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Gar Alperovitz: All three. And there are a lot of people who don’t self-identify that way, there are a lot of people who are really interested in fundamental change, but don’t fall into the categories that we normally think about. There are a lot of people on the edges trying to decide whether to participate. I’m doing this book tour and going around the country, and people come out of the woodwork at these readings, and they are searching and looking for a different direction. And similarly the Occupy movement left a lot of people with a lot of questions: “Where are we going? Is there another way forward?”
So broadly speaking, even amongst radicals, most people are open to thinking about new directions, but they don’t have a fully coherently defined vision of where they’re going and how to go forward. The book is aimed at a very broad group of people.
You argue throughout the book, and I tend to agree, that the age in which the labour movement and other traditional activist or left and liberal alliances effect policy is over. But you also argue that it will require change of governmental economic intervention in order to achieve further democratic gains. On a local level, you see a “checkerboard strategy” as paramount. How do you think people can begin changing their cities or states towards deeper democracy, and how do you see the interplay between cities and states changing the dialogue?
Regarding cities, it’s a very mixed bag, and I tried to portray that with the checkerboard strategy. Some cities are really taken over by extreme right-wing groups or are very conservative, and the whole name of the game there is to sell off city assets and to cut back on pension funds and wages for workers, placing the taxpayer interest in the worst way. That’s certainly one tendency.
But there are other cities where that really isn’t true, and there’s a lot of opportunity for different movements. The most obvious case here is Cleveland. That’s a city that’s been in very bad economic shape. But it turns out a different strategy of building cooperatives, of changing ownership and building land trusts, once the city officials understood it, made a lot of sense to them, and they began using all the policy tools and programs available to them in very creative ways.
It partly has to do with politics but it also has to do with awareness. I’ve done a lot of ‘real’ hardnosed politics, but sometimes what is critical is awareness. They’re just not aware of what they could do in a different direction. In those cases, particularly if there’s an activist involvement, you get a different shift. So for instance, something like the Cleveland model is beginning to emerge in ten different cities: Atlanta is the most advanced, Pittsburgh and Cincinnati are doing something based on the same model. We’ve received 110 inquiries — a significant number of cities are interested, but they just hadn’t thought of what they could do with the existing powers they have. What hasn’t happened yet, although I think Cincinnati is close, we haven’t seen activists actually figuring out ways to move the ball in these new models. And I think that’s the next stage. We’ve seen it in the case of New Era Windows, which has a powerful activist component within and also broad support for the model from outside. I think we’re going to see more and more of that as time goes on. That’s my sense of what’s happening just from talking to a lot of people — there are no studies, at this stage of the game you pick up information by talking to a lot of people, the newspapers certainly don’t cover it, academics don’t cover it… Mark as brainly!
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