Quotes by Gar Alperovitz - Page 1

Worker ownership is only one form of democratizing ownership.
Gar Alperovitz / Professor
Form
Ownership
Workers
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If you don't have a way to speak to ordinary Americans, you're not in the game.
Gar Alperovitz / Professor
Games
Ordinary
Way
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Parecon is a very tough-minded economic vision and model, and it sets a standard for us to look at.
Gar Alperovitz / Professor
Looks
Tough
Vision
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The top 400 people own more wealth now than the bottom 185 million Americans taken together. That is a medieval structure.
Gar Alperovitz / Professor
People
Taken
Together
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Finding ways to organize work in which people are not locked into unequal power relationships is very important. Having said that, it's not easily done, and it's complicated.
Gar Alperovitz / Professor
Done
Important
People
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The federalism term is a good term, but it's just below the surface; it's just about to come up into wider public understanding that these practices are happening and are politically viable.
Gar Alperovitz / Professor
Federalism
Practice
Understanding
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The reality of the world we live in is that people sometimes aren't interested in many circumstances; no matter how much young radicals yell at them, that isn't what they want to do right now.
Gar Alperovitz / Professor
People
Reality
World
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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 / Professor
America
Cities
Work Out
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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 / Professor
Communication
Country
Example
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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 / Professor
Land
Levels
Vision
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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?
Gar Alperovitz / Professor
People
Real
Vision
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In America, we need to go forward in nationalizing several large corporations: I think that's possible; we nationalized General Motors; we nationalized several of the big banks, de facto; we nationalized Chrysler; we nationalized AIG. I think there will be more crises, and at some point, rather than being bailed out by the government, the public may keep the corporations it has to rescue.
Gar Alperovitz / Professor
Government
America
Thinking
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As we move toward the pluralist commonwealth, economic interventions that stabilize communities - for instance by localizing the flows of goods and services or by promoting worker ownership - not only have immediate practical benefits but provide the necessary preconditions for the growth and development of a renewed culture of sustainable democracy that can serve as the basis for still further transformations at larger scales.
Gar Alperovitz / Professor
Community
Growth
Moving
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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 think that's where we are in the question, so let's not blow it; let's see what we can develop over time.
Gar Alperovitz / Professor
Blow
Loss
Thinking
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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 happens, we learn more how to move toward the vision that is much larger than just the community level.
Gar Alperovitz / Professor
Keys
Moving
Years
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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 publicly owned. That's a big fight for big private companies. In some areas, this is a political struggle, in some it's conventional common sense.
Gar Alperovitz / Professor
Fighting
Moving
Struggle
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Worker-owned co-ops, on their own, floating in the market, tend to replicate the behavior of worker-owned capitalists in some circumstances. They sometimes develop positive participatory schemes, sometimes not. We know from the studies of worker-owned plywood companies in the US, they can tend to develop conservative attitudes, not socialist attitudes. So even though I'm an advocate of further democratization of the workplace, we also need to be building larger structures.
Gar Alperovitz / Professor
Attitude
Floating
Needs
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I am interested in the political economy of institutional power relationships in transition. The question is one of "reconstructive" communities as a cultural, as well as a political, fact: how geographic communities are structured to move in the direction of the next vision, along with the question of how a larger system - given the power and cultural relationships - can move toward managing the connections between the developing communities. There are many, many hard questions here - including, obviously, ones related to ecological sustainability and climate change.
Gar Alperovitz / Professor
Community
Moving
Political
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