The next American revolution?

I went to a talk at Politics & Prose yesterday with Gar Alperovitz, the historian and economist who teaches at Maryland, who was plugging his new book What Then Must We Do? Straight Talk About the Next American Revolution.

I like Alperovitz and quoted him once in a column. He's a radical progressive and drew a crowd to P&P much like Howard Zinn did. Most of what he said made a lot of sense.

He says we're in the midst of a systemic crisis, not a political crisis, because things don't change regardless of which party is in power. This is enlightening because it is obviously true that Democrats Clinton and Obama have been no more successful in changing the Reagan juggernaut than the Bushes, who weren't trying to change it. It explains why the elections in 2014 and 2016 offer little hope of improvement.

Alperovitz says we need to "put a couple of decades on the table" to get the systemic change he thinks we need. There's no guarantee we will get the change, he says, and we could just continue on the road to decay that we have been on for three decades. In any case, a couple of decades sounds optimistic to me.

The system that is in crisis is corporate capitalism. Part of the problem is that many of us think that the period from the 40s to the 60s, when labor unions were an effective countervailing force against corporate power, is the norm, when in fact that was the temporary aberration. What we've had since then -- the untrammeled power of corporations to avoid taxes, enrich the wealthy and impoverish the middle class -- is the real norm for corporate capitalism.

Alperovitz says we are in a pre-history of transformation, like the pre-history that preceded the Great Depression, creating the bases for change. He says the revolution will be the democratization of wealth, and he sees the beginnings of it in coops and credit unions, worker-owned businesses in Cleveland and elsewhere, state banks in North Dakota and elsewhere, and so on. He did not talk about crowdfunding or other forms of locavesting but perhaps this is in his book.

He asked the audience to abandon their practice of looking in the rearview mirror to figure out what lies ahead and also to drop their cynicism and pessimism and figure out what they can do to contribute to this pre-history of the revolution.

It's a great challenge and applying it to myself I realized that my foray into self-publishing and my devotion to blogging are part of the democratization of wealth. At least a dozen times, Alperovitz said "you won't read about this in the press," and if I'd had more patience I would have been curious to ask him why thought that was so. But the answer is obvious, because the press is part of corporate capitalism and that goes for book publishing, too.

I bought his book, though I'm not sure there's much more in it than was in his talk. I found it all quite validating. My own feeling of liberation from being able to self-publish my novel and put my blogs out there I can now see as part of a more generalized movement. My immediate fascination with Amy Cortese's Locavesting and my efforts to get these kinds of stories in the short-lived Sustainable Money all fit into the pattern described by Alperovitz.