Gar Alperovitz

Last updated
Gar Alperovitz
Gar Alperovitz.jpg
Alperovitz in 2012
Born (1936-05-05) May 5, 1936 (age 88)
Racine, Wisconsin
Alma mater
OccupationCo-Chair of the Next System Project at the Democracy Collaborative
Notable work
  • The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb
  • America Beyond Capitalism
  • Unjust Deserts
Website garalperovitz.com

Gar Alperovitz (born May 5, 1936) is an American historian and political economist. Alperovitz served as a fellow of King's College, Cambridge; a founding fellow of the Harvard Institute of Politics; a founding Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies; a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution; and the Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland Department of Government and Politics from 1999 to 2015. He also served as a legislative director in the US House of Representatives and the US Senate and as a special assistant in the US Department of State. Alperovitz is a distinguished lecturer with the American Historical Society, co-founded the Democracy Collaborative and co-chairs its Next System Project with James Gustav Speth.

Contents

Education and early career

Born in Racine, Wisconsin in 1936, Alperovitz attended William Horlick High School. He graduated from the University of Madison-Wisconsin with a degree in American history in 1959 and from the University of California, Berkeley with an M.A. in economics in 1960. [1] He was awarded a Marshall scholarship to pursue a Ph.D. in political economy at the London School of Economics, later transferring to Cambridge University to study under theoretical economist Joan Robinson, who served as his doctoral thesis adviser. Alperovitz wrote his dissertation on the role of the atomic bomb in the creation of the postwar economic order. [2] While completing his doctoral studies, he worked for two years in the US House of Representatives as a legislative assistant to Robert Kastenmeier. He was named a fellow of King's College, Cambridge University in 1964. [3]

On leave from courses, Alperovitz served as the legislative director for Senator Gaylord Nelson in 1964 and 1965, where he played a role in efforts to limit the scope of powers given to the President in the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, drafting an amendment to the resolution that would have prevented the escalation to a full ground war in Vietnam. [4] In 1965 he accepted a post as a special assistant (policy planning, United Nations) to the Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations. In 1966 Alperovitz joined the Brookings Institution as a non-resident guest scholar. He was elected as a founding fellow of the Institute of Politics at Harvard University's Kennedy School that year.

Cold War historian

In 1965 Simon and Schuster published Alperovitz's Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam, based on his Cambridge doctoral thesis. Drawing on the diaries of Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, the work argued that after Germany's defeat, U.S. policymakers based their strategy toward the Soviet Union on the judgment that the atomic bomb, once demonstrated, would provide leverage in negotiating the postwar world order. Alperovitz also reported that, at the time, there was substantial but not definitive evidence suggesting that gaining diplomatic leverage against the Soviet Union was a major consideration in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. [5] The book, published as the Vietnam War generated increasing public concern, became a focal point in the debate over the direction of American foreign policy in the mid- and late 1960s. Although critically reviewed at the time by many, such as former Truman Administration Cabinet member Senator Clinton Anderson in The New York Times, others welcomed it. Historian Michael Beschloss observed in a 1985 New York Times retrospective that Atomic Diplomacy had immense "shock value" during a time when the public was less skeptical "about the motives of our leaders and the origins of the cold war" and that Alperovitz's argument "pushed other scholars to re-examine their assumptions about Hiroshima and Nagaski." [6] Yale historian Gaddis Smith wrote in The New York Times in 1985 that "the preponderance of new evidence that has appeared since 1965 tends to sustain the original argument." [7]

