and they buy cooperate…that’s a cooperative buying association.

You similarly have companies, small companies often, that get together in a co-op because they can get a better deal for what they produce if they sell cooperatively. So there’s a buying co-op, there’s a selling co-op, sometimes farmers buy land cooperatively, so there’s an ownership co-op. I’m talking about something else.

The cure for the “bads” of unbridled capitalism — Change the organization of production

I’m talking about the ‘cooperativization’ of the work itself – not the owning, not the buying, not the selling – but the organization of the production. Sometimes it’s called a producers’ co-op or a workers’ co-op, because for me the crucial thing is to change the organization of production.

LF – That word ‘socialism’ has ‘social’ at the heart of it. I mean it was about concerns for the life of the worker and the community.

RW – And it was all about this. If you open volume one of his [Karl Marx] greatest work – is called Capital: Critique of Political Economy – volume one – I teach it in university so I know it – volume one is all about the organization of production. And his argument is – Look the mass of people produce a surplus that is gathered into the hands of a very small number of people who then organize a system to keep that nice arrangement going for themselves. And the implication, as he spells it out, is change that. That is the root of many problems.

LF – Although you talk about it as something that needs a cure, there’s a whole lot of people that think capitalism is doing just well and their health is fine and they want to keep it that way, So how do you think this could ever change? Or are you talking about new little projects in different places that could maybe make life different for the people that are part of them [the communities] but don’t necessarily take on the whole system?

The big push for change will come when enough people recognize capitalism is not tolerable anymore

RW – My reading of history, as best I can, is that the great changes that happened very rarely happened because the people who made the change had a clear idea of where they were going. So, for example, if you look at the people who made the revolution in France in 1789, the great French Revolution, they knew they couldn’t stand feudalism, the old system. They didn’t want the landlords, they didn’t want King Louis, they didn’t want all of that. Where they were going, that they would establish a capitalism that would look like…they didn’t know that, they didn’t think like that – and frankly I don’t think most of them cared. Some did. And they sketched blueprints. And those were interesting. But the big push came when it was recognized that’s not tolerable anymore. And my guess is that what we’re seeing and what we’re living through, which is a very important historical moment I think, is the mass recognition by people around the world that this system – which achieved many things in the last 300 years: we’re not throwing out, you know, in some casual way, an economic system that proved technically dynamic and an ability to generate wealth – but like anything else that has worked in history, it’s born, it evolves, and then it passes away. And we might want to believe that this system will last forever the way no other system did, but the odds aren’t with us. And I think when you have just what we began this conversation with, a quote “recovery” just five years old that has benefited a tiny number of people, who are most responsible bringing the crisis, and bypass the mass of people, you’re talking about a situation in which many people are beginning to understand that this is a system problem. It can’t be fixed by this or that. It’s not the refrigerator where you call the repair persona and he or she does this. No. It’s when that repair person sits you down and says “I could charge you a lot. I could do another quick fix. But you need a new refrigerator.”

LF – Rick Wolff. His new book is Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism. It’s just out from Haymarket Books.

Visit Richard Wolff’s website, democracyatwork, where you can watch other recent videos featuring Wolff. He even invites visitors to submit their most pressing questions,

SEE ALSO

• Cooperativization on the Mondragón Model As Alternative to Globalizing Capitalism by Betsy Bowman and Bob Stone, Center for Global Justice, November 15, 2011 –  “Among available models of alternatives to capitalism, we have borrowed much from David Schweickart’s “economic democracy” and Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel’s “participatory planning.” We put a Schweickart-like democratization before processes like participatory planning. What may also set us apart is our claim that cooperativization can eliminate globalizing capitalism’s worst features.”

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There is hope! We are laying the groundwork for the “Next Great Revolution” – Gar Alperovitz

This is the speech that Obama should be giving, hasn’t, and never will

No 523 Posted by fw, July 17, 2012

In his keynote address to the Green Party’s National Convention, activist and historian Gar Alperovitz proclaimed – and I’m paraphrasing –“Revolutions begin in rooms like this, with people like you stepping up to transform the most powerful corporate capitalist system in the history of the world. We are laying the groundwork for the “Next Great Revolution”.

