THE PLURALIST COMMONWEALTH (Demo)

Gar Alperovitz writes:

Together with my colleagues at the Democracy Collaborative, we have assembled what we hope will be a useful resource for activists, scholars, and policy makers trying to come to terms with the system problem: If we know the system is broken, and we want to move beyond both corporate capitalism and state socialism—how do we clarify the nature of a serious alternative?

Over the last decades, I have tried to sketch an answer—or at least a serious point of departure for defining and refining an answer.  The Pluralist Commonwealth is a system anchored in the reconstruction of communities and the democratization of wealth.  It involves plural forms of cooperative and common ownership, and, following the principle of subsidiarity, begins with decentralization and then moves to higher levels of regional and national coordination, but only when necessary. I invite you to visit the new site now; or keep reading to learn more about what you’ll find there.

The site begins with an overview of a few key texts drawn from some four decades of work which present the underlying principles of the model and explain its evolution.

Outlining the major elements of the model alongside relevant texts and excerpts, the site then explains how the Pluralist Commonwealth addresses:

• Democratized ownership forms
• Local democracy, community culture, and the non-sexist city
• Scale and regionalism
• Climate change, growth, and the environment
• Liberty and reduced work hours
• Both planning and markets

Finally, a historical section attempts to put the Pluralist Commonwealth model in context; explaining how struggles against war, poverty, and deindustrialization helped shape the development of this systemic alternative vision.

We intend the site to function as an ongoing, actively growing archive of material related to the Pluralist Commonwealth and related aspects of systemic change. Please visit the site today, share it with friends and colleagues, and let us know if there’s anything we can do to make it more useful.

The Pluralist Commonwealth is a systemic model, developed and refined over the last forty years by political economist and historian Gar Alperovitz, which attempts to resolve theoretical and practical problems associated with both traditional corporate capitalism and traditional state socialism. A central emphasis is the reconstruction of communities–and the nation as a community–from the ground up. Hence, it might also be called a Community-Sustaining System.  The term “Pluralist Commonwealth,” however, is offered to stress the inevitability—for functional as well as scale reasons—of different (plural) institutional forms of wealth democratization. This is something not commonly recognized in discussions of alternative systemic models which often tend to focus narrowly on the simple polarity of state ownership versus worker-ownership, or state versus self-managed firms.

In general, community and democracy, the model holds, require changing and democratizing the way in which wealth is owned and managed.  Although worker-owned and self-managed firms play a role in the design, much broader structural strategies based on community-based variations of the Mondragón model are utilized in key areas, and in connection with significant intermediate scale enterprise. Larger public firms (and joint public/worker firms) are brought into focus for very large scale industry. High tech start-ups and small private local firms are included in the model. The approach also accepts the utility of certain forms of markets in some areas along with participatory economic planning in others. Attention is paid at all levels to the de facto political power and cultural implications of alternative institutional approaches.

An evolving mix of wealth-holding institutions is projected.  Over time a fundamental shift in the ownership of wealth would slowly move the nation as a whole toward greater equality. Among other things the changes would also help finance a reduction in the workweek so as to permit greater amounts of free time, thereby bolstering both individual liberty and democratic participation. As population continues to grow, the model also moves in the direction of, and ultimately projects, a long-term devolution of the national system to a form of regional reorganization and decentralization—a strategic move important not only to democracy and liberty, but to the successful democratic management of ecological and other pressing issues. Along with the strong affirmation of community, the concept of ‘subsidiarity’—that as a rule functions should be kept at the lowest level possible, moving only to higher levels when absolutely necessary—is a guiding principle throughout. Although the primary focus is on U.S. problems and possibilities, the central features of the model suggest applications for countries other than the United States.

This site is intended to serve as a living archive, reporting on research and ongoing developments related to the Pluralist Commonwealth, its economic, cultural and political theory, and its specific elements as they evolve. The site is part of an expanding Democracy Collaborative project designed to advance alternative systems thinking in the twenty first century. The site is curated by staff of the Collaborative.

http://www.pluralistcommonwealth.org/

The maverick Louis Kelso in the 1950’s discussed broad based capital ownership with Mortimer Adler and together authored the book “The Capitalist Manifesto” in 1958, followed by “The New Capitalist” in 1961. In these books were mentioned the works of Harold Moulton of the Brookings Institute who authored “The Formation of Capital”. To date the ideas presented have not been implemented or examined by main stream academia, politicians, or moral leaders – “Expanded Capital Ownership”.– Louis O. Kelso

“Alienation, which is growing rampant in our society and in all other countries of the globe, begins with economic alienation. Economic alienation begins with the erosion of productive power, which each man who has only his labor to sell, must necessarily suffer in an industrial society.””Socialism has been discredited. Plutocracy is in the process of being discredited. Democratic capitalism has yet to be tried.”Walter Reuther was right in 1967 when he stated:”Profit sharing in the form of stock distributions to workers would help to democratize the ownership of America’s vast corporate wealth which is today undemocratic and unhealthy.”

“If workers had definite assurance of equitable shares in the profits of the corporations that employ them, they would see less need to seek an equitable balance between their gains and soaring profits through augmented increases in basic wage rates. This would be a desirable result from a standpoint of stabilization policy because profit sharing does not increase costs. Since profits are a residual, after all costs have been met, and since their size is not determinable until after customers have paid the prices charged for the firm’s products, profit sharing [through wider share ownership] cannot be said to have any inflationary impact upon costs and prices.”(Hearings on the 1967 Economic Report of the President, Joint Economic Committee of Congress, p. 774.)