Just a comment about the title of this book. We live in a Constitutional Republic NOT a democracy.

This author asks the right questions, difficult questions. What would a vision worth fighting for look like? What are its elements? How do we create a new vision that might mobilize people? What really makes sense if we want an equitable, sustainable democracy?

It then offers some really interesting answers, based on real-world experiences. It also offers a pathway or a strategy to achieve real change. This is not just another list of wished for policy-prescriptions, nor is it utopian (except in the very best sense of the word).

The author offers a powerful critique of our current situation. But then ... and I am repeating myself because I think it is soooo sorrowfully rare ... it offers a vision, an achievable, real-world vision, of how to reconstruct our political economic system as if democracy and equality really matter.

If you read one "political" book this year, this should be it. It will introduce you not only to Gar Alperovitz's ideas but also to many of the most interesting experiments, critics, and thinkers from all over the political spectrum.

Now, I'm a card-carrying progressive, and I watch every liberal documentary and read every progressive/leftie/ecological book that comes down the pike. But this book is blazingly boring. I bought it because it has great blurbs on the back, and it has a promising index (any book that has Herman Daly, Juliet Schor, and Kirkpatrick Sale in its index has to be good, right?). But the content has no soul whatsoever. I had never read anything by Alperovitz before, so I don't know if his prior work is any better. But this one is a yawner. I mean, I never skip through passages of liberal policy books, but I just had to scan through significant portions of this stuff. It's just that dry and uninspiring. I guess maybe this is for policy wonks only. But if you're a layperson, don't bother. Pick up "Going Local," or the new annotated version of "Small is Beautiful" instead. You'll find it much better going.

I just saw author Gar Alperovitz interviewed on C-Span this morning about his new book, "America Beyond Capitalism."(The program is now available on line on the site's archive section, if you didn't see it.) In these days of political obfuscation, spin, and government policies that bear little relationship to reality, Alperovitz's common sense analysis of the shortcomings of the American political-economic system, and alternative ways of organizing our country's work and wealth, is a breath of fresh air.

Progressives will find this book particularly insightful, inspiring, and thought-provoking (something we need in these dark political times). Much more than an indictment of our national ills, "America Beyond Capitalism" offers a serious vision of what America could be like if we began living up to our treasured national values of liberty, equality, and democracy. The book is based on a wealth of data and a comprehensive review of the literature (more than 70 pages of end notes for you scholars out there), but it is one of the most accessible and personal books about "politics" you will ever read, based on the author's own political involvement since the early 1960s.

The book is also filled with mind-boggling facts about our society that most of us - even those who follow the daily news and are deeply involved in politics - simply are unaware of. For example: 2/10ths of 1% of us made more money selling stocks and bonds in 1999 [the latest year available] than all other taxpayers put together; corporate taxes as a share of Federal revenues fell from 35% in 1945 to 7.4% in 2003; the country's top tax bracket fell from 91% after World War II to 35% after the Bush tax cuts; the top 5% of wealth holders in America own 70% of stocks, bonds, and private businesses. The author convincingly demonstrates that this growing concentration of wealth is continuing and escalating. The result: America's democracy is being subverted by rampant inequities. And yet neither major political party is proposing anything meaningful to address the fact that our nation is becoming what amounts to a feudal/medieval society.

The most important contribution of the book, in my view, is that the author begins to sketch out the framework for a new "system" - neither capitalist nor socialist, liberal nor conservative. (As an historian, Alperovitz notes that political-economic systems come and go; though we may think our corporate-dominated market economy is "the end of history," he argues that our era is already witnessing pressures that will force the U.S. to undergo historic system change.) To advance the creation of this new system, he offers concrete proposals for alternative ways to hold wealth that could benefit the great majority, and suggests ways that political participation could be expanded, how work could be organized so that we have more leisure, how the environment could be protected, and much more. This is a compelling book; highly recommended; a perfect catalyst for stirring debate and discussion.