Gar Alperovitz’s thesis to support his bold assertion goes something like this –

The current political and corporate capitalist systems in the U.S. are broken. Problems are wicked and cannot be managed the old way. People at the grassroots level sense something is wrong but don’t quite know what to do about it.  But they do know there has to be a better way. The better way, according to Alperovitz, is a bottom-up transformative change. The question is: Can we rebuild a democratic system from the bottom up that changes ownership of capital from big corporations to worker-run businesses and, concurrently, is inherently Green?

Yes we can, he insists, even though acknowledging that the minority of citizen activists who will bring about that change don’t, as yet, have the experience to successfully manage transformative change. The good news is that the foundation of transformative change is already being laid by an explosive growth of worker-owned and co-op companies. Alperovitz points to Cleveland as a model for building entire communities where the 99% benefit as opposed to the existing corporate capitalist system that benefits only the 1%. These kinds of experiments are the only way to build a popular mass movement. However, to achieve this transformative change, citizen activists will have to rise above the current level of relying primarily on “projects and politics” to the level of “existential self-awareness”. And that’s hard to do.

Here’s a 25:16-minute video of Alperovitz’s keynote address, followed by my abridged transcript with added subheadings to facilitate speedy browsing of main ideas.

Gar Alperovitz’s Green Party Keynote: We Are Laying Groundwork for the “Next Great Revolution” Published on July 16, 2012 by Democracy Now.

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT

Revolutions begin in rooms like this, with people like you, stepping up to transform the most powerful corporate capitalist system in the history of the world

…you begin [historical change by] fighting small and you expand when the time is right, and you make an impact because the other things are failing. That is what has happened in many, many cases. Revolutions are as common as grass and world history, and they begin in rooms like this… That is how it works. That is how it works. When I say I take you all seriously, first, I’m talking to the person in your personal seat. So when I say I take you seriously, you, maybe more seriously than you take yourself, I mean to say that the beginnings of the next great historic change come from us taking ourselves that seriously. So, I urge — and I think many people here do — but I urge that you sit back and say, am I up to that or am I just doing politics, or am I really up to that? Now that is transforming the most powerful corporate capitalist system in the history of the world. That is what it is about. And to say that I take you seriously is to say that that is what you’re stepping up to, not simply a gesture, not simply a new party, not simply a green movement. It is that, and that is the challenge.

Now, I am very cold-eyed realist. I did run House and Senate staffs. I’ve even done stuff for my pains and for my sins, planning U.N. policy in the State Department before I left that world many years ago. I have been involved in the nitty-gritty of ugly politics. I am no naive guy. And I say again that we have the possibility, if we look at the stage we are at and what is happening to the era and who we are existentially — I am talking to the person in your chair — and if we know who we are and take ourselves that seriously, we have that possibility. So, let me go on.

This is the most important period of American history bar none. The current system is running out of options. Problems are wicked and cannot be managed the old way.

The second thing I want to say is, I don’t think that is always true. But I do think that the emerging era of history into which we are living our lives, the era into which we are living, may well be the most important period of American history bar none. Now, I say it as a historian and others would disagree, but I don’t say it lightly. And when I say bar none, I mean including the American Revolution and including the 1960’s and the Civil War. Whoa, that is a heavy rap, as we used to say in the 1960’s. What I mean is that in many ways, the system is running out of options, and we are beginning to see more and more people aware of the difficulties that cannot be managed the old way.

The crises are systemic. Washington is broken. Either we transform the system or risk violent societal disruptions

Most people know Washington is broken. They have not quite realized that the systemic problems are coming to the surface, that it’s a systemic crisis. You may get ripples of increased gain and jobs and so forth, but you can’t deal with climate change, you can’t deal with unemployment, you can’t deal with poverty, and we keep getting more and more decay. That’s light bulb time. That’s when people begin to asking very serious questions. Now, remember, when I say that I come at it as a historian. You got to throw a couple of decades of your life on the table, not a couple of weeks and not a couple elections. But, there is growing sentiment on all sides that either we transform the system or profound difficulties, violence, probably repression, possibly something like fascism when the violence begins, there is great danger.

