America Beyond Capitalism: Is It Possible?

[marmar]

Dollars and Sense / By Gar Alperovitz

America Beyond Capitalism: Is It Possible?
Thousands of co-ops, worker-owned businesses, land trusts, and municipal enterprises are quietly beginning to democratize the deep substructure of the American economic system.

January 3, 2012 |


“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 streets of their decaying Midwestern hometown. No local, state or federal programs offered significant help. Steelworkers called training programs “funeral insurance”: they led nowhere since there were no other jobs available. Inspired by a young steelworker, an ecumenical religious coalition put forward a plan for community-worker ownership of the giant mill. The plan captured widespread media attention, the support of numerous Democrats and Republicans (including the conservative governor of the state at the time), and an initial $200 million in loan guarantees from the Carter administration.

Corporate and other political maneuvering in the end undercut the Youngstown initiative. Nonetheless, the effort had ongoing impact, especially in Ohio, where the idea of worker-ownership became widespread in significant part as the result of publicity and educational efforts traceable to the Youngstown effort—and because of the depth of policy failures and the continuing pain of deindustrialization throughout the state. In the more than three decades since that effott, numerous employee-owned companies—inspired directly and indirectly by the effort to save the Youngstown mill—have been developed in Ohio. Individual lives were also changed, among them that of the late John Logue, a professor at Kent State University who established the Ohio Employee Ownership Center, an organization that provides technical and other assistance to help firms across the state become worker-owned.

There has also been an evolution in the position of the United Steelworkers union. In the late 1970s the union saw worker-ownership as a threat to organizing, and it opposed efforts by local steelworkers to explore employee-owned institution-building in cities like Youngstown. Over the decades, however, the union changed its position as its leaders saw the need to supplement traditional forms of labor organizing with other strategies. The union has now become a strong advocate of worker ownership, and is actively working to develop new models based upon the Mondragón Cooperative Corporation in the Basque country of Spain. This highly successful grouping of worker-owned cooperatives employs 85,000 people in fields ranging from sophisticated medical technology and the production of appliances to large supermarkets and a credit union with over 21 billion euros in assets. ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/story/153646/america_beyond_capitalism%3A_is_it_possible/

[Little Star]

1. This article made me think of Mondragon Corporation...

Here is a wiki link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

[izquierdista]

2. If you can get beyond capitalism, much is possible.

I have to point out that capitalism is primitive. There are very primitive tribes in the world that don't have a written language, still do a lot of hunting and gathering, and build huts out of sticks and palm fronds, that nevertheless practice capitalism. They weave baskets or raise yams or pigs, and regularly go to the marketplace to trade their surplus with neighboring tribes. They may not even have money and instead engage mostly in barter transactions, but it is still classical capitalism.

To advance, to have a school where children can learn to read and write a language, that doesn't require capitalism at all; it requires central planning. The tribe needs to agree to gather the children together into one place at one time and find a literate teacher to teach them. In some magic scaling property of socialism, it is as easy to teach 14 children to read as it is to teach 10 children.

Another socialist advance is to have a community well that everyone can use, instead of everyone using their own bucket to walk down to the creek and fetch water. The strong of the community can put in the manual labor of digging the well, and then everyone can obtain water "each according to his need".

Indeed, technology makes lots of things possible -- if you can get beyond capitalism.

[PETRUS]

3. Yes, capitalism is primitive.

It's morally primitive, in particular. And while I agree with you in general, some people reading your comment might infer that central planning is capitalism's antithesis. It is not - worker ownership/control is. Trade and markets can still exist in post-capitalist arrangements, alongside planning where planning is preferable.