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.

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.

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.

Internationally, there are countries going well beyond the course, with airlines, transportation. There are systems around the world that have explored mining, rail transport, television, communication, Internet service - there very common examples around the world that we can draw examples from.

We need to learn to listen to what the people need and want and not try to impose on them a whole schema that they may not. This is historically difficult stuff: how do we balance the project of raising consciousness, advancing a vision of utopia, with the real and honest engagement in real-world experiments?

Worker-owned co-ops, on their own, floating in the market, tend to replicate the behavior of worker-owned capitalists in some circumstances. They sometimes develop positive participatory schemes, sometimes not. We know from the studies of worker-owned plywood companies in the US, they can tend to develop conservative attitudes, not socialist attitudes. So even though I'm an advocate of further democratization of the workplace, we also need to be building larger structures.

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.