Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Business co-operatives can offer successful alternative models of decision making, employment, and operation without the existence of managerial and hierarchical structures. Through case studies spanning the United States, Europe, and Latin America--including the first in-depth look at the Cuban co-operative movement, Peter Ranis explores how co-operatives have evolved in response to the recent economic crisis and how the success of co-operatives is spurring the reinvention of labor unions today.
Placing the work of key radical theorists including Marx, Gramsci, and Luxembourg alongside that of contemporary political economists such as Block, Piketty, and Stiglitz, Cooperatives Confront Capitalism provides a unique theoretical synthesis and offers a far-reaching analysis of the ideas, achievements, and wider historical context of the cooperative movement. It will be essential reading for anyone interested in how co-operatives and democratic worker organizations can create a lasting solution to unemployment and poverty.
Synopsis
Cooperatives the world over are successfully developing alternative models of decision-making, employment and operation without the existence of managers, executives and hierarchies.
Through case studies spanning the US, Latin America and Europe, including valuable new work on the previously neglected cooperative movement in Cuba, Peter Ranis explores how cooperatives have evolved in response to the economic crisis. Going further yet, Ranis makes the novel argument that the constitutionally enshrined principle of 'eminent domain' can in fact be harnessed to create and defend worker cooperatives.
Combining the work of key radical theorists, including Marx, Gramsci and Luxemburg, with that of contemporary political economists, such as Block, Piketty and Stiglitz, Cooperatives Confront Capitalism provides what is perhaps the most far-reaching analysis yet of the ideas, achievements and wider historical context of the cooperative movement.