As a buzz phrase, ​“the new econ­o­my” got legs dur­ing the dot-com boom of the late 1990s. It acknowl­edged the country’s shift away from man­u­fac­tur­ing towards tech­nol­o­gy-dri­ven jobs. Today, how­ev­er, chat­ter on the sub­ject is more often than not pred­i­cat­ed on the notion that our sys­tems them­selves are fail­ing, en masse — not just the major­i­ty of Amer­i­cans who are liv­ing stag­nant pay­check to stag­nant pay­check, but fail­ing a plan­et that’s start­ing to look like it spent the last 250 years smok­ing too many cigarettes.

In May 1983, the cov­er of Time Mag­a­zine fea­tured an image of a klutzy look­ing robot. It had a prim­i­tive com­put­er for a body, ana­log tape reels for eyes and was push­ing a wheel­bar­row with a fac­to­ry in it. The chim­neys on the fac­to­ry, rest­ing tilt­ed in the wheel­bar­row, were still smok­ing as the robot trucked it off. The head­line read: ​“The New Econ­o­my” and fur­ther enticed read­ers, in small­er print, with ​“Where the jobs will be” and ​“Indus­try win­ners and losers.”

Grant­ed, for many, the econ­o­my and envi­ron­ment are two sep­a­rate issues. But when both are strug­gling — not get­ting tan­gi­bly bet­ter for most peo­ple — the col­lat­er­al dam­age unlim­it­ed eco­nom­ic growth requires starts rais­ing oth­er­wise com­pla­cent eye­brows. As the main­stream media works to fit the debate about eco­nom­ic inequal­i­ty into a boot­strap-cap­i­tal­ist ver­sus free­loader-social­ist box, here are some of the real­i­ties fuel­ing the skepticism:

The wealth of the 400 rich­est Amer­i­cans now exceeds that of 80 mil­lion fam­i­lies— 62 per­cent of Amer­i­cans.

rich­est Amer­i­cans now exceeds that of mil­lion fam­i­lies— per­cent of Amer­i­cans. A recent sur­vey found that near­ly half of work­ing Amer­i­cans have no savings.

Cor­po­rate Amer­i­ca is shov­el­ing stag­ger­ing sums into a thor­ough­ly hijacked polit­i­cal sys­tem, as under­fund­ed schools teach kids they prob­a­bly shouldn’t bank on polar bears, Social Secu­ri­ty or the state of Flori­da being around when they get older.

Cor­po­ra­tions have the same rights as peo­ple and rou­tine­ly demon­strate their pow­er to super­sede the will of local com­mu­ni­ties that oppose them.

Cities are expe­ri­enc­ing home­less­ness ​ “ emer­gen­cies,” while too many of those with jobs are allo­cat­ing the bulk of their stag­nant wages to sky­rock­et­ing rents, ner­vous­ly hop­ing they don’t need to take their car into the shop or have a med­ical pro­ce­dure (the deductible of many ACA health plans being any­thing but affordable).

​ emer­gen­cies,” while too many of those with jobs are allo­cat­ing the bulk of their stag­nant wages to sky­rock­et­ing rents, ner­vous­ly hop­ing they don’t need to take their car into the shop or have a med­ical pro­ce­dure (the deductible of many ACA health plans being any­thing but affordable). An hon­est appraisal of unem­ploy­ment in this coun­try would reveal a sig­nif­i­cant­ly high­er rate than the offi­cial 5 per­cent ( 10 . 4 per­cent for African Amer­i­cans), while many of the jobs being added in the grow­ing ser­vice indus­try fall short of pro­vid­ing any actu­al finan­cial security.

Accord­ing to a recent Gallup poll, 63 per­cent of Amer­i­cans feel this econ­o­my unfair­ly dis­trib­utes its wealth. What­ev­er ​“fair­ness” is, that’s plen­ty of peo­ple, on all sides of the ​“aisle” (let’s just call them ​“folks”), cur­rent­ly under the impres­sion that a size­able chunk of the col­lec­tive we is in the process of get­ting fleeced. In oth­er words: if this is the new econ­o­my, per­haps we need a new­er one.

