From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth

From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth PDF

Author: Alex Gourevitch

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1107033179

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This book reconstructs how a group of nineteenth-century labor reformers appropriated and radicalized the republican tradition. These "labor republicans" derived their definition of freedom from a long tradition of political theory dating back to the classical republics. In this tradition, to be free is to be independent of anyone else's will - to be dependent is to be a slave. Borrowing these ideas, labor republicans argued that wage laborers were unfree because of their abject dependence on their employers. Workers in a cooperative, on the other hand, were considered free because they equally and collectively controlled their work. Although these labor republicans are relatively unknown, this book details their unique, contemporary, and valuable perspective on both American history and the organization of the economy.

Freedom Is Power

Freedom Is Power PDF

Author: Lawrence Hamilton

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2014-07-31

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 1107062969

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A novel, sophisticated and realistic account of freedom as power through political representation.

Free Time

Free Time PDF

Author: Julie L. Rose

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2016-11-01

Total Pages: 185

ISBN-13: 1400883687

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Recent debates about inequality have focused almost exclusively on the distribution of wealth and disparities in income, but little notice has been paid to the distribution of free time. Free time is commonly assumed to be a matter of personal preference, a good that one chooses to have more or less of. Even if there is unequal access to free time, the cause and solution are presumed to lie with the resources of income and wealth. In Free Time, Julie Rose argues that these views are fundamentally mistaken. First, Rose contends that free time is a resource, like money, that one needs in order to pursue chosen ends. Further, realizing a just distribution of income and wealth is not sufficient to ensure a fair distribution of free time. Because of this, anyone concerned with distributive justice must attend to the distribution of free time. On the basis of widely held liberal principles, Rose explains why citizens are entitled to free time—time not committed to meeting life's necessities and instead available for chosen pursuits. The novel argument that the just society must guarantee all citizens their fair share of free time provides principled grounds to address critical policy choices, including work hours regulations, Sunday closing laws, public support for caregiving, and the pursuit of economic growth. Delving into an original topic that touches everyone, Free Time demonstrates why all citizens have, in the words of early labor reformers, a right to "hours for what we will."

The Age of Acquiescence

The Age of Acquiescence PDF

Author: Steve Fraser

Publisher: Little, Brown

Published: 2015-02-17

Total Pages: 452

ISBN-13: 0316333743

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A groundbreaking investigation of how and why, from the 18th century to the present day, American resistance to our ruling elites has vanished. From the American Revolution through the Civil Rights movement, Americans have long mobilized against political, social, and economic privilege. Hierarchies based on inheritance, wealth, and political preferment were treated as obnoxious and a threat to democracy. Mass movements envisioned a new world supplanting dog-eat-dog capitalism. But over the last half-century that political will and cultural imagination have vanished. Why? The Age of Acquiescence seeks to solve that mystery. Steve Fraser's account of national transformation brilliantly examines the rise of American capitalism, the visionary attempts to protect the democratic commonwealth, and the great surrender to today's delusional fables of freedom and the politics of fear. Effervescent and razorsharp, The Age of Acquiescence is provocative and fascinating.

Collective Courage

Collective Courage PDF

Author: Jessica Gordon Nembhard

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2015-06-13

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 0271064269

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In Collective Courage, Jessica Gordon Nembhard chronicles African American cooperative business ownership and its place in the movements for Black civil rights and economic equality. Not since W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1907 Economic Co-operation Among Negro Americans has there been a full-length, nationwide study of African American cooperatives. Collective Courage extends that story into the twenty-first century. Many of the players are well known in the history of the African American experience: Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph and the Ladies' Auxiliary to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Jo Baker, George Schuyler and the Young Negroes’ Co-operative League, the Nation of Islam, and the Black Panther Party. Adding the cooperative movement to Black history results in a retelling of the African American experience, with an increased understanding of African American collective economic agency and grassroots economic organizing. To tell the story, Gordon Nembhard uses a variety of newspapers, period magazines, and journals; co-ops’ articles of incorporation, minutes from annual meetings, newsletters, budgets, and income statements; and scholarly books, memoirs, and biographies. These sources reveal the achievements and challenges of Black co-ops, collective economic action, and social entrepreneurship. Gordon Nembhard finds that African Americans, as well as other people of color and low-income people, have benefitted greatly from cooperative ownership and democratic economic participation throughout the nation’s history.

Hayek’s Market Republicanism

Hayek’s Market Republicanism PDF

Author: Sean Irving

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-11-27

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 0429750730

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Friedrich Hayek was the 20th century’s most significant free market theorist. Over the course of his long career he developed an analysis of the danger that state power can pose to individual liberty. In rejecting much of the liberal tradition’s concern for social justice and democratic participation, Hayek would help clear away many intellectual obstacles to the emergence of neoliberalism in the last quarter of the 20th century. At the core of this book is a new interpretation of Hayek, one that regards him as an exponent of a neo-Roman conception of liberty and interprets his work as a form of ‘market republicanism’. It examines the contemporary context in which Hayek wrote, and places his writing in the long republican intellectual tradition. Hayek’s Market Republicanism will be of interest to advanced students and researchers across the history of economic thought, the history of political thought, political economy and political philosophy.

