A
range of new theorists have also increasingly given intellectual muscle
to the movement. Some, like Richard Heinberg, stress the radical
implications of ending economic growth. Former presidential adviser
James Gustav Speth calls for restructuring the entire system as the only
way to deal with ecological problems in general and growth in
particular. David Korten has offered an agenda for a new economy which
stresses small Main Street business and building from the bottom up.
(Korten also co-chairs a “New Economy Working Group” with John Cavanagh
at the Institute of Policy Studies.) Juliet Schor has proposed a vision
of “Plentitude” oriented in significant part around medium-scale, high
tech industry. My own work on a Pluralist Commonwealth emphasizes a
community-building system characterized by a mix of democratized forms
of ownership ranging from small co-ops all the way up to
public/worker-owned firms where large scale cannot be avoided.
The movement obviously confronts the
enormous entrenched power of an American political economic system
dominated by very large banking and corporate interests.
Writers
like Herman Daly and David Bollier have also helped establish
theoretical foundations for fundamental challenges to endless economic
growth, on the one hand, and the need to transcend privatized economics
in favor of a “commons” understanding, on the other. The awarding in
2009 of the Nobel Prize to Elinor Ostrom for work on commons-based
development underlined recognition at still another level of some of the
critical themes of the movement.
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