May 30, 1983. (Pho­to: Time Mag­a­zine Archives)

Gar Alper­ovitz — a polit­i­cal econ­o­my pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of May­land, his­to­ri­an and author of numer­ous books on the top­ic of cor­po­rate capitalism’s increas­ing­ly con­spic­u­ous pit­falls — is a well-known voice in the nation­al discussion.

He believes that the path to both greater income equal­i­ty and eco­log­i­cal sus­tain­abil­i­ty (some­thing he calls ​“an evo­lu­tion­ary recon­struc­tion”) must begin with the democ­ra­ti­za­tion of own­er­ship. Today, work­er-owned means of pro­duc­tion, the fun­da­men­tal tenet of tra­di­tion­al social­ism, is a for­eign con­cept to many Amer­i­cans. For oth­ers, it’s code for a his­toric path­way to bru­tal dic­ta­tor­ships. But Alper­ovitz says that coop­er­a­tive own­er­ship, as a guid­ing the­mat­ic prin­ci­ple, can be (and in some cas­es is already being) adapt­ed in a unique­ly Amer­i­can fashion.

He tells Rur­al Amer­i­ca In These Times, ​“To move to a whole dif­fer­ent con­cep­tion we’re going to need new lan­guage. The social­ist lan­guage very often end­ed in state social­ism. So we’re going to need a new one to talk about a com­mu­ni­ty-base build­ing towards a dif­fer­ent vision, a plu­ral­ist com­mon­wealth — work­er, neigh­bor­hood, region­al and nation­al forms of demo­c­ra­t­ic ownership.”

Oth­ers, like Janelle Orsi, the cofounder of the Sus­tain­able Economies Law Cen­ter (SELC) in Oak­land, Calif., are work­ing where they live to advo­cate for an econ­o­my based on local­ized shar­ing and coop­er­a­tion. By help­ing oth­ers nav­i­gate the legal­i­ties of non-tra­di­tion­al busi­ness or liv­ing arrange­ments, SELC is hop­ing to fos­ter some­thing they call ​“com­mu­ni­ty resilience.”

Thank God for Net­flix but this is not a lazy generation

Jus­ti­fi­ably jad­ed about what Wash­ing­ton can accom­plish these days, the new econ­o­my move­ment — a yet-to-be sin­gu­lar­ly defined group of peo­ple and orga­ni­za­tions work­ing to find sus­tain­able alter­na­tives to cor­po­rate cap­i­tal­ism — is not plac­ing its eggs in a polit­i­cal bas­ket. But if any­body out there is still won­der­ing why a mean-spir­it­ed bil­lion­aire shout­ing anti-estab­lish­ment rhetoric in a ​“Make Amer­i­ca Great Again” hat and an inde­pen­dent social­ist from Ver­mont are dom­i­nat­ing our 2016 elec­tion cycle, it’s safe to assume they’ve been out of the labor force for a while — like­ly draw­ing their income from fair­ly reli­able stock mar­ket div­i­dends (returns on pre-exist­ing wealth).

Wall Street — the often tout­ed sym­bol of ​“see, everything’s okay” in the eco­nom­ic recov­ery debate — has been cruis­ing high above Main Street since the finan­cial cri­sis of 2008 and the sub­se­quent Great Reces­sion. (The right lan­guage can take the sting out of almost any­thing.) Some, how­ev­er, argue that even these mar­kets are being artif­i­cal­ly propped up in the form of unprece­dent­ed ​“easy mon­ey” poli­cies imple­ment­ed after the last col­lapse. ​“Quan­ti­ta­tive eas­ing” to the tune of $4 tril­lion — known to these crit­ics as ​“cor­po­rate wel­fare” — and the Fed­er­al Reserve’s reluc­tance to raise the inter­est rate from its 7‑year stay near zero (ZIRP) have indeed cul­mi­nat­ed in tremen­dous mar­ket gains. And who knows where we’d be with­out it? But this wealth does appear quar­an­tined, locked in a cycle of grav­i­ty defy­ing side­ways and upward ​“trick­ling” — large­ly divorced from the world out­side of Wall Street. David Stock­man, the for­mer head of Pres­i­dent Ronald Reagan’s Office of Man­age­ment and Bud­get, calls these meth­ods ​“the ​‘great defor­ma­tion’ of Amer­i­can cap­i­tal­ism”—meth­ods that essen­tial­ly turn our finan­cial mar­kets into what he calls ​“dan­ger­ous, unsta­ble casi­nos.” Is this true? Who ben­e­fits from this ​“easy mon­ey” pol­i­cy? And who ulti­mate­ly pays for these mes­sian­ic measures?

