One thing this recession, and this election cycle, has made brutally clear is the imperative for progressives to promote an alternative economic vision. Without a clearly articulated vision of a positive economic alternative to the vicious inhumanity of capitalism, large chunks of the righteously outraged public is all too vulnerable to the lure of right-wing populism. We should have learned this lesson long ago, from Nazi Germany in the 1930s, and from right-wing anti-immigrant movements in the US extending at least as far back as the Know Nothing party, if from nowhere else.
With this in mind, I was encouraged to see the article "Innovation Isn't a Matter of Left or Right"
in the business pages of the New York Times of all places, proclaiming that most of the best innovations of the last few centuries have come, not from capitalism, but from open collaborative networking.
Unfortunately, however, Steven Johnson wrote this piece, out of faux or real obliviousness, as if there hasn't been a long tradition of radical democrats and anarchists making exactly this point for centuries.