Alperovitz has written extensively on the decision to use the atomic bomb in such publications as The New York Review of Books , The Washington Post , and The New York Times . He revisited the subject in The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth published by Knopf in 1995 on the 50th anniversary of the decision. [6] The work added further research demonstrating that top American and British World War II military leaders believed the war would end in the Pacific Theater long before an invasion of Japan could begin in November, and that they had attempted to convince top civilian leaders, including the president, that this was likely. The book demonstrated that virtually every top World War II U.S. military leader, including President (previously General) Eisenhower, went public after the war with statements suggesting that the use of the atomic bomb was unnecessary. A major part of the work documented the sophisticated public relations effort the Truman administration mounted to sustain public belief that using the bomb was necessary and, as Beschloss observed in a New York Times review, "why the public clings so tenaciously to the original explanation of why Truman gave the order." [6] Historian Marilyn Young observed in a featured review of the book in the American Historical Review that "few historians I know have taken up the central ethical and historical issues surrounding the first, and thus far only, use of nuclear bombs as seriously as Alperovitz." [8] A full-length ABC documentary anchored by Peter Jennings brought the argument to a broader audience. Other documentaries including one by the BBC and a dramatization by a German television network helped increase international interest.

Community wealth-building and the pluralist commonwealth model

Alperovitz's work as a political economist has centered on theoretical and practical alternatives to both corporate capitalism and traditional state socialism. He holds that the architecture of both suffers from centralized power that fails to support liberty, equality, ecological sustainability, genuine participatory democracy, and community. [9] Challenging both theories of reform and of revolution, he emphasizes a model based on the evolutionary reconstruction of economic institutions, communities, and the nation as a whole. [10] In American Beyond Capitalism and other books and essays, Alperovitz offers an integrated systemic model for a pluralist commonwealth based on democratizing ownership of economic institutions at all levels, a regional decentralization of economic and political power, and the building of forms of community wealth-holding and a culture of participatory democracy. [10]

The pluralist commonwealth model includes diverse forms of democratized ownership, from worker-community cooperatively owned production firms to municipally owned institutions, public banks, utilities, land trusts, and public transportation. Regional scaling of larger public enterprises and longer-term political decentralization are proposed as ways to transform and displace extractive elements of financialized corporate capitalism. Alperovitz also acknowledges the utility of certain forms of private enterprises and markets along with participatory economic planning. This model attempts to expand the limits of political economic possibilities beyond the polarity between state ownership and capitalism. The model also proposes a reduction in the workweek, providing workers more free time and allowing for more liberty and democratic participation. [11] It proposes that as population continues to grow, a long-term devolution of the national state in the direction of regional structures can allow for democratic participation and democratic management of ecological issues. [11]

In a 1978 profile, biographer Ron Chernow wrote: "Alperovitz believes that co-ops and other experimental enterprises can flourish in strong, stable communities…When Alperovitz talks about socialism (and he usually avoids the term, as much for its imprecision as its emotional charge), he doesn't mean a group of Soviet-style commissars and technocrats handing down production quotas from Washington. Rather, he foresees thousands of local planning boards acting as conduits for citizen participation. Decisions would trickle up from below, forming a barrier against the sort of bureaucratic monolith that most people equate with planning," [12] as well as with corporate capitalism. Alperovitz has said his work is influenced by his studies at the University of Wisconsin with historian William Appleman Williams, at Cambridge University with post-Keynesian theoretical economist Joan Robinson, and by his work with Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, an early environmentalist and the founder of Earth Day.

Alperovitz's interest in developing alternative economic models based on community wealth building began while he was in the federal government. Over 40 years, he has worked to create several institutions to develop an expansive theory and to implement principles on the ground. In addition to those noted at the outset, he co-founded The Cambridge Institute and The National Center for Economic and Security Alternatives. In 1964, while working in the Senate, he was the principal architect of legislation to create several regional planning commissions that might lead to efforts similar to the Appalachian Regional Commission as part of the Johnson Administration's War on Poverty. [1] Along with John McClaughry, he co-authored the Community Self-Determination Act of 1968, sponsored by a bipartisan coalition of 26 senators, which introduced an expansive ownership-oriented conception of already established Community Development Corporations (CDC) as a new institutional form.

In 1964 Alperovitz met Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and in 1967 he began work with King and high-level aides Andrew Young and Bernard Lee to explore a possible community-building economic strategy that might also build political power. [9] This work was cut short by King's assassination in 1968.