Whether these chick­ens will come home to roost is an open ques­tion. But if our soci­ety ever choos­es to have an hon­est con­ver­sa­tion about the notion that cer­tain insti­tu­tions are ​“too big to fail,” these are some very impor­tant moth­er cluckers.

Gar Alper­ovitz is a his­to­ri­an, polit­i­cal econ­o­mist, activist and pro­po­nent of a new econ­o­my. (Pho­to: gar​alper​ovitz​.com)

What then must we do?

Gar Alper­ovitz in his lat­est book, What Then Must We Do: Straight Talk About the Next Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion, argues that the eco­nom­ic and eco­log­i­cal prob­lems we are fac­ing con­sti­tute a sys­temic prob­lem, not a polit­i­cal one. He sug­gests this is most read­i­ly gleaned through a long-term lens — by under­stand­ing that the lev­el of eco­nom­ic inequal­i­ty and eco­log­i­cal decay we are cur­rent­ly expe­ri­enc­ing took decades to devel­op and is not a result of one polit­i­cal fail­ure here or the wrong can­di­date there. In oth­er words, this phe­nom­e­non is the byprod­uct of how our mod­ern insti­tu­tions were designed.

He sug­gests that, though to a less vio­lent extent than state social­ism, cor­po­rate cap­i­tal­ism has also proven vul­ner­a­ble to the elite cor­rup­tion of its best inten­tions, result­ing in both pover­ty and ​“eco­log­i­cal decay.”

Care­ful not to dis­cour­age the every­day citizen’s pas­sion for the polit­i­cal process, how­ev­er, he writes:

I’m not at all inter­est­ed in pour­ing cold water on pro­gres­sive hopes. Quite the con­trary. I’m try­ing to put some­thing else on the table in clear terms — name­ly, that if we are to get any­where in the future, we had bet­ter think twice about one of the most impor­tant prece­dents many peo­ple rely on when they hold that pol­i­tics can alter the pro­found­ly pow­er­ful trends ema­nat­ing from much deep­er sys­temic processes.

Look­ing back at his­toric social vic­to­ries, from civ­il rights and the rise of fem­i­nism to the more recent leg­is­la­tion on health care and gay rights, he cau­tions the read­er against iden­ti­fy­ing these long, ardu­ous strug­gles as com­fort­ing proof that we can count on gov­ern­ment to even­tu­al­ly do what’s in our best inter­ests. ​“What all this has been about is get­ting into the sys­tem,” he writes. ​“Not chang­ing it.”

On Sep­tem­ber 19, 1977, 5,000 work­ers at the Youngston Sheet and Tube Com­pa­ny in Youngstown, Ohio lost their jobs. Their attempt to form a coop­er­a­tive steel mill failed when the Carter admin­sis­tra­tion decid­ed not to back the effort. (Pho­to: rust​wire​.com)

