America Beyond Capitalism
America Beyond Capitalism

Author: Gar Alperovitz

Publisher: Democracy Collaborative Pres

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 373

ISBN-13: 0984785701

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America Beyond Capitalism is a book whose time has come. Gar Alperovitz's expert diagnosis of the long-term structural crisis of the American economic and political system is accompanied by detailed, practical answers to the problems we face as a society. Unlike many books that reserve a few pages of a concluding chapter to offer generalized, tentative solutions, Alperovitz marshals years of research into emerging "new economy" strategies to present a comprehensive picture of practical bottom-up efforts currently underway in thousands of communities across the United States. All democratize wealth and empower communities, not corporations: worker-ownership, cooperatives, community land trusts, social enterprises, along with many supporting municipal, state and longer term federal strategies as well. America Beyond Capitalism is a call to arms, an eminently practical roadmap for laying foundations to change a faltering system that increasingly fails to sustain the great American values of equality, liberty and meaningful democracy.

In, Against, and Beyond Capitalism
In, Against, and Beyond Capitalism

Author: John Holloway

Publisher: PM Press

Published: 2016-04-01

Total Pages: 113

ISBN-13: 1629632481

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In, Against, and Beyond Capitalism is based on three recent lectures delivered by John Holloway at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. The lectures focus on what anticapitalist revolution can mean today—after the historic failure of the idea that the conquest of state power was the key to radical change—and offer a brilliant and engaging introduction to the central themes of Holloway’s work. The lectures take as their central challenge the idea that “We Are the Crisis of Capital and Proud of It.” This runs counter to many leftist assumptions that the capitalists are to blame for the crisis, or that crisis is simply the expression of the bankruptcy of the system. The only way to see crisis as the possible threshold to a better world is to understand the failure of capitalism as the face of the push of our creative force. This poses a theoretical challenge. The first lecture focuses on the meaning of “We,” the second on the understanding of capital as a system of social cohesion that systematically frustrates our creative force, and the third on the proposal that we are the crisis of this system of cohesion. “His Marxism is premised on another form of logic, one that affirms movement, instability, and struggle. This is a movement of thought that affirms the richness of life, particularity (non-identity) and ‘walking in the opposite direction’; walking, that is, away from exploitation, domination, and classification. Without contradictory thinking in, against, and beyond the capitalist society, capital once again becomes a reified object, a thing, and not a social relation that signifies transformation of a useful and creative activity (doing) into (abstract) labor. Only open dialectics, a right kind of thinking for the wrong kind of world, non-unitary thinking without guarantees, is able to assist us in our contradictory struggle for a world free of contradiction.”—Andrej Grubačić, from his Preface

Practicing Cooperation
Practicing Cooperation

Author: Andrew Zitcer

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2021-11-02

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 1452964173

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A powerful new understanding of cooperation as an antidote to alienation and inequality From the crises of racial inequity and capitalism that inspired the Black Lives Matter movement and the Green New Deal to the coronavirus pandemic, stories of mutual aid have shown that, though cooperation is variegated and ever changing, it is also a form of economic solidarity that can help weather contemporary social and economic crises. Addressing this theme, Practicing Cooperation delivers a trenchant and timely argument that the way to a more just and equitable society lies in the widespread adoption of cooperative practices. But what renders cooperation ethical, effective, and sustainable? Providing a new conceptual framework for cooperation as a form of social practice, Practicing Cooperation describes and critiques three U.S.-based cooperatives: a pair of co-op grocers in Philadelphia, each adjusting to recent growth and renewal; a federation of two hundred low-cost community acupuncture clinics throughout the United States, banded together as a cooperative of practitioners and patients; and a collectively managed Philadelphia experimental dance company, founded in the early 1990s and still going strong. Through these case studies, Andrew Zitcer illuminates the range of activities that make contemporary cooperatives successful: dedicated practitioners, a commitment to inclusion, and ongoing critical reflection. In so doing he asserts that economic and social cooperation must be examined, critiqued, and implemented on multiple scales if it is to combat the pervasiveness of competitive individualism. Practicing Cooperation is grounded in the voices of practitioners and the result is a clear-eyed look at the lived experience of cooperators from different parts of the economy and a guidebook for people on the potential of this way of life for the pursuit of justice and fairness.

Wageless Life
Wageless Life

Author: Ian G. R. Shaw

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2019-12-03

Total Pages: 162

ISBN-13: 1452963479

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Drawing up alternate ways to “make a living” beyond capitalism To live in this world is to be conditioned by capital. Once paired with Western democracy, unfettered capitalism has led to a shrinking economic system that squeezes out billions of people—creating a planet of surplus populations. Wageless Life is a manifesto for building a future beyond the toxic failures of late-stage capitalism. Daring to imagine new social relations, new modes of economic existence, and new collective worlds, the authors provide skills and tools for perceiving—and living in— a post-capitalist future. Forerunners: Ideas First Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead

Beyond Capitalism
Beyond Capitalism

Author: Jeff Shantz

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2013-04-25

Total Pages: 493

ISBN-13: 162356364X

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Capitalism as a global system barely allows the needs of the majority of the world's population to be met. Whether from an industrialized country such as the US or from South Africa, the need for an alternative can be felt all over the world. It is clear nowadays that, due to the non-democratic nature and inadequacies of capitalism, another system must take its place. Such a process has already begun through the cooperative movement, which this book examines along with other initiatives. Featuring essays by international scholars and activists from various spheres of the anti-capitalist left, the work features many examples from the north and the south, to cover both the historically-advanced and late capitalist economies. It discusses such initiatives as participatory economics, the Mondragon experience, worker cooperatives in Europe and Latin America, solidarity economy in South Africa, and more. Written in an accessible manner, Beyond Capitalism will be an invaluable resource for any student of social movements and political thought and for anyone looking for alternative to today's ongoing systemic crises.

