Wow! eBook
Realizing Hope: Life Beyond Capitalism 2nd Edition
Author(s): Michael Albert (Author)
- Publisher: Zed Books Ltd
- Publication Date: 16 Jan. 2014
- Edition: 2nd
- Language: English
- Print length: 224 pages
- ISBN-10: 1780325622
- ISBN-13: 9781780325620
Book Description
Realizing Hope offers a speculative vision of a future beyond capitalism – an alternative to the exploitation of human labour, the unchecked destruction of the earth, and the oppression of all for the benefit of the few. Participatory economics – parecon for short – is Albert s concrete proposal for a classless economy, developed from anarchist principles first introduced by Kropotkin, Bakunin, Pannekoek and others. In this classic text, Albert takes the insights and hopes of parecon and enlarges them to address all key aspects of social life and society – gender, culture, politics, science, technology, journalism, ecology, and others. Realizing Hope provides vision to help us all together conceive a world that might be just over the horizon, a world we can begin building today.
Editorial Reviews
Review
Noam Chomsky
‘Michael Albert is a very serious thinker. In Realizing Hope he not only presents an alternative to capitalism, he provides profound insights into how economics affects personalities and social relations and vice versa. The book opens many doors for social vision and strategy. At a moment when Africa needs an alternative to nationalist politics. Realizing Hope is amazingly timely. Pan-Africanists and Black Marxists alike will find much to enrich and expand our politics in this book.’
Mandisi Majavu, author and journalist
‘During the grim decades of “there is no alternative” few did more than Michael Albert and his collaborators to promote discussion of alternatives to domination by either state or market. Now, when millions assert “another world is possible”, Michael Albert’s proposals for participatory economics provide an essential starting point for thinking about what that world might be and how we might get there. In Realizing Hope, he goes beyond the primarily economic framework of participatory economics to open the crucial but too-rarely posed questions of how to coordinate economic change with the changes we need in other spheres of life.’ –Jeremy Brecher, author of Save the Humans?