One per­son, one vote: the democ­ra­ti­za­tion of capitalism

All things con­sid­ered, the redis­tri­b­u­tion of wealth should be an uncom­fort­able top­ic. His­tor­i­cal­ly, the col­lec­tive response to ​“let them eat cake” has cul­mi­nat­ed in the copi­ous spilling of elite blood. (One won­ders if that bloody chap­ter in human his­to­ry could have been avoid­ed by intro­duc­ing ​“sys­temic” into the French peasantry’s vocab­u­lary.) But Alper­ovitz doesn’t call for billionaire’s heads on sticks. Nor does he espouse the notion that cul­tur­al and finan­cial inequities can be sus­tain­ably alle­vi­at­ed by some­thing as mun­dane as high­er tax­es on the rich. Rather than work­ing to change poli­cies with­in our exist­ing insti­tu­tions, Alper­ovitz con­cen­trates on the pos­si­bil­i­ty of build­ing entire­ly new ones. In an oth­er­wise fair­ly pes­simistic ode to our col­lec­tive cir­cum­stances, he informs the read­er that such pos­si­bil­i­ties are not with­out precedent.

His answer to the tit­u­lar ques­tion ​“What then must we do?” is mul­ti-faceted, but ulti­mate­ly root­ed in seiz­ing exist­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties (in many cas­es ones direct­ly cre­at­ed by the myr­i­ad fail­ures of cor­po­rate cap­i­tal­ism) to democ­ra­tize wealth. (If this term elic­its an innate Sovi­et era, ​“Uh-oh!,” you’re not alone — espe­cial­ly if you’re over the age of 65 — but, for bet­ter or worse, stud­ies show that gut reac­tions to the word ​“social­ism” are chang­ing.)

Begin­ning with the plight of 5,000 steel work­ers in Youngstown, Ohio, who, on Mon­day, Sep­tem­ber 19, 1977 learned their jobs at Youngstown Sheet and Tube were lost and worked relent­less­ly against the pow­er­ful busi­ness­men and Unit­ed Steel­work­ers union lead­ers of their time to cre­ate a work­er-owned steel mill that would sus­tain their com­mu­ni­ty, Alper­ovitz fills whole chap­ters with exam­ples of work­er-owned coop­er­a­tives now thriv­ing all over the coun­try (and world). Ulti­mate­ly, the Youngstown work­ers’ effort to cre­ate an employ­ee-owned mill suc­cumbed to the Carter administration’s polit­i­cal pan­der­ing, but not before rev­o­lu­tion­iz­ing the nation­al con­ver­sa­tion about alter­na­tives to tra­di­tion­al, cor­po­rate busi­ness models.

“For a start,” Alper­ovitz writes, ​“130 mil­lion Amer­i­cans — 40 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion — are [already] mem­bers of one or anoth­er form of coop­er­a­tive.” These insti­tu­tions exist in vir­tu­al­ly every sec­tor — from the elec­tri­cal co-ops preva­lent in many rur­al areas (“social­ist” enter­pris­es around since the 1930s that cur­rent­ly gen­er­at­ing 25 per­cent of the nation’s elec­tric­i­ty) to agri­cul­tur­al, insur­ance, health care, food and retail co-ops, not to men­tion, per­haps most inter­est­ing­ly, cred­it unions.

He explains that these com­mu­ni­ty banks, to which more than 95 mil­lion Amer­i­cans belong with an esti­mat­ed $1 tril­lion in com­bined assets, ​“lie at the heart of a new and poten­tial­ly explo­sive move­ment to break down the tra­di­tion­al bar­ri­ers to fund­ing non­tra­di­tion­al busi­ness mod­els.” For exam­ple, he writes that in 2011 and 2012, the ​“Move Your Mon­ey” cam­paign shift­ed ​“hun­dreds of mil­lions if not bil­lions of dol­lars away Wall Street and big banks.”

One per­son, one vote, is the ground­ing prin­ci­ple behind cred­it unions and, the­o­ret­i­cal­ly, all coop­er­a­tives. That means in a co-op mon­ey should nev­er buy pow­er or prof­its — instead, these are dis­trib­uted based on one’s lev­el of par­tic­i­pa­tion. But, as Alper­ovitz empha­sizes again and again, work­er-owned com­pa­nies are far from ​“the only forms of democ­ra­tized wealth devel­op­ing under the radar in the Unit­ed States.” Thou­sands of ​“social enter­pris­es,” from tra­di­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty devel­op­ment cor­po­ra­tions (CDCs) to a grow­ing num­ber of ​“land trusts” that pro­vide afford­able hous­ing to areas fac­ing, among oth­er threats, gen­tri­fi­ca­tion, are simul­ta­ne­ous­ly work­ing to solve the (sys­temic and often envi­ron­men­tal) prob­lems fac­ing their com­mu­ni­ties. They are at the same time profiting.

