Hope and Enterprise: Building a democratic economy from under ground up

By Ted Silverman

It is often said that the current recession is the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. What's not often mentioned is that, in at least one salient sense, the present situation is far worse. For while the Depression was generally expected to be temporary no comparable hope exists today. The jobs needed to overcome the crisis have been shipped out of the country as a matter of national policy and those in charge of policy have little incentive for change. Concentration of wealth is greater and more devastating than ever before andboth major political parties are firmly in its grip, with the result that populist avenues of mainstream political action are largely blocked. In addition to these practical problems there are crucial issues of principle at stake. Our early American forebears took it for granted that freedom is as much a matter of economic independence as it is one of politics. As masses of self-employed working people were driven from their farms and shops and pressed into the service of the nascent industrial system they came to regard their new condition as wage slavery; virtually the same as chattel slavery with the remedial circumstance that, at least in principle, the former might be escaped with less difficulty than the latter. It took two centuries of first violence and then unremitting "educational" efforts to accustom Americans to the role of docile order-taker in the image of 'good student,' 'good citizen' and most crucially good employee. From both a practical and a moral perspective it would seem that the circumstances call for a mass movement of everyday people working cooperatively to build a new economy, comprising enterprises owned by those who run them and creating work for all who want it - a new industrial base founded on and enervated by distributed, clean and sustainable energy sources, utilizing cooperative, Open Source production methods. This short book is a primer on how this might be accomplished and an invitation to join up, with the author and/or each other, in the effort to do so. You don't need money, credit or any particular expertise, just a willingness to help build a federation of cooperative enterprises that you, your friends and colleagues own - and to defy the powers that be (or perhaps more to the point, to become the powers that be).

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1482601753
• ISBN13: 9781482601756
• Release Date: April 2013
• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Length: 140 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 11.0" x 0.3" x 8.5"