Finding ways to organize work in which people are not locked into unequal power relationships is very important. Having said that, it's not easily done, and it's complicated.

If you don't have a way to speak to ordinary Americans, you're not in the game.

In America, we need to develop communitywide structures of democratic ownership, we need to work out cooperative development, we need to work out participatory management, we need new ecological strategies developed at the local city, state, regional level.

There are areas using what's called the "checkerboard strategy." They are different cities where you can move around the "checkerboard," doing things you can't do in every square, that you can do in some of them, building a mosaic of these kinds of practices. There are about 400 cable television networks, for example, that are publicly owned. That's a big fight for big private companies. In some areas, this is a political struggle, in some it's conventional common sense.

We've been following many forms of democratized ownership, starting with co-ops, land banks at the neighborhood level, municipal ownership and state ownership of banks - there's a whole series of these that attempt to fill the small-scale infrastructure that can build up to a larger theoretical vision.

As we move toward the pluralist commonwealth, economic interventions that stabilize communities - for instance by localizing the flows of goods and services or by promoting worker ownership - not only have immediate practical benefits but provide the necessary preconditions for the growth and development of a renewed culture of sustainable democracy that can serve as the basis for still further transformations at larger scales.

For 40 years, my argument has been that democratizing ownership of wealth has been the key to egalitarian society and the goals of egalitarian society. But you start at the local level, both at the workplace, community and other institutions and you reconstruct the egalitarian democratized structure as well as participatory structure. And as this happens, we learn more how to move toward the vision that is much larger than just the community level.