Alper­ovitz calls the recon­struc­tion of tra­di­tion­al busi­ness mod­els — that is, the democ­ra­ti­za­tion of wealth among those work­ing for their own social, eco­log­i­cal and finan­cial well-being — an ​“evo­lu­tion­ary process.” And, per­haps like the first fish that found itself with legs, numer­ous forces are mar­shaled against any eco­nom­ic par­a­digm shift. Because tra­di­tion­al cor­po­ra­tions are behold­en to share­hold­ers, for exam­ple, the mere men­tion of allo­cat­ing prof­its for ​“social pur­pos­es” is cur­rent­ly not just counter-intu­itive in terms of max­i­miz­ing prof­its, it’s jus­ti­fi­able grounds for legal action against the company.

Before crit­i­ciz­ing our nation’s ver­i­ta­ble legion of lawyers as some­how ​“anti-social,” remem­ber that, accord­ing to this sys­tem of ours, the cor­po­ra­tions these indi­vid­u­als are defend­ing are peo­ple too. (Though not up to their necks in stu­dent loans.) Even rethink­ing this struc­ture qui­et­ly — not amid a deeply polar­ized pop­u­lace, half of which is ready to tack­le any damn pinko in the name of…who knows any­more — is a mas­sive under­tak­ing. Yet Alper­ovitz sug­gests that new forms of social­ly con­scious cap­i­tal­ism, a pro­gres­sive con­cept to be sure, needn’t be dis­sect­ed along right and left lines. He points out that in 1987, it was the Gip­per him­self who said, ​“I can’t help but believe that in the future we will see in the Unit­ed States and through­out the West­ern world, an increas­ing trend toward the next log­i­cal step, employ­ee own­er­ship. It is a path that befits a free people.”

The Sus­tain­able Economies Law Center

While Alper­ovitz envi­sions how our eco­nom­ic insti­tu­tions and the way that we do busi­ness might be trans­formed over time, Janelle Orsi is work­ing, day to day, to cre­ate a peo­ple-cen­tered econ­o­my on the local level.

In 2006, Orsi, a third-year law stu­dent at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia Berkley, was focus­ing on social jus­tice issues like police mis­con­duct and keep­ing kids out of juve­nile hall. ​“Far too ear­ly in my career,” Orsi tells Rur­al Amer­i­ca In These Times, ​“I was start­ing to get burned out on the adver­sar­i­al court sys­tem.” She began feel­ing like she could ​“work for­ev­er” and not make a dif­fer­ence. At some point she asked her­self: ​“How would it look if I were a lawyer that was more proac­tive­ly help­ing to cre­ate com­mu­ni­ties that were actu­al­ly going to sus­tain peo­ple — pre­vent­ing these prob­lems that are oth­er­wise just get­ting BandAids?”

She met a local orga­ni­za­tion called People’s Gro­cery—a group of urban farm­ers in Oak­land teach­ing young peo­ple how to grow fresh food in neigh­bor­hoods with oth­er­wise lit­tle access. ​“They were pro­vid­ing young peo­ple with jobs,” she says, ​“cre­at­ing actu­al solu­tions to the same prob­lems I’d been get­ting up-tight about.”

The expe­ri­ence left Orsi think­ing about the ​“need for land.” She real­ized that, in many cities there’s plen­ty of it, but that that land is pri­vate­ly owned — not shared. Still in school, Orsi decid­ed to write a paper focus­ing on all the legal issues that would arise around peo­ple shar­ing pri­vate­ly owned land to grow food. Suf­fice it to say, they were numerous.

