What Then Must We Do?
“Is There an America Beyond Capitalism?”
Tuesday April 16th, 4PM, 336 Ingraham Hall
Seminar: “The Unusual Nature of the Emerging Crisis, and its Possibilities”
Wednesday, April 17th, 12 noon, 8108 Social Science
Book presentation and signing
Wednesday, April 17th, 7PM, Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative, 426 W. Gilman St.Madison, WI
Gar Alperovitz, political economist, historian, and author of the new book What Then Must We Do? Straight Talk About the Next American Revolution will give two free public talks in Madison highlighting how, in an age of political deadlock and economic decay, hope can be found in the growing movement across the country to build a new and more egalitarian economy based in cooperation and community. Dr. Alperovitz will suggest that a movement aiming at the “evolutionary reconstruction” of the American system—away from rampant inequality and corporate control, and towards a more just distribution of wealth and renewed democracy—is poised to take center stage in the national conversation.
GAR ALPEROVITZ, Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland, has been responsible for some of the most important and influential analyses of new forms of worker, community, and cooperative ownership. He is the cofounder of The Democracy Collaborative, a research institute developing strategies to build community wealth, including an innovative network of green worker cooperatives in Cleveland, Ohio. In addition to his work as a leader in the new economy movement, he is an acclaimed historian of US foreign policy. He is a former fellow of the Institute of Politics at Harvard and of King’s College at Cambridge University, where he received his PhD in political economy. He has served as a legislative director in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, and as a special assistant in the Department of State. Earlier he was president of the Center for Community Economic Development, Codirector of The Cambridge Institute, and president of the Center for the Study of Public Policy. Dr. Alperovitz’s numerous articles have appeared in publications ranging from The New York Times and The Washington Post to The Journal of Economic Issues, Foreign Policy, Diplomatic History, and other academic and popular journals. His most recent books are America Beyond Capitalism (2011) and What Then Must We Do? Straight Talk about the Next American Revolution. Dr. Alperovitz is also author of The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (1995), Making a Place for Community: Local Democracy in a Global Era (2002), and Unjust Deserts (2008).
About What Then Must We Do?
Never before have so many Americans been more frustrated with our economic system, more fearful that it is failing, or more open to fresh ideas about a new one. The seeds of a new economy—and, if we act upon it, a new system—are forming. In What Then Must We Do?, forthcoming this April from Chelsea Green Publishing, Gar Alperovitz speaks directly to the reader about why the time is right for a revolutionary new economy movement, what it means to democratize the ownership of wealth, and what it will take to build a new system to replace the decaying one, offering an evolutionary, common-sense solution for moving from despair and anger to strategy and action.