Youngstown activism

Alperovitz is recognized as the leading architect of the first modern steel industry attempt at worker ownership. [9] In 1977, after failing to invest in the modernization of its production machinery, the holding company that owned the large steel manufacturer Youngstown Sheet & Tube shut down its plant in Youngstown, Ohio, and laid off more than 4,000 workers in a single day—still known in the community as Black Monday. [13] In response, these steelworkers and a broad-based community coalition decided to attempt to reopen the mill under Alperovitz's comprehensive plan for worker-community ownership. [12] Advocates of the plan argued that the plant became unprofitable only because rent-seeking corporate owners shifted investments to other locations and industries instead of investing in modernizing the plant, whereas community ownership could foster efficient production and long-term investment.

This coalition asked Alperovitz and the National Center for Economic Alternatives to develop a comprehensive feasibility study and effort. A nationwide campaign led by national religious leaders put the Youngstown effort on the map, and with Alperovitz's help, the coalition secured support from the Carter administration's Department of Housing and Urban Development for a sophisticated plan along with a pledge to provide loan guarantees. A comprehensive study by a leading steel industry expert demonstrated that the community could feasibly reopen the mill under a worker-community ownership program after updating it with modern technology. [12] The Carter administration later withdrew its loan pledges after the midterm elections of 1978.

Vietnam War activism

Alperovitz was involved in efforts to stop the escalating Vietnam War for several years, both as a political actor and later as an activist. While still Legislative Director to Senator Gaylord Nelson, Alperovitz authored an amendment to the famed Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that would have pre-empted the massive escalation of the war that ensued after the Resolution passed. [14] After being appointed and serving for a year as Special Assistant to the U.S State Department, Alperovitz resigned his post discouraged by insider attempts to alter US war policy.

From 1966 to 1968, while a Fellow at the Harvard Institute of Politics, Alperovitz played a role in the burgeoning antiwar movements coalescing in Cambridge at the time, developing the "Vietnam Summer" activism campaign centered on canvassing and teaching. [15] The New Yorker at the time credited Alperovitz with devising the campaign's strategy, which sought to educate and agitate "undecideds and unaffiliated doves" into taking action against the war. [15] Alperovitz arranged for Martin Luther King Jr. and writer and physician Benjamin Spock to join the effort and formally kick off the project. [15]

Role in the Pentagon Papers

In 1971 Alperovitz met Daniel Ellsberg at a Cambridge dinner party. Alperovitz was unaware that months earlier, while still a RAND employee, Ellsberg had secretly made several sets of photocopies of a classified United States Department of Defense report on the history of the Vietnam War, giving a portion of one set to New York Times journalist Neil Sheehan. [16] These documents, which later became known as the Pentagon Papers, revealed that the US government had known from an early point in the conflict that it could not win the Vietnam War, and further showed that each administration since Eisenhower, and especially the Johnson administration, had "systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress" about the conduct of the war.

To keep the publication of the Pentagon Papers going, Alperovitz developed a strategy to hand off portions of the report to one news publication at a time beginning with The Washington Post—which helped to create an ongoing media spectacle and to keep public interest in the contents of the papers alive for several weeks. With Ellsberg in hiding, Alperovitz handled the logistics of handing off the papers to the press, adopting the moniker "Mr. Boston" when speaking to journalists and exercising great caution in planning elaborate handoffs. In an interview with The New Yorker, Ellsberg said that "Alperovitz, in particular, was critical to the way this thing worked out … it was Alperovitz who devised the strategy of distributing the papers to as many news organizations as possible, including [to Ben Bagdikian at] The Washington Post, an approach that later proved to be crucial from both a legal and a public-relations standpoint. And it was Alperovitz who came up with the elaborate techniques for slipping the documents to reporters while evading the authorities." [16]

Works

Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam

In this work, Alperovitz investigates the role of the atomic bomb in shaping the formation of the U.S relationship with the Soviet Union and the makeup of the postwar international political order. Alperovitz provides evidence that once the atomic bomb had successfully been tested, the U.S policy towards the Soviet Union under the Truman Administration shifted from "conciliatory" to "tough" and he argues that Truman used the U.S possession of the atomic bomb as a diplomatic tool to force "Soviet acquiescence to American plans" for postwar Europe as the two powers negotiated at the Potsdam Conference." [17] In this work, Alperovitz also presents substantive, although not definitive, evidence suggesting that top-level American civilian and military leaders knew the atomic bomb was not necessary to end World War II, but still used it to demonstrate strength vis-á-vis the Soviet Union.