Millions of people sense something is wrong. They just don’t know what to do about it. But they do know there has to be a better way

But lots of folks sense something is wrong. The first in my adult life that you find millions of people responding. Listen to the response: Occupy. Occupy was critical, far more important. The American people responded to Occupy. They got it, they know, they know who runs this game. It’s no secret, and it’s a new kind of awareness that something is going on with those big banks and something’s going on with these corporations that don’t quite know how to get a handle on it, but it is not like if we just elect a Democrat it’s all going to be fine and the progressive era will start again. There is a sense that is very deep, and in my view, given the inability to solve the problems, that’s going to be worse, and the pain is going to increase and the number of people saying, there has got to be a better way, something different has got to happen, somehow we’ve got to start in a different place, somehow either we build something new or this thing is a sham.

People at the grassroots level don’t currently have the experience to manage transformative change. They need time to organize

That’s a big deal in history. That’s a big deal when people begin asking those kinds of questions. Now, it takes a long, painful process, but notice this system probably does not reform in the old liberal way for all the reasons we know including the labor movement has collapsed from 35% to down to 7% in the private sector. But, probably it doesn’t have a classic revolution, because government is 30% of the big floor under the economy. You get decay and stagnation, pain and difficulty. That is a very unusual moment in history because it goes on and gives time for people to be aware and to build democratically from the bottom up. If it collapsed tomorrow, the right wing would take over. And if it collapsed to the left, we wouldn’t be prepared. And above all, we wouldn’t know from the bottom of our own experience how to build and run and change and transform the system. This is an era where things are beginning to open up over time. Time for us. Including the person standing here and in your seat.

History teaches us that systems are defined by those who control the wealth. Right now corporate capitalists control the systems, the capital wealth and the power

Let me put it another way—-the third thing I want to say—-systems in history are defined above all by who controls the wealth; no secret. In the feudal era, land was the critical piece. If you had the land and you were the lord, you commanded. In the 19th century, there was the kind of capitalism that was sort of free enterprise. Most of the free enterprise small business capitalists of the 19th century were actually farmers. They ran a small business called a farm. That was a different, maybe a free time in some ways, but a very different time. State socialism was a different way to own capital throughout the system. That is another way to go about it, and we live now in essentially what is called corporate capitalism. And if you look at who owns the system and the power, you all know the income number distribution numbers, they’re pretty obvious. It’s gone from about—-the top 1% has gone from about 10% to 22% and then bobbling around given the recession in the 20% range. Think of that, it’s gone from 10% to 20% in 30 years. Who lost that money? But wealth is even worse.

The top 400 people in America own more wealth that the bottom 185 million Americans

The way you define the system is who owns the capital wealth, and 1% owns just about half all the investment business capital, 1%. 5% owns 70%. And the top — this is a number you got to get your head around, really odd and I checked many times — think about this, the top 400 people, not percent, people, 400 own more wealth now than the bottom 185 million Americans taken together. That is a medieval structure. I don’t mean that rhetorically, I mean that technically that is the way you concentrated wealth in the medieval era, really.

Can we build a democratic system from the bottom up that changes the ownership of capital and is inherently Green? That’s the challenge.

So, the question becomes — and here is the third (sic) thing I think a lot about we do a lot with — is there any sign if you don’t like state socialism, you don’t like corporate capitalism that we can build a democratic system from the bottom up that also changes the ownership of capital and is also inherently Green? How do we do that? We — we.

