In April I had the pleasure of introducing the noted political economist Gar Alperovitz at an event sponsored by the Weavers Way Cooperative in Mt. Airy. The following essay is an expanded version of my introduction. They to point to the lessons we can learn from Alperovitz and how those lessons are already being put to work in my own community, Mt. Airy.
During the Carter presidency people began to notice that liberals were running of out ideas for making our country more just and democratic. Carter may have been wrong to attribute the difficulties of his presidency to a nationwide “malaise” but as a description of liberal political thought, the term seemed appropriate.
At the time, my teacher Michael Walzer wrote an article in the New Republic that explained this phenomenon. He pointed out that liberals, in fact, rarely had ideas of their own. Their ideas were borrowed from the left. And the real trouble was that the left had no new ideas.
In the years since then, Democratic political fortunes have waxed when Bill Clinton was at the head of the ticket and waned in other years. But we are still waiting for Democratic leaders to give us a new vision of a better future. Aside from talking about the important issue of national health insurance, Democrats have little inspiring or politically attractive to say about the persistent and growing inequities in America, the extraordinary high levels of uncertainty in the job market, energy and environmental difficulties, the unending distress in our old cities like Philadelphia, or the sprawl and anomie that afflict suburbs and newer cities.
While Democratic politicians have been largely silent, there has been an explosion of interesting ideas on the left in the last twenty years. In a recent talk at the annual meeting of Weavers Way Coop in Mt. Airy, Gar Alperovitz, the author of the current book, America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming our Wealth, Our Liberty, and Our Democracy, presented a vision of a “radically different system-wide political-economic model” that includes many of the best of those ideas.
Alpervotiz’s vision encompasses, on the one hand, the strand of political thought that has been called communitarianism. It emphasizes the importance of—and the recent threats to—democracy, localism, and community in America. Alperovitz insists that radical change in American can only come through strengthening our sense of community by reengaging citizens in governing themselves especially but not only at the local level.
On the other hand, Alperovitz draws upon left wing ideas that more directly challenge our conventional economic arrangements then the liberal thought of the post-world war II era. Indeed, in some ways Alperovitz calls on us to return to the concerns of the very early twentieth century. We sometimes forget that in the early 20th century progressives and socialists did not take corporate capitalism for granted. Instead they both put forth quite radical ideas for regulating and controlling large businesses. In the aftermath of the second New Deal and the War Keynesianism that finally brought our economy out of the recession, liberals jettisoned much of their agenda. They started focusing primarily on redistributing income and wealth and, with the important exception of the movement to protect the environment, stopped thinking about how wealth was produced. This however, was a regressive step because it forgot an important lesson of left politico-economic thought, that the way we produce goods and services has a critical effect on the not only how these goods are distributed but, also, on the shape of our individual and communal lives.
In the last twenty years, left wing thought has relearned this lesson. Progressive writers have been arguing for years that poverty is much more a matter of the economic and social characteristics of the community in which one lives than it is a matter of one’s family income. Thus poverty can be best overcome not so much by the redistribution of income or by job training but by reviving local economies. Other writers have pointed out that American business is much less productive than it could be because it fails to engage the skills and abilities and loyalties of its workers. (Much the same is true of American government as progressive unionists like Tom Paine Cronin have argued for years.) Still others have shown that place-based businesses—such as worker or consumer cooperatives—are much more effective in serving the good of the communities in which they operate than are rootless corporations.
Alperovitz denies that he is a utopian and gives no guarantees that radical change will occur any time soon, if at all. He does point out, however, that dramatic changes in politico-economic systems have taken place time and again, often when least expected. And he suggests that the outlines of a different kind of system can already be seen emerging in the explosion of mostly local and mostly democratic enterprises. Worker owned corporations have expanded from 1600 in 1975 to 11,000, employing 8.8 million people, in 2003. There are now 48,000 cooperatives in the US. Much of the impressive redevelopment of urban neighborhoods—including very poor ones—has been carried out by locally controlled community development associations. And cities around the country have been using their resources to develop locally-owned enterprises that serve their citizens in ways that are impossible for corporations.
For Alperovitz, these new enterprises, and the outpouring of citizen activism that has made them possible, have arisen because they better serves the political and economic needs of most Americans. He argues that these new developments might possibly be the beginning of a movement that will eventually have the power to put in place public policies that further allow local, democratic, and place-based enterprises to grow even faster. And, as they grow stronger, this new model of politico-economic life will come to replace the corporate model that so dominates our lives.
There are, of course, lots of questions that can be raised about Alperovitz’ vision. But as those of us who heard him speak thought about our own community, Mt. Airy, we realized that there is something to what he said. We know that Mt. Airy is a racially and economically integrated community, and has new playgrounds, a drug store, and a supermarket, largely because of the efforts of our community associations, West Mt. Airy Neighbors and East Mt. Airy Neighbors. And we know that, with more support from progressive public policies that encourage communities to chart their own future, both the drug store and the supermarket would have been better than they are. We can see how important our co-op, Weavers Way, is to our community. We can see that the commercial revival on Germantown Avenue was spurred by our community organizations, by our Community Development Corporation, Mt. Airy USA, and by local, progressive developers. We can see that our churches and synagogues are centers of activism. We can see that Mayor Street’s wireless initiative is a good example of the municipal initiative Alperovitiz writes about and that the first community to propose such an idea was Mt. Airy. And we can see that the civic spirit of Mt. Airy is one reason that many progressive city wide initiatives have begun in our community.
(Full disclosure: I served as president of West Mt. Airy Neighbors for three years and continue to sit on its board and I am on the executive committee of Mt. Airy USA.)
To go by the evidence of our community—and communities elsewhere in the country—political and social change is happening all around us. And it is no longer the case that left has no ideas about how to deepen and broaden those changes. The question, then, is how far can those changes go, and when will Democratic political leaders begin to make them a central part of their own agenda.