Migration Beyond Capitalism
Migration Beyond Capitalism

Author: Hannah Cross

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2020-09-29

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 1509535969

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Harshly exploited migrant labour plays a fundamental role in the political economy of contemporary capitalism. The abstract and utopian theorising of many liberals and leftists on the migration question often ignores or downplays patterns of displacement and brutal class dynamics, which divide and weaken working people while empowering the ruling class. In this important new book, Hannah Cross provides a sober analysis of the class antagonisms of migration in the context of the nation, social democracy, and the racialized ordering of the world. Bringing Marxist methodology and strategy to a careful analysis of existing emancipatory movements, she sets out the programmes and approaches that are needed to promote global worker solidarity and create a future in which cheap labour is no longer a mainstay of wealthy economies. This focus on the labouring classes allows her to identify some important new directions for migration in a world beyond capitalism, exploitation and injustice. This book will be essential reading for students, scholars and general readers interested in the politics and political economy of migration in a world unhelpfully caught between racist authoritarian capitalism and the wishful-thinking of contemporary left-liberalism.

The Future is Degrowth
The Future is Degrowth

Author: Matthias Schmelzer

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2022-06-28

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1839765860

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We need to break free from the capitalist economy. Degrowth gives us the tools to bend its bars. Economic growth isn’t working, and it cannot be made to work. Offering a counter-history of how economic growth emerged in the context of colonialism, fossil-fueled industrialization, and capitalist modernity, The Future Is Degrowth argues that the ideology of growth conceals the rising inequalities and ecological destructions associated with capitalism, and points to desirable alternatives to it. Not only in society at large, but also on the left, we are held captive by the hegemony of growth. Even proposals for emancipatory Green New Deals or postcapitalism base their utopian hopes on the development of productive forces, on redistributing the fruits of economic growth and technological progress. Yet growing evidence shows that continued economic growth cannot be made compatible with sustaining life and is not necessary for a good life for all. This book provides a vision for postcapitalism beyond growth. Building on a vibrant field of research, it discusses the political economy and the politics of a non-growing economy. It charts a path forward through policies that democratise the economy, “now-topias” that create free spaces for experimentation, and counter-hegemonic movements that make it possible to break with the logic of growth. Degrowth perspectives offer a way to step off the treadmill of an alienating, expansionist, and hierarchical system. A handbook and a manifesto, The Future Is Degrowth is a must-read for all interested in charting a way beyond the current crises.

Art/Commons
Art/Commons

Author: Massimiliano Mollona

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2021-04-22

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 1786997010

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Art/Commons is the first book to theorise the commons from the perspectives of contemporary art history and anthropology, focusing on the ongoing tensions between art and capitalism. This study is grounded in an analysis of contemporary artistic and curatorial practices, which the author describes as practices of commoning, based on co-production, participation, mutualism and the valorization of reproductive labour. Mollona proposes a novel theoretical approach to current debates on the commons, and shows that art can provide both a language of anti-capitalist and post-colonial critique as well as a distinctive set of skills and practices of commoning.

Moving Beyond Capitalism
Moving Beyond Capitalism

Author: Cliff DuRand

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-09-26

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 1317093844

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The book speaks to the widespread quest for concrete alternative ways forward 'beyond capitalism' in the face of the prevailing corporatocracy and a capitalist system in crisis. It examines a number of institutions and practices now being built in the nooks and crannies of present societies and that point beyond capitalism toward a more equal, participatory, and democratic society – institutions such as cooperatives, public banks, the commons, economic democracy. This seminal collection of critical studies draws on academic and activist voices from the U.S. and Canada, Mexico, Cuba, and Argentina, and from a variety of theoretical-political perspectives – Marxism, anarchism, feminism, and Zapatismo.

Health Care Under the Knife
Health Care Under the Knife

Author: Howard Waitzkin

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2018-03-15

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 1583676759

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Disobedience : doctor workers unite! / Howard Waitzkin -- Becoming employees : the deprofessionalization and emerging social class position of health professionals / Matt Anderson -- The degradation of medical labor and the meaning of quality in health care / Gordon Schiff and Sarah Winch -- The political economy of health reform / David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler -- The transformation of the medical industrial complex : financialization, the corporate sector, and monopoly capital / Matt Anderson and Robb Burlage -- The pharmaceutical industry in the context of contemporary capitalism / Joel Lexchin -- Obamacare : the neoliberal model comes home to roost in the United States, if we let it / Howard Waitzkin and Ida Hellander -- Austerity and health / Adam Gaffney and Carles Muntaner -- Imperialism's health component / Howard Waitzkin and Rebeca Jasso-Aguilar -- U.S. philanthrocapitalism and the global health agenda : the Rockefeller and Gates foundations, past and present / Anne-Emanuelle Birn and Judith Richter -- Resisting the imperial order and building an alternative future in medicine and public health / Rebeca Jasso-Aguilar and Howard Waitzkin -- The failure of Obamacare and a revision of the single payer proposal after a quarter century of struggle / Adam Gaffney, David Himmelstein, and Steffie Woolhandler -- Overcoming pathological normalcy : mental health challenges in the coming transformation / Carl Ratner -- Confronting the social and environmental determinants of health / Carles Muntaner and Rob Wallace -- Conclusion : moving beyond capitalism for our health / Adam Gaffney and Howard Waitzkin