The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb

Drawing upon a host of new evidence that had been declassified since the publication of Atomic Diplomacy, such as the diary of U.S. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, in this work Alperovitz offers what Harper's called "the most definitive account we are likely to see of why Hiroshima was destroyed, and how an official history justifying that decision was subsequently crafted and promulgated by the national security establishment." [18] He argues that the preponderance of evidence suggests that it was not military necessity but rather the U.S.'s geostrategic motives vis-à-vis the Soviet Union that most influenced Truman's decision to use the atomic bomb against Japan. Although Alperovitz acknowledges that "a full and unqualified answer as to why the atomic bomb was used is neither essential nor possible", he says that "what is important is whether, when the bomb was used, the president and his top advisers understood that it was not required to avoid a long and costly invasion, as they later claimed and as most Americans still believe." [19]

America Beyond Capitalism

In this work Alperovitz chronicles growing discontent with the current political economy status quo, and diagnoses the long-term structural ills of the American political and economic system as inherent to capitalism's systemic architecture. He writes, "The book argues that the only way for the United States to once again honor its great historic values—above all equality, liberty, and meaningful democracy—is to build forward to achieve what amounts to systemic change...fundamental change—indeed, radical systemic change...If equality, liberty, and meaningful democracy can truly no longer be sustained by the political and economic arrangements of the current system, this defines the beginning phases of what can only be called a systemic crisis—an era of history in which the political-economic system must slowly lose legitimacy because the realities it produces contradict the values it proclaims. Moreover, if the system itself is at fault, then self-evidently—indeed, by definition—a solution would ultimately require the development of a new system." [20] Alperovitz offers a remedy in the form of grassroots experiments currently underway in thousands of U.S. communities, which he sees as precedents that popular movements can use to plant the seeds of the next, more democratic economy. He points to worker cooperatives, municipal ownership of utilities, community land trusts, and larger institutions such as public banks and public transportation, as a roadmap for "laying foundations to change a faltering system that increasingly fails to support the great American values of equality, liberty, and meaningful democracy." [21]

Unjust Deserts

With his co-author Lew Daly, Alperovitz explores the connection between the economic impact of socially-created knowledge and rising economic inequality to argue that "a new aristocracy is reaping huge unearned gains from our collective intellectual wealth." [22] Alperovitz summarizes the work in an interview with Dissent : "... our main focus is on the broader problem of inequality, not on undeserved fortunes per se. The problem we see is a society whose wealth is commonly created, by and large, but very unequally distributed and enjoyed. The largely collective way we produce our wealth is morally out of sync with the individualistic way we distribute the wealth and also justify the resulting vast inequalities. So we're not saying to the Bill Gateses of the world: you don't deserve anything and we're going to tax it all away. What we're saying is that our society should be more equal than it is if we truly believe, first, that people should be rewarded according to what they contribute, and second, that society should be repaid for the large contributions it makes, which enable everything else. These are common beliefs or, at least, reasonable ideas, so that is not the problem. The problem is a mistaken view of wealth-creation, which distorts how these common ideas are applied." [23]

Books

Related Research Articles

<i>Enola Gay</i> US Army Air Forces Boeing B-29 airplane that dropped the first atomic bomb

The Enola Gay is a Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber, named after Enola Gay Tibbets, the mother of the pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets. On 6 August 1945, during the final stages of World War II, it became the first aircraft to drop an atomic bomb in warfare. The bomb, code-named "Little Boy", was targeted at the city of Hiroshima, Japan, and destroyed about three-quarters of the city. Enola Gay participated in the second nuclear attack as the weather reconnaissance aircraft for the primary target of Kokura. Clouds and drifting smoke resulted in Nagasaki, a secondary target, being bombed instead.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anti-capitalism</span> Political ideology and movement opposed to capitalism

