Busboys and Poets welcomes Gar Alperovitz to the Langston room for this book talk and discussion. In this time of deepening political, economic, and ecological crisis, it’s more important than ever to not only resist the current political threats, but also build a new system—the world we hope to live in.Â
Gar Alperovitz, co-founder of the Democracy Collaborative, co-chair of the Next System Project, and former Lionel Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland, sees our dark times as the potential prehistory of a period of fundamental and transformative systemic change. In the new book, he outlines his vision of the “Pluralist Commonwealth," a new political-economy that moves beyond both corporate capitalism and state socialism. The book is designed as a small, easy to use handbook with short entries on the key elements of a next system, and is packed with concrete and hopeful examples of what can be done locally to build a new truly democratic political economy from the ground up.
In response to the swell of organizing that has taken place in recent months, the book will be released online for free to make it available for use by the greatest number of activists, organizers, and practitioners working at the grassroots level. However, limited-edition print copies of the book will be available at the Busboys and Poets launch event and at other resistance gatherings throughout 2017.
Introducing Gar on June 1st will be Robert Borosage, the founder and president of the Institute for America’s Future and co-director of its sister organization, the Campaign for America’s Future.
About the Author:
Gar Alperovitz has had a distinguished career as a historian, political economist, activist, writer, and government official. He is a founding principal of the Democracy Collaborative, a research institution developing practical, policy-focused, and systematic paths towards ecologically sustainable, community-oriented change and the democratization of wealth and the co-chair of the Next System Project. For fifteen years, he was the Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland, and is a former Fellow of Kings College, Cambridge University; Harvard’s Institute of Politics; the Institute for Policy Studies; and a Guest Scholar at the Brookings Institution.
