Keith Preston’s “Free Enterprise: The Antidote to Corporate Plutocracy”

by | Dec 1, 2008 | Stress Blog | 15 comments

I wanted to pass along a link to an essay that I think you all should read. Preston is what I guess he would call a “left-libertarian” or “anarcho-socialist”, or perhaps he has another term. Anyway, the piece is brilliantly constructed and it won the Chris R. Tame Memorial Prize. I think it would be interesting to read the end, and then backtrack to see how he gets there. Here’s a paragraph that not many people here would be inclined to fully agree with:

An economy organized on the basis of worker-owned and operated industries, peoples’ banks, mutuals, consumer cooperatives, anarcho-syndicalist labor unions, individual and family enterprises, small farms and crafts workers associations engaged in local production for local use, voluntary charitable institutions, land trusts, or voluntary collectives, communes and kibbutzim may seem farfetched to some, but no more so and probably less so than a modern industrial, high-tech economy where the merchant class is the ruling class and the working class is a frequently affluent middle class would have seemed to residents of the feudal societies of pre-modern times.

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