“Fellow revolutionaries, I am delighted to be with you,” political ecnomist Gar Alperovitz greeted his SOCAP (Social Capital Markets) audience in San Francisco last week.
A video from his Seattle Town Hall post-debate talk the following day is catching a lot of attention, but this talk with folks working at the “intersection of money and meaning” — 1600 in attendance according to the opening keynote by co-founder Kevin Doyle Jones — is shorter and tighter.
It is, as Alperovitz says in 60s lingo, a “heavy rap.”
There is a movement building that cuts across many parts of the spectrum, and it is calling itself the new economy movement, for lack of better terms.
The thing that I think is important about it, and why it could be transformative — including the direction that is represented by this cutting-edge part of the movement — is that it is asking itself: Are we up to, really, what it would take to transform an economic system? Not just doing projects isolated, but projects that build up and begin to ask that big, big question in a strategic way, not simply a tactical way. …
I don’t think we here are talking about projects alone, I don’t think we are talking only about entrepreneurship, I don’t think we are talking only about impact investing.
I think we are talking — and I sometimes wear a historian’s hat — I think we are talking about laying down the foundations. … We are establishing the pre-history in this work, step by step, of the possible great transformation.
So I’m talking to you about identity. … I’m talking to the person in your chair. … I’m a little older than some folks here — that’s what used to be called a heavy rap.
See also: all SOCAP12 videos.
