Memorandum to Participants of the Exploratory Project for Economic Alternatives
Memorandum to Participants of the Exploratory Project for Economic Alternatives
December 1, 1972
Gar Alperovitz, Archibald L. Gillies, and David R. Hunter
In retrospect, it’s easy to identify the late 1960s and early 1970s as a transitional period in the political economic history of the United States. We know now that the mild social democratic system that had been constructed between the New Deal and the Great Society (roughly 1935 to 1965) was breaking down amidst slowing economic growth, rising inflation, a disastrous overseas war, and conservative (and business) backlash against growing social and political unrest. At the same time, the neoliberal revolution of market liberalization, deregulation, privatization, and globalization that was to subsequently sweep the globe had yet to take hold.
However, at the time only a few people were able to truly identify the uniqueness and potential of the moment – and offer a coherent and actionable alternative path forwards for the country. Chief among these were a small group of political economists, researchers, and public intellectuals based at the Cambridge Policy Studies Institute (aka. The Cambridge Institute) in Massachusetts (one of the organizational predecessors of The Democracy Collaborative).
Early in 1972, this group launched the Exploratory Project for Economic Alternatives (EPEA). “The Project’s argument,” its architects wrote, is “that it is critically important to launch a systematic effort to develop coherent alternative models of how local, regional and national economic institutions might actually function to achieve more equity, participation, ecological sanity, etc. through new forms of employee, cooperative, or public ownership…”
This memorandum to participants in the project summarizes a preliminary report and subsequent discussions with stakeholders. It is one of the foundational documents of Community Wealth Building – identifying both the problems of the existing system (economic and political inequality, racism, environmental decay, militarism, poverty, etc.) and potential solutions (new economic structures based on democratic ownership and participation, interventions in crisis areas such as energy, the environment, and the military-industrial complex, and a new approach to public education and communications).
Reading the memorandum, we are struck by how accurately the group diagnosed the emerging economic and social problems the US was facing at the time (many of which we still face today) and we wonder how different our world could have been if the solutions they proposed were implemented instead of neoliberalism.
Thomas Hanna
August 17, 2026