Yes We Can! In fact we’re already doing it with worker-owned and co-op companies. And we’re going to do a lot more of it

One of the things happening, and this is exciting stuff going on, and the press simply does not cover, they don’t have an interest. If they had any interest, they’d be able to look at the other way because they — but they don’t have any money to do it. The press is being stripped of all capacity to report. But on the ground there are now, what, 10 million people involved a worker-owned companies. Did you know that? 10 million, in America. 130 Million are involved in co-ops and co-op credit unions. 40% of society. Four or five thousand neighborhood owned corporations, thousands of social enterprises. Odd bits and pieces here and there like Sarah Palin’s Alaska; they use the oil revenues as a matter of legal right, everybody gets a piece; it’s a maverick country but there it is. They don’t do that in Texas. We’re going to do that a lot elsewhere when we get to where we’re going to get.

These kinds of experiments, along with the projects and politics, are the only way to build a popular mass movement

If you look carefully on the ground, there are these social enterprises popping up, credit unions, etc., etc. and there are many, many more experiments. Something like 20 states now have legislation before them like the Bank of North Dakota, a state owned bank, and many other states. Another 20 approximately are considering single payer. And here is the issue, as the pain deepens — that’s why the era is critical — as the pain deepens and we have time to build, and we work to build, more and more people begin to see, you’ve got to come up with a new answer. My judgment is — and I think I’m not blowing smoke — those kinds of experiments are the only way to build the popular base, with the politics and the projects, with the politics and the projects.

Cleveland provides a model for building whole communities where the 99% benefit, not just the 1% of capitalist owners

There is a really beautiful thing going on in Ohio in Cleveland, we have been involved with. I was involved with the Youngstown workers in 1977 when the first big steel closing occurred, the workers tried to take over and they got clobbered. But, they organized their politics and got a lot of people involved. So, in Ohio, the idea of worker ownership is a bigger idea. Lots of people understand it. And in Cleveland, building on the Mondragon model, we know about the Mondragon model and other ideas, there are a series of worker owned integrated co-ops in Cleveland in a neighborhood where the average income is $18,000 per family. And they have these co-ops not just standing alone, but linked together with a non-profit corporation and a revolving fund. The idea is to build the community and worker ownership, not just make a couple workers richer, to say the least, not just rich but to build a whole community, and to use the purchasing power of hospitals and universities, tax money in there, Medicare, Medicaid, education money, buy from these guys and build the community. That model and it’s the greenest — for one of the things — the greenest laundry in that part of the country, that uses about one-third of the heat, about a third of the electricity and about a third of the water. They’re on track now to put in more solar capacity that exists — one of the other worker owned companies that exists in the entire state of Ohio. These are not little-thinking co-ops.

There’s another one they’re just about to open which is a greenhouse; 3.25 acres. The greenhouse hydroponic will be the largest in the United States in an urban area, the largest in a worker co-op, worker-owned, in a community building structure, capable of producing something like 5 million heads of lettuce a year, capable of producing something like 5 million heads of lettuce a year. That’s happening. You could do that, and you could force the politicians to help you do that.

To learn more about thousands of other “New Deal” things that are happening in America visit this website

There is a website, Community-wealth.org, [where] you will find thousands of things that are happening on the ground that change the ownership of wealth and begin to green the economy, and it is part of the new deal that we’re going to build forward as we go on through the decay. That’s the direction.

These are the kinds of things that are the prehistory of the next great revolution. And this is how you build it

Those are the kind of things that are the prehistory of the next great revolution. That’s how you build it. You generate the ideas and then you begin to protect national ideas out of real experience and out of real commitment. So, did you happen to notice, we did not nationalize the two big auto companies when those crises came, and we pretty much nationalized the banks before we gave them back. So when those crises come, and they will come, if we’re prepared with a highly democratic vision and if we know something and if we build the politics, I’m not just talking about communities, that’s critical; if you don’t have democratic experience in local communities you’ve got nothing. But, the ideas like Wisconsin pointing to the New Deal, those ideas also generate vision for the long, larger scale when time goes on and we build forward.