Boy, oh boy, do we need this book? The Left, it seems, has been in headlong retreat - politically, ideologically, and intellectually - for decades now, with the end of the postwar boom, the fall of Communism in the East and the (still unfolding) crisis of Social Democracy in the West, accompanied by a full-blown counterattack by capital. We are all familiar with the results: falling wages, the energy crisis, recession, the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, the "financialization" of capital, the Third World debt crunch, the decline of organized labor, cutbacks in social provision, downsizing and global restructuring, deregulation, privatization, and the sorry tale of a quarter-century's political and ideological swing to the right. What's left of the "official" Left (American liberalism, the rump of the European social democratic movements whose leaderships sold out long ago to become the craven servants of power) is - at best - still splashing away far downstream from where the real action is, seeking a way forward among the muddy puddles of 'tax-and-spend' transfer policies and modest redistribution left behind by the high tide of Keynesianism and the welfare state. The antiglobalization movement may have brought with it some renewed sense of energy and hope that "another world is possible," but often seems to lack any convincing comprehensive vision of what an alternative political-economic system might look like.

Into this valley of ashes steps Gar Alperovitz with a vital new progressive vision and a realistic politics of how to get there. Better known as a historian and author of the definitive book on the decision to use the atomic bomb, Alperovitz is also a distinguished political-economist, and this is obviously where his heart really lies. A veteran of the Civil Rights and Antiwar movements who also spent considerable time in the halls of power on Capitol Hill (nearly averting the Vietnam War single-handedly when he almost succeeded in getting his boss, Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, to amend the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution!), he was a prime mover in attempts to protect rustbelt communities from the terrible effects of industrial decline through the development of viable economic alternatives. The initial fight for worker-ownership in the Steel industry was lost, but in the process Alperovitz began to ponder the lessons and to develop a more coherent and systematic alternative political-economic model for the long haul.

Alperovitz eschews the all-too-common habit of progressive writers of lapsing into a litany of complaint, though at the same time his unsparing eye ranges over the deteriorating trends with regard to liberty, wealth ownership and equality, social mobility, working time, environmental protection and democratic participation. His accounts of the growing fiscal crisis - with even the most conservative estimates showing a deteriorating fiscal environment in which the projected federal deficit for the coming decade is $5 trillion, or as much as $7.5 trillion if the surplus in the Social Security Trust Fund is set aside - and of the coming crises in retirement and health care and the "squeeze" on the middle class are devastating in their implications, both for traditional progressive strategies of 'tax-and-spend' and for the social health of the nation as a whole. Without another way forward, the U.S. in the coming decades will face a crumbling economic and social infrastructure and an even more starkly polarized society of "haves" and "have-nots," lorded over by a now even more egregious version of the "super-elites" who did so well out of the corporate hogwallow and looting spree of the 1990s.

Against this grim canvas, however, Alperovitz paints the picture of a veritable explosion of institutional innovations at the grass-roots level in which worker-owned firms, community development corporations, land trusts, public pension funds and municipal enterprises are proliferating on the ground, accompanied by an ever-more sophisticated academic literature pointing to the way in which new principles of wealth-ownership can be used to benefit small and large publics over time. The implications of Alperovitz's argument are immense: just as capitalism itself was a sixteenth-century development of institutions that had grown up in the cracks and interstices of the old feudal order, so it is that the economic institutions and arrangements of the next economic system will, in all probability, come from late capitalist innovations.

This book, then, is an absolute gem - laying out, in broad brush-strokes (though supported on every page by a wealth of data and analysis), what might seem ludicrous if it wasn't so well-reasoned and tightly-argued: that we are beginning to approach the point where we will have the institutional and political basis for the transformation of American capitalism into a system truly capable of sustaining liberty, equality, democracy, community and environmental sustainability. Add to this the possibility of a knock-on effect that breaks the "iron triangles" of corporate and elite power behind the recent resurgence of militarism and imperialist adventurism in the United States, and we may just have the recipe for a wholesale rejuvenation and reanimation of the political Left as a force capable of - and with a programmatic agenda for - system-wide political-economic change. Much will depend on the widespread dissemination of the powerful and original ideas at the core of this careful but vastly ambitious book.

As Alperovitz himself acknowledges, his book is intended as the beginning of a serious conversation about long-term change, not the end. Where actual experiments with alternative economic institutions have been attempted on the ground, they have been closely studied and a rich academic and activist literature has built up. This is only a start. We need the equivalent of Che Guevara's "two, three, many Vietnams," a rich proliferation of real-world experiments with new economic models and institutions. We need to reanimate the idea of an alternative political economy for the twenty-first century, based on values of justice, equality, democracy, solidarity and sustainability. The capitalists and their usual pack of running dogs and apologists will no doubt scorn and resist each and every one of our attempts along the way: in return, as Alperovitz shows by the shining example of his deeply moral vision, we need only the simple determination that, whatever else may happen, they shall not impoverish our imaginations too.