by GAR ALPEROVITZ
My attention in the new year is focused on the U.S., which is in a highly unusual state of crisis. On the one hand, it is unlikely to totally collapse. On the other, it is unable—not least because of the long-term radical decline in union density—to mobilize traditional progressive solutions for reforming the system. The result is decay: growing economic inequality, stagnation, massive structural poverty, and a stalemated national politics.
Paradoxically, however, this very stalemate is forcing people both to pursue innovative strategies in the short term and reassess longer term visions about where the left is and might decide to go. The coming year is likely to generate a major increase in both activism and the sophistication of activism, as we come to terms with the need to get serious about taking on the structural crisis and building an institutional basis that shores up the traditional left while at the same time laying the foundations for something beyond—i.e. the next system.
Here a myriad of underreported on-the-ground experiments with new forms of worker and community ownership, with more participatory forms of government and with more sophisticated forms of decentralised planning on the municipal and regional scales, are likely to be taken up by a movement increasingly aware that something fundamental is wrong with the system at a structural level. Already, the result is a growing understanding of the importance of democratising capital, and of the need to build a movement capable of doing so.
Precisely because the welfare state and social democracy is so much weaker in the United States than in many advanced systems—and because the country is so large and so decentralised—a different form of evolutionary reconstruction that is neither reform nor revolution may well be in the process of accelerating here. This, too, is laying the groundwork for systemic change around a much more highly decentralised social ownership model than many have as yet conceived.
New Left Project for more