Mutualism

Mutualism PDF

Author: Sara Horowitz

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2021-02-16

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 0593133528

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A profound look at the crisis of work and the collapse of the safety net, and a vision for a better way forward, rooted in America’s cooperative spirit, from the founder of the Freelancers Union “Read this essential book to see how we can and must build the future.”—Reid Hoffman, co-founder of Linkedin Mutualism: It’s not capitalism and it’s not socialism. It’s the future. The twentieth century changed every facet of life for American workers: how much they could expect to earn and what they had the right to demand. But by 2027, a majority of Americans—from low-wage service workers to white-collar professionals—won’t be traditional employees. Benefits like paid sick leave, pensions, 401(k)s, disability insurance, and health care will be nearly extinct. To meet the needs of this new generation of workers, the government has done almost nothing. In this book, labor lawyer, former chair of the board of the New York Federal Reserve, and MacArthur “genius” Sara Horowitz brings us a solution to the current crisis of work that’s rooted in the best of American traditions, which she calls mutualism. Horowitz shows how the future of our economic safety net rests on this approach and demonstrates how mutualist organizations have helped us solve common problems in the past and are now quietly driving rural and urban economies alike all over the world, inspired not by for-profit corporations but by labor unions and trade associations, religious organizations and mutual aid societies, and vital social movements from women’s suffrage to civil rights. Mutualism is for anyone who feels that the system is not working for them, and is looking for a new way to build collaboratively, create the new American social contract, and prosper in the twenty-first century.

The Oxford Handbook of Populism

The Oxford Handbook of Populism PDF

Author: Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 737

ISBN-13: 0198803567

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The Oxford Handbook of Populism presents the state of the art of research on populism from the perspective of Political Science. The book features work from the leading experts in the field, and synthesizes the main strands of research in four compact sections: concepts, issues, regions, and normative debates. Due to its breath, The Oxford Handbook of Populism is an invaluable resource for those interested in the study of populism, but also forexperts in each of the topics discussed, who will benefit from accounts of current discussions and research gaps, as well as a map of new directions in the study of populism.

The Empire of Necessity

The Empire of Necessity PDF

Author: Greg Grandin

Publisher: Metropolitan Books

Published: 2014-01-14

Total Pages: 378

ISBN-13: 1429943173

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From the acclaimed author of Fordlandia, the story of a remarkable slave rebellion that illuminates America's struggle with slavery and freedom during the Age of Revolution and beyond One morning in 1805, off a remote island in the South Pacific, Captain Amasa Delano, a New England seal hunter, climbed aboard a distressed Spanish ship carrying scores of West Africans he thought were slaves. They weren't. Having earlier seized control of the vessel and slaughtered most of the crew, they were staging an elaborate ruse, acting as if they were humble servants. When Delano, an idealistic, anti-slavery republican, finally realized the deception, he responded with explosive violence. Drawing on research on four continents, The Empire of Necessity explores the multiple forces that culminated in this extraordinary event—an event that already inspired Herman Melville's masterpiece Benito Cereno. Now historian Greg Grandin, with the gripping storytelling that was praised in Fordlandia, uses the dramatic happenings of that day to map a new transnational history of slavery in the Americas, capturing the clash of peoples, economies, and faiths that was the New World in the early 1800s.

Carry Me Back

Carry Me Back PDF

Author: Steven Deyle

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2006-08-31

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 0190294965

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Originating with the birth of the nation itself, in many respects, the story of the domestic slave trade is also the story of the early United States. While an external traffic in slaves had always been present, following the American Revolution this was replaced by a far more vibrant internal trade. Most importantly, an interregional commerce in slaves developed that turned human property into one of the most valuable forms of investment in the country, second only to land. In fact, this form of property became so valuable that when threatened with its ultimate extinction in 1860, southern slave owners believed they had little alternative but to leave the Union. Therefore, while the interregional trade produced great wealth for many people, and the nation, it also helped to tear the country apart. The domestic slave trade likewise played a fundamental role in antebellum American society. Led by professional traders, who greatly resembled northern entrepreneurs, this traffic was a central component in the market revolution of the early nineteenth century. In addition, the development of an extensive local trade meant that the domestic trade, in all its configurations, was a prominent feature in southern life. Yet, this indispensable part of the slave system also raised many troubling questions. For those outside the South, it affected their impression of both the region and the new nation. For slaveholders, it proved to be the most difficult part of their institution to defend. And for those who found themselves commodities in this trade, it was something that needed to be resisted at all costs. Carry Me Back restores the domestic slave trade to the prominent place that it deserves in early American history, exposing the many complexities of southern slavery and antebellum American life.