Anti-capitalism is a political ideology and movement encompassing a variety of attitudes and ideas that oppose capitalism. In this sense, anti-capitalists are those who wish to replace capitalism with another type of economic system, such as socialism or communism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Daniel Ellsberg</span> American whistleblower, political activist (1931–2023)

Daniel Ellsberg was an American political activist, economist, and United States military analyst. While employed by the RAND Corporation, he precipitated a national political controversy in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Pentagon study of U.S. government decision-making in relation to the Vietnam War, to The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other newspapers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Henry L. Stimson</span> American general, Secretary of War, and statesman (1867–1950)

Henry Lewis Stimson was an American statesman, lawyer, and Republican Party politician. Over his long career, he emerged as a leading figure in U.S. foreign policy by serving in both Republican and Democratic administrations. He served as Secretary of War (1911–1913) under President William Howard Taft, Secretary of State (1929–1933) under President Herbert Hoover, and again Secretary of War (1940–1945) under Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman, overseeing American military efforts during World War II.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James F. Byrnes</span> American politician (1882–1972)

James Francis Byrnes was an American judge and politician from South Carolina. A member of the Democratic Party, he served in the U.S. Congress and on the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as in the executive branch, most prominently as the 49th U.S. Secretary of State under President Harry S. Truman. Byrnes was also the 104th governor of South Carolina, making him one of the very few politicians to have served in the highest levels of all three branches of the American federal government while also being active in state government.

<i>Hiroshima</i> (book) 1946 book by John Hersey

Hiroshima is a 1946 book by American author John Hersey. It tells the stories of six survivors of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It is regarded as one of the earliest examples of New Journalism, in which the story-telling techniques of fiction are adapted to non-fiction reporting.

William Harold Greider was an American journalist and author who wrote primarily about economics.

Tsuyoshi Hasegawa is an American historian specializing in modern Russian and Soviet history and the relations between Russia, Japan, and the United States. He taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he was director of the Cold War Studies program until his retirement in 2016.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Historiography of the Cold War</span> Historiography of the Cold War

As soon as the term "Cold War" was popularized to refer to postwar tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, interpreting the course and origins of the conflict became a source of heated controversy among historians, political scientists and journalists. In particular, historians have sharply disagreed as to who was responsible for the breakdown of Soviet Union–United States relations after the World War II and whether the conflict between the two superpowers was inevitable, or could have been avoided. Historians have also disagreed on what exactly the Cold War was, what the sources of the conflict were and how to disentangle patterns of action and reaction between the two sides. While the explanations of the origins of the conflict in academic discussions are complex and diverse, several general schools of thought on the subject can be identified. Historians commonly speak of three differing approaches to the study of the Cold War: "orthodox" accounts, "revisionism" and "post-revisionism". However, much of the historiography on the Cold War weaves together two or even all three of these broad categories and more recent scholars have tended to address issues that transcend the concerns of all three schools.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki</span> August 1945 attacks in Japan during WWII

On 6 and 9 August 1945, the United States detonated two atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bombings killed between 150,000 and 246,000 people, most of whom were civilians, and remain the only use of nuclear weapons in an armed conflict. Japan surrendered to the Allies on 15 August, six days after the bombing of Nagasaki and the Soviet Union's declaration of war against Japan and invasion of Japanese-occupied Manchuria. The Japanese government signed the instrument of surrender on 2 September, effectively ending the war.

Economic reconstruction is a process for creating a proactive vision of economic change. The most basic idea is that problems in the economy, such as deindustrialization, environmental decay, outsourcing, industrial incompetence, poverty and addiction to a permanent war economy are based on the design and organization of economic institutions. Economic reconstruction builds on the ideas of various institutional economists and thinkers whose work both critiques existing economic institutions and suggests modes of organizing society differently. Economic reconstruction, however, places much more emphasis on the idea of alternative plans and alternative organization.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John R. Deane</span> United States Army general

