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Over the past year the number of questionable police use-of-force incidents has been ever present. The deaths of Eric Garner in New York, Michael Brown in Missouri, and 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Ohio, are but just a few tragic cases.

The post The visual, experiential, and research dimensions of police coercion appeared first on OUPblog.

How do we address the problem of inequality in capitalist societies? Tom Malleson, the author of After Occupy: Economic Democracy for the 21st Century, argues that by making sure that democracy exists in both our economy and in our government, we may be able to achieve meaningful equality throughout society. We recently spoke to him about how economic democracy works and how viable it can be.

To start, give us a bare-bones description of what economic democracy is.

Economic democracy is the idea that democracy belongs not just in politics, but in the economy as well. There’s a paradox at the very center of our society: we call ourselves a democracy and yet a central part of society, the economy, has very little democracy in it at all. Workers do not elect the managers of their firms. Bankers do not allocate finance with any accountability to their communities. Investment decisions are not made with any citizen participation. That’s the philosophical paradox that After Occupy investigates. There are real, concrete examples of democratic alternatives in the economy out there, such as worker cooperatives in Spain and Italy, public banks in India, participatory budgeting in Brazil, capital controls in Malaysia, and so on. Ultimately, these alternative practices might be woven together to constitute a fundamentally different kind of society – a truly democratic one.

What exactly is a worker cooperative?

Worker co-ops are businesses that are owned and controlled entirely by the workers themselves. Workers elect the management on a one-person one-vote basis, just like we elect politicians into government. Probably the most famous co-op in the world is Mondragon in Spain. It started in 1956 with only five workers, and today employs over 80,000 people, with assets of over €35 billion. In addition to being far more democratic than conventional corporations, co-ops have two other important advantages. First, they have far less inequality of wages. In the United States, the average CEO makes 300 times the average employee of his or her company. For co-ops the ratio rarely exceeds 3:1. If co-ops spread, society as a whole would become significantly more equal too. In addition, co-ops also have far better job security. Instead of simply firing people in a recession, co-ops act in a much more humane way, usually by collectively agreeing to reduce their hours or take a pay cut across the board, instead of laying people off. That’s why in this last recession Mondragon has fired far fewer people than other Spanish firms. So if we had more co-ops here in the United States, the recession would have been far less devastating.

Are co-ops economically viable?

Absolutely. Economists have now been studying co-ops for over 30 years, and the conclusion is that worker co-ops operate with similar levels of efficiency to conventional firms. These results have been found again and again, in the United States, Uruguay, France, Italy, Spain, Denmark, the United Kingdom, and Sweden. Perhaps the most compelling evidence of viability is Northern Italy, where co-ops are more prevalent than in any other part of the world. In Emilia Romagna, for instance, they represent a substantial 12% of the region’s GDP, many co-ops have been around for decades, and the co-op sector dominates in a number of industries including construction, wine making, and food processing.

In After Occupy you argue that the current system of investment is undemocratic. What exactly do you mean?

The investment decisions that are made today — building highways or high-speed trains, condos or social housing, tar sands or green businesses — fundamentally determine the kind of society we will end up with tomorrow. Investment determines our future, which is why it must be accountable to us, the public. How could this happen? One important example is participatory budgeting, where local neighborhoods get to decide themselves on the kind of public infrastructure spending they want to see. In terms of finance, bank regulation is an obviously important first step. But over the long term, what is needed is a public banking system so that finances are allocated according to public need, not just according to private profit. Just like we have an electricity system and a post office that serves public needs, we need finance to do so as well (so that banks invest in poor communities or into green businesses – things that private banks will never do). At the end of the day, finance is simply too important for our future to be left to the banks.

Is having a true economic democracy feasible or is it simply a utopian?

Every proposal that is made in this book is based on real concrete examples. Worker co-ops already exist, as do public banks, participatory budgeting, etc. So we know there is absolutely nothing impossible about any of them – the institutions work. The difficult part, of course, is expanding them and bringing successful examples over from other countries. Some reforms (such as regulating the banks), are possible in the short-term; others, like building a large co-op movement, are the project of a generation. But the fact that we can see real-world examples of these things means that they are not at all utopian. With sufficient political will, a democratic economy is entirely within our reach.

Tom Malleson is the author of After Occupy: Economic Democracy for the 21st Century and is an Assistant Professor in the Social Justice and Peace Studies program at King’s University College at Western University, Canada. He is the co-editor of Whose Streets? The Toronto G20 and the Challenges of Summit Protest and the author of Stand Up Against Capitalism (forthcoming).

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The post A conversation on economic democracy with Tom Malleson appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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By Dennis Baron

Psst, wanna buy a hot slogan?

“Occupy Wall Street,” the protest that put “occupy” on track to become one of the 2011 words of the year, could be derailed by a Long Island couple seeking to trademark the movement’s name.