So, now that’s also a heavy wrap. I am saying that we are laying the foundations bit by bit in an extremely unusual period of history, the most important moment in history because we’re running out of options, in my view. And mine is suggesting we can take it forward in a positive way.

“The most radical thing you’re going to hear – I think there is hope”

I want to say something far more radical than I have said before. This is the most radical thing you’re going to hear. I think there is hope. I’m no Utopian. I don’t mean it is going to be hard and tough and a lot of stuff is going to go wrong and a lot of pain and a lot of difficulty. But I don’t think they’ve got all the answers and I don’t think that they’ve got all the power and I don’t think they can solve it. And I do believe — the person in your chair, why I take you seriously — can you wrap your heads around, really, I mean, really, that we are in a position to lay down the foundations for the next great transformation? Really? Not just doing token politics, not just building the party. All that is critical. Not just laying the foundations. But really laying the groundwork for transformation into a highly democratic new system beyond the old traditions, one that is sustainable, one that gives a climate change, but also alters the ownership and democratizes wealth. That is our question.

People understand that something different really has to happen

One last thing. I give you just a little fragment more of the book [America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty, and Our Democracy]. Two fragments, actually. This is a really interesting one. They have been polling younger people, people in the range of 18-29. These are people who really will build the next politics; a lot of them in this room. Now, it turns out that in the latest polls, it turns out that when you look at it, about 45%, 43% have a positive reaction to the word capitalism and 49% of a positive reaction to the word socialism. I don’t know that any of those folks actually know what the word socialism means, but the idea that they understand something different really that has got to happen is embedded in those politics.

Projects and politics alone aren’t enough to transform the system. We have to rise above that – to the level of existential self-awareness. And that’s hard to do

But, one last one I saw just the other day, I did a piece for Sojourn Magazine, one of the real radical activists group of religious Christians. One of the pieces of poll data I saw was this, said that 36% of all Americans polled — one of the big polling agencies, not a side one, not a biased one — 36% decided and were quite sure that capitalism, Christianity and capitalism cannot be reconciled. So, my urging, I am pleased to be here, but I don’t think anybody moves the ball like people in this room when they get serious…. [M]y suggestion to you is that we together are in fact capable if we rise to that level of existential self-awareness. Real hard [to do]. Real hard. People want to do projects, they want to do politics, they don’t want to get as serious as it takes to really transform the system. So, that I think that is our challenge and I see a lot of people in this room up and ready to do it.

Thank you for having me.

*****

Gar Alperovitz is professor of political economy at the University of Maryland and co-founder of the Democracy Collaborative.

Fair Use Notice: This blog, Citizen Action Monitor, may contain copyrighted material that may not have been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Such material, published without profit, is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues. It is published in accordance with the provisions of the 2004 Supreme Court of Canada ruling and its six principle criteria for evaluating fair dealing

Employee ownership offers alternative to unions and a real solution for workers and communities

“This is the future of the world of work”

No 445 Posted by fw, March 27, 2012

“At a time when many are disillusioned with big banks and big business, the economic crisis and growing inequality in our country, employee ownership offers a real solution for workers and communities.”

Shift Change: Putting Democracy to Work is a new documentary (to be released in July, 2012) that highlights worker-owned enterprises in North America and in Mondragon, Spain. The film couldn’t be timelier as 2012 has been declared the “International Year of the Cooperative” by the U.N. In the following 5:50-minute preview of the film, workers acclaim the significant benefits of worker cooperatives. Read my transcript of the workers’ commentary.

Shift Change: Putting Democracy to Work by Mark Dworkin (Photographer/Editor) and Melissa Young (Producer), February 28, 2012.

TRANSCRIPT

Equal Exchange, Massachusetts

Male worker — I work here as an employee but I also own one share of the company. I have a say in what happens with the company, which is awesome.

Male worker — We have a stake. We have “skin in the game” as they say. It’s a real business. We have goals to meet. There’s just this environment where we all love what we’re doing, and it’s very meaningful to us, and we all want it to work.

