Act: Inspiration

Everything for Everyone

September 20, 2018

book coverThe origins of the next radical economy is rooted in a tradition that has empowered people for centuries and is now making a comeback.

A new feudalism is on the rise. While monopolistic corporations feed their spoils to the rich, more and more of us are expected to live gig to gig. But, as Nathan Schneider shows, an alternative to the robber-baron economy is hiding in plain sight; we just need to know where to look.

Cooperatives are jointly owned, democratically controlled enterprises that advance the economic, social, and cultural interests of their members. They often emerge during moments of crisis not unlike our own, putting people in charge of the workplaces, credit unions, grocery stores, healthcare, and utilities they depend on.

Everything for Everyone chronicles this revolution–from taxi cooperatives keeping Uber at bay, to an outspoken mayor transforming his city in the Deep South, to a fugitive building a fairer version of Bitcoin, to the rural electric co-op members who are propelling an aging system into the future. As these pioneers show, co-ops are helping us rediscover our capacity for creative, powerful, and fair democracy.

Nathan Schneider

I’m Nathan Schneider, a writer, editor, and professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. I’ve published a book each on God and the Occupy movement. Writing articles for a variety of publications—like Harper’s, The Nation, Vice, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The Catholic Worker—keeps my notebooks filled. The column I write for the Catholic weekly America feeds my faith. Editing the online religion magazine Killing the Buddha keeps me odd, and Waging Nonviolence, a publication I co-founded, keeps me up on struggles for justice around the world. I suppose what I’m after is the chronicling of ideas, of perfect worlds, of ordinary imaginations in practice. My method is speculative. Every word is hypothesis—while recognizing fearfully that with even the most casual remark we are building ourselves and our world irrevocably.

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