Another World Is Possible
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In November 2004, for instance, California voters overwhelmingly approved tax increases for people making more than $1 million, and earmarked the proceeds for mental health programs. New Jersey has enacted legislation taxing those making more than $500,000, and designating the money to offset property taxes that fall disproportionately on the middle class and the poor. In Connecticut, a recent poll found 77 percent of voters, including 63 percent of Republicans, in favor of a tax on those making more than $1 million. A 2006 initiative in California would tax the top 1 percent (individuals making more than $400,000 and couples making more than $800,000) to pay for quality preschool for all four-year-olds. As the fiscal crisis deepens, many other states are beginning to look in this direction.
If the national policy process remains deadlocked and the pain continues to build, it is not unreasonable to predict that both the wealth-building and populist trends will accelerate -- and might ultimately explode, New Deal-style, in a fireworks of national policies based on the steady accumulation of local and state experience and political networks.
What makes the wealth and tax trajectories particularly interesting is that they involve institutional change. This takes us to the deeper meaning of the systemic crisis. In fact, it is not simply that the traditional balancing forces in the corporate system have collapsed. Rather, the very nature of that system -- especially its rules for how wealth is owned and managed -- appears to be coming into focus.
The truly defining characteristic of any political-economic system centers always on the issue of property: In the feudal era, massive land ownership was central to who had power. In 19th-century capitalism, modest-size enterprise ownership (of farms as well as businesses) was central. In modern capitalism, corporate and elite ownership is key. In socialism, state ownership is the hallmark. What is striking is that taken together, the various emerging strategies offer the possible outlines of a different answer to the central question of who should own wealth.
That longer-range vision is a very decentralized, community-benefiting economic system. Variations on the Alaska and Alabama precedents (and many other state investment programs) even suggest a larger-scale federal ownership option -- and, ultimately, a populist commonwealth alternative to both socialism and capitalism. If so, the current realities we assume to be inevitable and immovable just might be neither. And, just possibly, the kind of systemic change that is common throughout world history may not have stopped dead in its tracks at the outset of the 21st century.
I am a historian, not a utopian. It is possible that things will never change, or that times will get worse. It is, of course, also obvious that the only way to find out if major change is possible is to roll up one's sleeves and get to work. (Besides, there is little to lose; good things get done no matter what.)
For skeptics in general and progressives in particular, it is useful to recall one other case study of how very large-order change (not simply electoral victory) can sometimes be achieved against huge odds: In the 1940s and 1950s, conservative thinkers and activists were regarded as antique and ridiculous by the mainstream press, by most serious academics, and by the nation's political leadership. They were far more marginal than today's liberals; the idea that you could change the system in their direction seemed absurd. Long before Goldwater in 1964 and Reagan in 1980, however, serious conservatives got down to the work of putting together a movement that would come to dominate every major institution of national governance. For the moment, that is -- until we see the next reel of the movie.
Gar Alperovitz is a professor at the University of Maryland, and the Author of America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty, and Our Democracy.
Illustration: Philippe Weisbecker
