Community Capitalism

Perhaps you thought it was fantasy. Perhaps you thought it was a ruse. Perhaps you thought it was the actions of an immature heart and love that had yet to be "educated" by reality. Wrong! Actually your first answer was right. Now you have to be unschooled and learn love all over again, and you might want to start here at that foundation of love. But you forgot, after all it only lasted a couple of seconds, a couple of days and then that place that those eyes took you disappeared like a mirage. You no longer have what it takes to graduate to love's stage seven. Don't worry, Illuminations will take you back. If infatuation is oft the cornerstone with which we set the foundation of love, why do we throw away that foundation when we build the school of our convictions as to what love is? But remember when we thought a love was perfect and we thought that love was supreme? Remember when we thought love would find ourselves in a perfect plot and we could reside there forever? Remember when love was the most beautiful thing in existence and so was our love? Might I ask, what is wrong with that? And if there is nothing wrong with that, why isn't it considered right? If the school of love in which the world learns fails, and we are unable to graduate to love's better vision. If indeed, we fail to take our love to a higher grade, perhaps we aught to find a better school. Love instinctively knows better, and the new foundation upon which love will be reschooled goes back to our original convictions when we thought love was perfect, that love was supreme, that love would deliver and that love is perfect. There is a reason for that original conviction and it is because, love is.

"Growing worldwide interest in community economic development has led to a blossoming of “how to” manuals,as well as analyses of co-operatives, development corporations, gender, financing, etc. Yet in all this discussion very little is said about the basic objective of CED: Is it designed to fill holes left by capitalism or is it intended to replace it? There is equally little on a theory of CED. This book draws on several disciplines -- particularly economics, sociology and political studies -- to assess the state of CED theory and to identify implicit issues for building that theory. It emphasizes the necessity to draw theoretical insights from each discipline, in the process howing the efficacy of interdisciplinary approaches. It concludes with a discussion of both future theoretical directions and of what existing theory has to say about achieving a transformative CED."--pub. website.

Connects the Marxist construct of capitalism to systems of community In this book, Michael Lebowitz deepens the arguments he made in his award-winning, Beyond Capital. Karl Marx, in Capital, focused on capital and the capitalist class that is its embodiment. It is the endless accumulation of capital, its causes and consequences that are central to Marx’s analysis. In taking this approach, Marx tended to obscure not only the centrality of capital’s “immanent drive” and “constant tendency” to divide the working class but also the political economy of the working class (“social production controlled by social foresight”). In Between Capitalism and Community, Lebowitz demonstrates that capitalism contains within itself elements of a different society, one of community. Whereas Marx’s intellectual construct of capitalism treats it as an organic system that reproduces its premises of capital and wage-labor (including a working class that looks upon the requirements of capital “as self-evident natural laws”), Lebowitz argues that the struggle of workers in common and activities based upon solidarity point in the direction of the organic system of community, an alternative system that produces its own premises, communality, and recognition of the needs of others. If we are to escape the ultimate barbarism portended by the existing crisis of the earth system, the subordination of the system of capitalism by that of community is essential. Since the interregnum in which capitalism and community coexist is marked by the interpenetration and mutual deformation of both sides within this whole, however, the path to community cannot emerge spontaneously but requires a revolutionary party that stresses the development of the capacities of people through their protagonism.

Hou proposes to end the dichotomous view of the state and the market, and capitalism and communism, by examining the local institutional innovation in three villages in China and presents community capitalism as an alternative to the neoliberal model of development. Community is both the unit of redistribution and the entity that mobilizes resources to compete in the market; collectivism creates the boundary that sets the community apart from the outside and justifies and sustains the model. Community capitalism differs from Mao-era collectivism, when individual interests were buried in the name of collective interests and market competition was not a concern. This book demonstrates the embeddedness of the market in community, showing how social relations, group solidarity, power, honor, and other values play an important role in these villages' social and economic organization.

Reimagining our global economy so it becomes more sustainable and prosperous for all Our global economic system is broken. But we can replace the current picture of global upheaval, unsustainability, and uncertainty with one of an economy that works for all people, and the planet. First, we must eliminate rising income inequality within societies where productivity and wage growth has slowed. Second, we must reduce the dampening effect of monopoly market power wielded by large corporations on innovation and productivity gains. And finally, the short-sighted exploitation of natural resources that is corroding the environment and affecting the lives of many for the worse must end. The debate over the causes of the broken economy—laissez-faire government, poorly managed globalization, the rise of technology in favor of the few, or yet another reason—is wide open. Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy that Works for Progress, People and Planet argues convincingly that if we don't start with recognizing the true shape of our problems, our current system will continue to fail us. To help us see our challenges more clearly, Schwab—the Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum—looks for the real causes of our system's shortcomings, and for solutions in best practices from around the world in places as diverse as China, Denmark, Ethiopia, Germany, Indonesia, New Zealand, and Singapore. And in doing so, Schwab finds emerging examples of new ways of doing things that provide grounds for hope, including: Individual agency: how countries and policies can make a difference against large external forces A clearly defined social contract: agreement on shared values and goals allows government, business, and individuals to produce the most optimal outcomes Planning for future generations: short-sighted presentism harms our shared future, and that of those yet to be born Better measures of economic success: move beyond a myopic focus on GDP to more complete, human-scaled measures of societal flourishing By accurately describing our real situation, Stakeholder Capitalism is able to pinpoint achievable ways to deal with our problems. Chapter by chapter, Professor Schwab shows us that there are ways for everyone at all levels of society to reshape the broken pieces of the global economy and—country by country, company by company, and citizen by citizen—glue them back together in a way that benefits us all.

The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior. In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth. Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new "behavioral futures markets," where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new "means of behavioral modification." The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a "Big Other" operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff's comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled "hive" of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit -- at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future. With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future -- if we let it.

Shortlisted for the Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award From one of the most important economic thinkers of our time, a brilliant and far-seeing analysis of the current populist backlash against globalization. Raghuram Rajan, distinguished University of Chicago professor, former IMF chief economist, head of India's central bank, and author of the 2010 FT-Goldman-Sachs Book of the Year Fault Lines, has an unparalleled vantage point onto the social and economic consequences of globalization and their ultimate effect on our politics. In The Third Pillar he offers up a magnificent big-picture framework for understanding how these three forces--the state, markets, and our communities--interact, why things begin to break down, and how we can find our way back to a more secure and stable plane. The "third pillar" of the title is the community we live in. Economists all too often understand their field as the relationship between markets and the state, and they leave squishy social issues for other people. That's not just myopic, Rajan argues; it's dangerous. All economics is actually socioeconomics - all markets are embedded in a web of human relations, values and norms. As he shows, throughout history, technological phase shifts have ripped the market out of those old webs and led to violent backlashes, and to what we now call populism. Eventually, a new equilibrium is reached, but it can be ugly and messy, especially if done wrong. Right now, we're doing it wrong. As markets scale up, the state scales up with it, concentrating economic and political power in flourishing central hubs and leaving the periphery to decompose, figuratively and even literally. Instead, Rajan offers a way to rethink the relationship between the market and civil society and argues for a return to strengthening and empowering local communities as an antidote to growing despair and unrest. Rajan is not a doctrinaire conservative, so his ultimate argument that decision-making has to be devolved to the grass roots or our democracy will continue to wither, is sure to be provocative. But even setting aside its solutions, The Third Pillar is a masterpiece of explication, a book that will be a classic of its kind for its offering of a wise, authoritative and humane explanation of the forces that have wrought such a sea change in our lives.