Awakening the Sleeping Giant: Interstitial Transformation and the Cooperative Movement
31 Pages Posted: 1 Aug 2011 Last revised: 24 Aug 2012
Date Written: 2011
Abstract
Erik Olin Wright’s recent new book, Envisioning Real Utopias, is an important contribution to an expanding literature that attempts to articulate both a vision for a radical egalitarian and democratic society as well as a strategy for achieving it. The cooperative movement is often given an important role in this literature, although it is rarely considered in a thorough or critical manner. Wright’s book is no exception to this. This essay seeks to deepen the discussion of the cooperative movement by historicizing it so as to reveal its ideological foundations, and providing both a fuller and a more critical account of the contemporary movement than Wright provides.
Keywords: Erik Olin Wright, cooperatives, William Thompson, socialism, radical democracy, egalitarianism
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