Quotes for All
We’ve been following many forms of democratized ownership, starting with co-ops, land banks at the neighborhood level, municipal ownership and state ownership of banks – there’s a whole series of these that attempt to fill the small-scale infrastructure that can build up to a larger theoretical vision. Gar Alperovitz
Internationally, there are countries going well beyond the course, with airlines, transportation. There are systems around the world that have explored mining, rail transport, television, communication, Internet service – there very common examples around the world that we can draw examples from. Gar Alperovitz
We need to learn to listen to what the people need and want and not try to impose on them a whole schema that they may not. This is historically difficult stuff: how do we balance the project of raising consciousness, advancing a vision of utopia, with the real and honest engagement in real-world experiments? … Read more
There are areas using what’s called the checkerboard strategy. They are different cities where you can move around the checkerboard, doing things you can’t do in every square, that you can do in some of them, building a mosaic of these kinds of practices. There are about 400 cable television networks, for example, that are … Read more
The top 400 people own more wealth now than the bottom 185 million Americans taken together. That is a medieval structure. Gar Alperovitz
There has been a change in consciousness that makes this one of the most interesting periods of American history, maybe the most interesting. There’s a loss of belief in the corporate system; there’s a recognition that something is fundamentally wrong, So there’s an opening to a whole different vision of where to go forward. I … Read more
In America, we need to develop communitywide structures of democratic ownership, we need to work out cooperative development, we need to work out participatory management, we need new ecological strategies developed at the local city, state, regional level. Gar Alperovitz
For 40 years, my argument has been that democratizing ownership of wealth has been the key to egalitarian society and the goals of egalitarian society. But you start at the local level, both at the workplace, community and other institutions and you reconstruct the egalitarian democratized structure as well as participatory structure. And as this … Read more