"Many of the most promising ideas in circulation now proceed from a simple principle: Our economy will continue to fail the American people until they are given more control over it.

Some of the proposals that should be given consideration concern the reallocation of power at the firm level: that is to say, “reshaping company ownership so that it is democratic, inclusive, and purposeful by design,” as the policy analyst Peter Gowan wrote last year. In an interview this week, Gowan told me, “We should be encouraging the development of a lot of alternative economic models. And we should be encouraging people and workers on the ground to think about how the private ownership of capital is negatively impacting their lives.”"

"In a widely overlooked campaign proposal last year, Senator Bernie Sanders, inspired by another recent Labour proposal, took the concept of the employee stock fund to the next level: the Democratic Employee Ownership Fund. “Under this plan,” the campaign wrote, “corporations with at least $100 million in annual revenue, corporations with at least $100 million in balance sheet total, and all publicly traded companies will be required to provide at least 2 percent of stock to their workers every year until the company is at least 20 percent owned by employees.”"

"This isn’t a new idea. In Italy, for instance, a body of legislation called the Marcora Framework offers workers financial support for turning shuttering businesses into worker cooperatives. According to the European Research Institute on Cooperative and Social Enterprises, the framework facilitated at least 257 worker buyouts between 1979 and 2014 and saved at least 9,500 jobs. It also found that even distressed businesses that wound up closing eventually survived for over a decade, on average, after their worker takeovers. In 2018, the platform of the U.K.’s Labour Party included an even bolder idea—granting workers the right to a first chance to buy their companies not only when they’re at risk of dissolving but whenever they’re put up for sale."

https://newrepublic.com/article/160528/workplace-democracy-pandemic-economic-crisis

"Submitting traditionalism to any kind of rational scrutiny reveals it for what it is: an appeal to fantasy, the wrapping of oneself in the blanket of vaguely defined yet comforting categories. It presents a fundamentally hierarchical vision of the world, compensating followers for a lack of material improvement with a sense that they are superior to degenerate liberals and dangerous foreigners.

The right-wing populism of figures like Steve Bannon, for instance, excludes huge swaths of workers, despite his claims of championing a working-class politics. Compare that to democratic socialism, which offers all workers not just better material conditions, but empowerment — extending basic economic and political rights that neoliberalism has allowed to wither away."

jacobinmag.com/2021/01/benjamin-teitelbaum-war-for-eternity-steve-bannon/

A clever critique of Neoliberalism

http://currentaffairs.org/2021/01/james-harden-and-the-death-of-heliocentrism/

"[...] The right can riot, but its violence is always personal, always victimizing and scapegoating, always symbolic even when it spills fatally into the material. This is its understanding of order. This is why the gallows looms so large in its imaginary, why so many of those interviewed speak of stringing up politicians, making them pay for their crimes, watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants. But here tyranny grows capacious, for it designates any figure who threatens their inalienable right to harm. They wanted to hang Senators but they would have gladly killed a Black person, a Jew, an immigrant, and they settled for a cop. One single article by an embedded reporter on January 6 captures, without meaning to do so or seeming to notice, seven different references to communists. This is what you get when you imagine yourself a rightful heir, dispossessed by social justice warriors, by the RCP puppeteering the rise of China, by northern carpetbaggers and urban elites. You get people who want to cleanse the Capitol’s marble with blood, who fight cops in order to be cops.

The burning of a police station by partisans, by comparison, targets a basic structure of domination. It wants the unmaking of everyday life, not its purification and repetition with a slightly changed cast. In this regard the Capitolists could not have been more eloquent. Having breached the building and reached the Senate chambers, the boldest and most ludicrous among them, dressed as a reiver, could think of nothing better to do than install himself at the desk of the Senate president."

libcom.org/library/dilemma-political-economy-time-monsters-research-destroy

It’s impossible to agree to disagree with someone when there is no mutually agreed upon reality. It’s impossible to agree to disagree with a person who refuses to accept the equal right to life of a person who looks different or worships another god. It’s impossible to build a democracy with those who have given themselves over—mind, body, and soul—to authoritarianism.

https://www.guernicamag.com/why-we-cant-agree-to-disagree/