“That was an ​‘Aha’ moment,” says Orsi, ​“I real­ized that I could be a lawyer who focus­es exclu­sive­ly on help­ing peo­ple nav­i­gate shar­ing — draw­ing up agree­ments, think­ing about lia­bil­i­ty issues, reg­u­la­tions, iron­ing out the details of their finances and governance.”

After grad­u­at­ing Orsi went to work for coop­er­a­tives — gro­cery and work­er co-ops, help­ing peo­ple buy­ing homes or land togeth­er. ​“These were exact­ly the clients I want­ed to serve,” says Orsi, ​“but time after time I was find­ing that there was some sort of legal require­ment stand­ing in the way of what these peo­ple want­ed to do.”

Whether it was reg­u­la­tions pre­vent­ing two peo­ple from pur­chas­ing real estate togeth­er, the way employ­ees were putting in hours at a food co-op, or secu­ri­ties laws that arose when peo­ple tried to pool their funds togeth­er, she inevitably encoun­tered sys­temic oppo­si­tion. ​“I start­ed to feel like the legal sys­tem was designed to keep peo­ple way from each oth­er,” says Orsi, ​“It assumed peo­ple were going to exploit each oth­er, which made it very dif­fi­cult for peo­ple to come togeth­er to pool their time, ener­gy and resources.”

In 2009, over cof­fee with friend and fel­low lawyer, Jen­ny Kas­san, who had come to sim­i­lar con­clu­sions about the lim­i­ta­tions of the law when it came to shar­ing, the two began enter­tain­ing the idea of a non-prof­it called the Sus­tain­able Economies Law Cen­ter. ​“It sound­ed like a big deal law cen­ter,” says Orsi, ​“but we fig­ured it’d be an on-the-side hob­by.” That sum­mer, how­ev­er, they and stu­dents inter­est­ed in the project peti­tioned the Secu­ri­ties and Exchange Com­mis­sion (SEC) to change laws regard­ing small invest­ments in local enter­pris­es. Part­ly a sym­bol­ic ges­ture used to draw atten­tion to how pro­hib­i­tive secu­ri­ties laws are when it comes to enabling peo­ple to raise cap­i­tal from their local com­mu­ni­ties, SELC’s work lay the ground­work for the Jump­start Our Busi­ness Star­tups (JOBS) Act, which Oba­ma even­tu­al­ly signed in 2012.

The project got big­ger from there. In 2012 they received a $50,000 grant from the 11th Hour Project and since then addi­tion­al fund­ing. In Sep­tem­ber, SELC hired its twelfth staff member.

Janelle Orsi is co-founder and Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of the Sus­tain­able Economies Law Cen­ter. (Pho­to: SELC)

Many of the reg­u­la­tions that stand in the way of the new econ­o­my movement’s goals — non-tra­di­tion­al, often coop­er­a­tive arrange­ments — emerged in the 1930s, dur­ing the Great Depres­sion, when Con­gress start­ed real­iz­ing how, when you let an econ­o­my run wild, work­ers get exploit­ed and invest­ments become risky. Busi­ness­es were get­ting big­ger and big­ger and the gov­ern­ment saw a need to intervene.

“All of these reg­u­la­tions were cre­at­ed out of good inten­tions,” says Orsi, ​“and they remain impor­tant to the extent that we still have an econ­o­my dom­i­nat­ed by large-scale play­ers and those play­ers do have incen­tive to exploit peo­ple — to squeeze as much as pos­si­ble out of labor and our envi­ron­ment as they can.”

Orsi rarely ever sug­gests chang­ing those reg­u­la­tions as they apply to large com­pa­nies, but she does think we ​“need to cre­ate a whole new legal frame­work that rec­og­nizes when you cre­ate coop­er­a­tive busi­ness­es, for exam­ple, the inher­ent legal frame­work is so dif­fer­ent that we should prob­a­bly have dif­fer­ent reg­u­la­tions for them.”