Major General John Russell Deane was a senior United States Army officer who served as Chief of the United States Military Mission in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow during World War II. As such, he was the principal U.S. military official in Moscow through the end of the war and Ambassador W. Averell Harriman's key military advisor. He attended the 1943 Moscow Conference and the 1945 Yalta Conference. As the war progressed, he became frustrated by the Soviet government and urged that the U.S. work with the Soviets under a firmer policy "based on mutual respect and made to work both ways."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Debate over the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki</span> Controversies surrounding nuclear attacks

Substantial debate exists over the ethical, legal, and military aspects of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 August and 9 August 1945 respectively at the close of World War II (1939–45).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Presidency of Harry S. Truman</span> U.S. presidential administration from 1945 to 1953

Harry S. Truman's tenure as the 33rd president of the United States began on April 12, 1945, upon the death of president Franklin D. Roosevelt, and ended on January 20, 1953. He had been vice president for only 82 days when he succeeded to the presidency. Truman, a Democrat from Missouri, ran for and won a full four-year term in the 1948 presidential election, in which he narrowly defeated Republican nominee Thomas E. Dewey and Dixiecrat nominee Strom Thurmond. Although exempted from the newly ratified Twenty-second Amendment, Truman did not run for a second full term in the 1952 presidential election because of his low popularity. He was succeeded by Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ralph Austin Bard</span> American financier and government official (1884–1975)

Ralph Austin Bard was a Chicago financier who served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, 1941–1944, and as Under Secretary, 1944–1945. He is noted for a memorandum he wrote to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson in 1945 urging that Japan be given a warning before the use of the atomic bomb on a strategic city. He was "the only person known to have formally dissented from the use of the atomic bomb without advance warning."

<i>Occupy</i> (book) 2012 book by Noam Chomsky

Occupy is a short study of the Occupy movement written by the American academic and political activist Noam Chomsky. Initially published in the United States by the Zuccotti Park Press as the first title in their Occupied Media Pamphlet Series in 2012, it was subsequently republished in the United Kingdom by Penguin Books later that year.

Economic democracy is a socioeconomic philosophy that proposes to shift ownership and decision-making power from corporate shareholders and corporate managers to a larger group of public stakeholders that includes workers, consumers, suppliers, communities and the broader public. No single definition or approach encompasses economic democracy, but most proponents claim that modern property relations externalize costs, subordinate the general well-being to private profit and deny the polity a democratic voice in economic policy decisions. In addition to these moral concerns, economic democracy makes practical claims, such as that it can compensate for capitalism's inherent effective demand gap.

The term pluralist commonwealth refers to a systemic model of wealth democratization supported and facilitated by a variety of different institutional forms. Political economist and historian Gar Alperovitz is generally credited for the development of this model as a way to resolve socio-economic problems associated with corporate capitalism and traditional state socialism. Expanding upon proposals that focus more narrowly on state- versus worker-ownership or state- versus self-managed enterprises, this "pluralist" approach involves large-scale public ownership of corporate equity, worker-owned and community-benefitting enterprises, Community Development Corporations, nonprofit corporations and enterprising state and local public agencies. According to Waheed Hussain: "A pluralist commonwealth is a free-market society in which the economic returns on productive assets improve the lives of large communities of individuals, rather than a narrow elite."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">New Economy Movement in the United States</span>

The New Economy Movement in the United States is a group of organizations that are attempting to restructure the current economic system. The movement prioritizes human well-being over economic growth. Its primary goal is to localize the economy in an attempt to spread wealth and promote sustainable business practices. The New Economy movement challenges both neoclassical and Keynesian economics to include theories of ecological economics, solidarity economy, commons, degrowth, systems thinking and Buddhist economics. The movement promotes more public ownership of the economy through organizational structures such as cooperatives, and state-owned banks. The goal of these changes is to remove or alleviate harmful environmental and social impacts of capitalism through alternative economic as well as political practices. A principal leader of the movement is the political economist and activist Gar Alperowitz, who, with others, promote the democratizing ownership of businesses and the economy as a means to achieve a sustainable, fair, and equal society.