Isthmus Engineering, Wisconsin

Female worker — I have worked at large corporations where there’s a huge hierarchy. It takes a lot of energy to operate in an environment like that. We put our energy toward our projects and out products.

Male worker – Most other companies I couldn’t share in the decision making because wouldn’t have a vote. And at the end of the day if the work I did produced profit I wouldn’t get to share in that because it would be going somewhere else. If I was concerned about what this was doing to the community, if I worked for another business that wouldn’t matter.

Mondragon Cooperatives — Basque Country, Northern Spain —

• A federation of 120 companies owned and run by their workers.
• 100,000 employees
• $25 billion annual sales
• Lowest unemployment in Spain
• Cooperative research and development
• Cooperative university
• Cooperative bank

White collar worker – Take any businessman elsewhere, and he’ll tell you that the most important thing is to maximize profits. We say that profit is important to sustain the business, but it’s also important to create jobs.

Female worker – We believe that it isn’t good for anybody if somebody loses their job. If you lose your job, you haven’t got money. If you haven’t got money, you can’t buy. If you can’t buy, you can’t buy our product.

Male worker – Income is distributed more equally, and it gets to more people. And that’s why so many people can live pretty well.

Male worker – The business if ours, but we’re also workers. We don’t have a boss like in other companies. We’re all bosses, and we all have to move the business forward.

White collar worker — The great majority of people are more integrated and involved and that’s why we can be more competitive and compete with the best businesses in the world. This is the future of the world of work.

Male worker – In typical corporations, you’re working for somebody else, and at the end of the shift you just go home. This is something different. It’s part of our lives, because we’re involved in running the company from top to bottom.

Female worker – In the end that you have a job is very important. Many times, in regular capitalist companies if there is a slowdown, you’re out in the street. Some coops do better than others, but you still have a job. You can’t get thrown out in the street.

Female worker – I’m in the second generation of a coop family. My sisters and I are members of Fagor. My parents’ generation built the cooperatives. They’ve left us this inheritance and we have to keep working to leave it to our children.

Evergreen Cooperatives – Cleveland, Ohio

Male (worker affiliation unknown) — Companies in this era of capital and job mobility are not really anchored in place. They’re not really loyal to the communities in which they reside. And so as companies come and go from our communities, it kind of rips the economic underpinnings

Female (worker affiliation unknown) — People losing their homes. The foreclosure crisis here has just been devastating. They say if you keep doing the same old thing you get the same results. And people are looking for results right now that are going to make a difference in people’s lives.

Female (worker affiliation unknown) – We give incentives to businesses and they come into a town and they say “well, we’re going to move here.” And we give them some money ten years when the incentive’s over they say “Well what town should we move to next?”

Evergreen Cooperative Laundry

Female worker – This was a unique idea – that people would own the business so the business can’t pick up and move unless every single person who worked there said: “Yeah, we’ll move to Florida.”

Female worker – Oh yeah. I work this machine. That machine – I’ll be all over the place. (Laughs). Everybody runs everything so we kind of rotate and move around, Yeah. You have to.

Male worker – We own this place. That’s an excellent reason to go to work. It’s like with a house – if you rent it, not so much but if you own it, that’s a big deal.

Ohio Cooperative Solar

Male worker – This is a business and we’re a coop. we all have to have a strong mentality that what Evergreen and Ohio Solar’s trying to do is going to work for us and our community.

RELATED LINK

• “I think an America beyond capitalism is a real possibility” — Gar Alperovitz –Gar Alperovitz argues in an op-ed in today’s New York Times that we may be in the midst of a profound transition toward an economy characterized by more democratic structures of ownership. Alperovitz finds that 130 million Americans are members of some kind of cooperative, and 13 million Americans work in an employee-owned company.

Fair Use Notice: This blog, Citizen Action Monitor, may contain copyrighted material that may not have been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Such material, published without profit, is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues. It is published in accordance with the provisions of the 2004 Supreme Court of Canada ruling and its six principle criteria for evaluating fair dealing.