SELC’s Pol­i­cy Direc­tor, Christi­na Oat­field, leads the organization’s Food Pro­gram while sup­port­ing the Grass­roots Finance part of their mis­sion. In addi­tion to a nation­wide cam­paign to pro­mote seed shar­ing among grow­ers, they’ve recent­ly draft­ed the Local Econ­o­my Secu­ri­ties Act (LESA) — a bill in Cal­i­for­nia that would exempt small local invest­ments in com­mu­ni­ty busi­ness­es from state per­mit restric­tions. In doing so, it would also allow a small farm enter­prise to raise up to $2 mil­lion for the ​“pur­chase, long-term leas­ing, pur­chase of an ease­ment, con­struc­tion or improve­ment of real prop­er­ty to be used for agri­cul­tur­al pur­pos­es.” ​“This bill is cur­rent­ly pend­ing leg­is­la­tion,” says Oat­field, ​“and prob­a­bly our biggest project relat­ed to Grass­roots Finance at the moment.”

“The impor­tant things we con­sume — hous­ing, ener­gy, water, food — should be con­sumer owned,” says Orsi. ​“Because of the work we do, and ser­vices and goods we pro­vide for soci­ety — to the extent that we’re spend­ing a good por­tion of our lives work­ing for them — we should be in con­trol of our work envi­ron­ment. It’s hard for me to see many busi­ness out there that shouldn’t be work­er owned.”

Ulti­mate­ly, how­ev­er, SELC is about more than the advance­ment of coop­er­a­tives — coop­er­a­tion itself, is an under­cur­rent. ​“Behind every­thing we do,” says Orsi, ​“is the idea that most of our econ­o­my should come into legal struc­tures that are either coop­er­a­tive or not for prof­it, because that removes the incen­tive for exploita­tion and dis­trac­tion. We keep com­ing back to the idea that work­er co-ops are absolute­ly essen­tial if we want to cre­ate sus­tain­able livelihoods.”

Ques­tions

The need for an eco­nom­ic over­haul that works for work­ing peo­ple — one that doesn’t leave a lega­cy of per­pet­u­al debt, envi­ron­men­tal destruc­tion and unrec­i­p­ro­cat­ed cor­po­rate servi­tude —is obvi­ous to many. But where are we head­ed and what can we do about it?

Are the TaskRab­bits and Uber dri­vers of today the ush­ers of a new, fend-for-your­self, do-what­ev­er-it-takes eco­nom­ic model?

Are these free­lance war­riors — seiz­ers of the so-called ​“gig econ­o­my” — 21st cen­tu­ry cor­po­rate refugees, resource­ful peo­ple drawn by eco­nom­ic neces­si­ty to the flames of app dri­ven start-ups that offer a per­pet­u­al­ly casu­al Fri­day but lit­tle in the way of long-term secu­ri­ty? Indeed, are employ­er-pro­vid­ed health care, two weeks paid vaca­tion, a match­ing 401k, parental leave, etc., anachro­nisms for those with­out strong boot­straps and a rel­a­tive­ly reli­able Toy­ota Corolla?

Con­sid­er­ing the extent to which our polit­i­cal process­es have been mon­e­tized by cor­po­rate influ­ence, can the rela­tion­ship between peo­ple, wealth and the envi­ron­ment be improved with­out gov­ern­ment inter­ven­tion? Is it pos­si­ble to cre­ate a more equi­table soci­ety with­out all-out social war­fare being the catalyst?

Maybe, maybe not, but a con­sid­er­ably more opti­mistic out­look presents itself if one scales these ques­tions down — replac­ing ​“soci­ety” with ​“town,” ​“city” or ​“com­mu­ni­ty.” Like the prob­lems them­selves, sus­tain­able solu­tions on the same scale will take time (per­haps gen­er­a­tions) to ful­ly man­i­fest. But employ­ing a community’s exist­ing resources — the most valu­able of which are the peo­ple who are direct­ly invest­ed in its sucess — to their fullest poten­tial, whether that is estab­lish­ing an employ­ee-owned busi­ness, arrang­ing to grow food on an emp­ty lot, or choos­ing to take cap­i­tal out of the increas­ing­ly ​“unsta­ble casi­nos” and put it to work in the local econ­o­my, might be worth a shot.