Community wealth building is a term which covers a range of approaches which "...aim at improving the ability of communities and individuals to increase asset ownership, anchor jobs locally by broadening ownership over capital, help achieve key environmental goals, expand the provision of public services and ensure local economic stability”. The original model, the Cleveland Model, was developed in Cleveland, United States, however the Cleveland Model has also been developed and applied with the creation of the "Preston Model", in Preston, Lancashire. It is a form of municipal socialism which utilises "anchor institutions", living wage expansion, community banking, public pension investment, worker ownership and municipal enterprise tied to a procurement strategy at the municipal level.

References

  1. 1 2 "GAR ALPEROVITZ - CAPITAL INSTITUTE". CAPITAL INSTITUTE. Archived from the original on 2018-10-02. Retrieved 2018-10-01.
  2. "Monthly Review | April 1, 2013". Monthly Review. Retrieved 2018-10-01.
  3. "Gar Alperovitz | Global Maryland, University of Maryland". globalmaryland.umd.edu. Archived from the original on 2018-10-02. Retrieved 2018-10-01.
  4. Ellsberg, Daniel (2002). Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon papers. New York: Viking. p. 358.
  5. Alperovitz, Gar (1965). Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam. Vintage.
  6. 1 2 3 Beschloss, Michael R. (30 July 1995). "Did We Need to Drop It?". The New York Times. Retrieved 2018-10-01.
  7. Smith, Gaddis (18 August 1985). "WAS MOSCOW OUR REAL TARGET?". The New York Times. Retrieved 2018-10-01.
  8. Marilyn, Young (December 1995). "Gar Alperovitz. <italic>The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth</italic>. Assisted by Sanho Tree, Edward Rouse Winstead, Kathryn C. Morris, David J. Williams, Leo C. Maley III, Thad Williamson, and Miranda Grieder. (A Borzoi Book.) New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1995. Pp. xiv, 847. $32.50". The American Historical Review. 100 (5). doi:10.1086/ahr/100.5.1515. ISSN   1937-5239.
  9. 1 2 3 "Historical Development". The Pluralist Commonwealth. Retrieved 2018-10-01.
  10. 1 2 "The Pluralist Commonwealth". The Pluralist Commonwealth. Retrieved 2018-10-01.
  11. 1 2 "Principles of a Pluralist Commonwealth: Introduction". TheNextSystem.org. 15 May 2017. Retrieved 2018-10-01.
  12. 1 2 3 Jones, Mother (April 1978). Mother Jones Magazine. Mother Jones.
  13. "The day that destroyed the working class and sowed the seeds of Trump". New York Post. 2017-09-16. Retrieved 2018-10-01.
  14. "Remember the Gulf of Tonkin". Washington Post. 2002-09-22. ISSN   0190-8286 . Retrieved 2018-10-01.
  15. 1 2 3 "Poll". The New Yorker. Retrieved 2018-10-01.
  16. 1 2 "The Untold Story of the Pentagon Papers Co-Conspirators". The New Yorker. Retrieved 2018-10-01.
  17. ATOMIC DIPLOMACY: HIROSHIMA AND POTSDAM by Gar Alperovitz | Kirkus Reviews.
  18. Cockburn, Andrew (2016-05-25). "Unjust Cause". The Stream - Harper's Magazine Blog. Retrieved 2018-10-03.
  19. Gar., Alperovitz (1996). The decision to use the atomic bomb : and the architecture of an American myth. Tree, Sanho. London: Fontana. ISBN   978-0006386803. OCLC   60306686.
  20. Gar., Alperovitz (2011). America beyond capitalism : reclaiming our wealth, our liberty, and our democracy. Speth, James Gustave. (Second ed.). Boston, MA. ISBN   9780984785704. OCLC   767837942.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  21. "Gar Alperovitz, author of America Beyond Capitalism". Illinois Public Media. 2012-02-26. Retrieved 2018-10-03.
  22. "Unjust Deserts - Center for American Progress". Center for American Progress. Retrieved 2018-10-03.
  23. "Unjust Deserts: An Interview with Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly | Dissent Magazine". Dissent Magazine. Retrieved 2018-10-03.