The rapidly-spreading Occupy Wall Street protests target the huge gap between rich and poor in America and elsewhere, so on Oct. 18, Robert and Diane Maresca tried to erase their own personal income gap by filing trademark application 85449710 with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office so they could start selling Occupy Wall St.™ T-shirts, bumper stickers, and totebags, as well as various other tchotchkes bearing the protest name (the Marescas’ application is for “Occupy Wall St.,” using the abbreviated form of street–they haven’t expressed an interest in owning “Occupy Wall Street” as well).

The Trademark Commission will have to decide whether anyone can own the rights to the phrase “Occupy Wall Street,” which seems to have captured the public’s imagination and entered the public domain in record time–in fact, faster than you can say “Tea Party.” If so, the Commission must then consider whether the Marescas have any right to the phrase. They didn’t join the OWS protests and they may have never even been to Wall St. (according to their application, the Marescas live in West Islip, about 50 miles from the main protest site). Plus, so far as anyone can tell, they’ve never manufactured T-shirts, bags, or stickers with “Occupy Wall St.” or any other logo or design.

The Marescas are not the only ones trying to capitalize on the anticapitalist protests. There’s an episode of an MTV reality show, complete with commercial sponsors. There’s a book. There’s an Android app. And a company called Condomania is selling Occupy condoms (free samples available to the protestors). There are over 3,000 items of Occupy merchandise for sale on the ’net. A local pizza shop sells Occupy Meat, Occupy Veggie, and Occupy Vegan pizzas to the protestors at a discounted price of $15 a pie. There’s even an Occupy Wall Street iPhone™ app that looks like a combo of Tetris and Angry Birds ($4.99 at the iTunes™ App Store™).

The Occupy movement itself is trying to buy TV time to air a commercial that it made—though unlike the competition, the original OWS remains not-for-profit. But it’s not even clear that Occupy Wall Street could trademark its own name, or that, despite its new-found popularity, the word occupy could qualify as Word of the Year, since it’s not really a new

I'm agitated today. Mayor Sam Adams of Portland has given Occupy Portland a deadline to vacate the two parks (across the street from each other) where they have been encamped. They have until 12:01am 11/12/11. What will happen? Is the protest supposed to end? We all know that is not going to happen. What are the alternatives? Are we supposed to imagine that rich benefactors will provide safe haven indoors for protestors to encamp for the winter where Portland Police will not have to watch over them? Who is provoking whom here? What is happening in other cities right now? What are the words being shared in the inner sanctums on both sides? I so want to know!

all photos courtesy of Kristin Parker, please do not reproduce without permission

I have friends working in the various Occupy X libraries. We don’t have a very big Occupy presence near me in Vermont and I was curious how things work there. Kristin Parker (@parkivist) is an anthropologist who received an MS (Simmons) with a concentration in archives management. She worked for twelve years managing the collections exhibits and archives at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and is now managing the art collection at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis. She’s a newish associate of the Boston Radical Reference Collective and is one of the people who has been organizing and staffing the A to Z (Audre Lorde to Howard Zinn) Library at Occupy Boston. I asked her a few questions over email. She writes…

“The A-Z Library is a partnership made up of the Boston Radical Reference Collective, the Progressive Librarians Guild of Simmons College and Metacomet Books of Plymouth, MA, run by John Ford who recognized a need for a durable setting for books at Dewey Square (the Occupy Boston site). He graciously installed a military tent and brought in a third of his own personal book collection. Other donations soon arrived through the librarians and members of the public. The library has been up and running for more than 2 weeks now. Every day we receive donations – it’s amazing. Books are organized according to subject, in plastic milk crates and wooden cranberry bog crates, for easy transporting and shifting. As described in the statement (link below): ‘The library aims to provide high-quality, accurate information to all interested parties. The collection contains material on topics such as political thought and social movements, activism, history, philosophy, religion, finance, consumerism, gender, race, as well as a large fiction section.’”

What your role is with the Occupy library in Boston and could you suggest a few links for people interested in the Occupy Library System generally?

Why I got involved – I love answering reference questions and I really enjoy working with the public. I’ve always admired the work of Radical Reference librarians and understand the importance of offering folks an alternative way to navigate resources and identify new ones. As an archivist: I remembered reading about the American Radicalism collection at Michigan State University, and how archivists sometimes have to be pro-active when it comes to documenting certain moments in history. I recognized pretty quickly watching the movement grow and definitely after my first visit to Dewey Square that this was an historic event and I wanted to attempt to capture activities at Occupy Boston in a way that would be useful for occupiers, visitors to the Square, and into the future.

We created a binder full of documents printed from the wikispaces (reference copies), that includes Occupy Boston’s statement of solidarity, the General Assembly Process for Consensus and other operational information. There are also copies of the GA minutes and other important documents from the various working groups. So, ideally, people can come to the library and get caught up on what’s what and hopefully the information is up-to-date, though thin