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FOLLOWING THE SANDINISTA VICTORY IN 1979, A HEATED DEBATE CONCERNING "DEMOCRACY" IN THE NICARAGUAN REVOLUTION HAS GALAVANIZED THE AMERICAN POLITICAL SCENE. THE DEBATE HAS BEEN CHARACTERIZED BY ITS POLEMICAL CONTENT AND THE EMPTY RHETORIC OF KEY PARTICIPANTS RATHER THAN INTORMED DISCUSSION. THIS ARTICLE SEEKS TO PROVIDE MUCH NEEDED FACTUAL INFORMATION BY ANALYZING THE IMPACT OF THE SANDINISTA REVOLUTIONARY PROJECT ON THE NICARAGUAN COUNTRYSIDE.

Following the Sandinista victory in 1979, a heated debate concerning "democracy" in the Nicaraguan revolution has galvanized the American political scene. The debate has been characterized by its polemical content and the empty rhetoric of key participants rather than informed discussion. This article seeks to provide factual information by analyzing the impact of the Sandinista revolutionary project on the Nicaraguan countryside

Can people use new participatory spaces to reclaim their rights as citizens and challenge structures of political power? This book carefully examines the constraints and possibilities for participatory governance under capitalism.

To understand what is at stake in the politics of participation, we need to look beyond the values commonly associated with it. Citizens face a dilemma: should they participate, even if this helps to sustain an unjust system, or not participate, thereby turning down rare opportunities to make a difference? By examining the rationale behind democratic innovation and the reasons people have for getting involved, this book provides a theory of how citizens can use new democratic spaces to challenge political boundaries. Connecting numerous international case studies and presenting original research from Rosario, Argentina, this book offers a crucial corrective to previous research. What matters most is not the design of new models of participation nor is it the supposed radical imagination of political leaders. It is whether people use new spaces for participation to renegotiate what democracy means in practice.

Bridging critical urban studies and democratic theory, this book will be of interest to researchers and students in the fields of democratic innovations, political economy and urban planning. It will also provide activists and practitioners of participatory democracy with important tools to expand spaces of grassroots democracy.

The last century, intense with dreams and major social experiments, has ended with a general collapse of initiatives for social transformation, and also total disillusionment with efforts for 'development' of so-called 'developing' nations. The victorious ideology of the day – capitalism – has sought to consolidate its triumph with a call for 'globalization', for the freeing of markets, for unchecked hunting by private capital within and across nations with total disregard for national and global welfare. For a period no answer to this was in sight, until at the turn of the century the global protest movement rekindled the torch of resistance. It is now appropriate to review where we are today and the task that lies ahead of us. With this end in view this article will look back at the experiments in and efforts for social change to draw enlightenment from them, review where we are today, trace elements of the new ideology that is emerging in the protest movement, and reflect upon the task ahead for grassroots social activism.

Introduction -- Market, state and capitalism: theories of political economy and China -- Market in state: a theory of Chinese political economy -- The state and market in imperial China -- Origins of the modern Chinese political economy: geopolitics, mobilization, and state building -- Grassroots capitalism and marketization: dynamics of market reform in the contemporary era -- The middle-ground: the nexus between the state and private enterprises -- The money regimes: fiscal and monetary reforms and their limits -- State capitalism: the centrally-managed SOEs and economic domination -- Conclusion

"Cooperatives, Grassroots Development, and Social Change" presents examples from Paraguay, Brazil, and Colombia, examining what is necessary for smallholder agricultural cooperatives to support holistic community-based development in peasant communities. Reporting on successes and failures of these cooperative efforts, the contributors offer analyses and strategies for supporting collective grassroots interests. Illustrating how poverty and inequality affect rural people, they reveal how cooperative organizations can support grassroots development strategies while negotiating local contexts of inequality amid the broader context of international markets and global competition. The contributors explain the key desirable goals from cooperative efforts among smallholder producers. They are to provide access to more secure livelihoods, expand control over basic resources and commodity chains, improve quality of life in rural areas, support community infrastructure, and offer social spaces wherein small farmers can engage politically in transforming their own communities. The stories in "Cooperatives, Grassroots Development, and Social Change" reveal immense opportunities and challenges. Although cooperatives have often been framed as alternatives to the global capitalist system, they are neither a panacea nor the hegemonic extension of neoliberal capitalism. Through one of the most thorough cross-country comparisons of cooperatives to date, this volume shows the unfiltered reality of cooperative development in highly stratified societies, with case studies selected specifically because they offer important lessons regarding struggles and strategies for adapting to a changing social, economic, and natural environment.

"Following the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011, tsunamis engulfed the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant located on Japan's Pacific Coast, leading to the worst nuclear disaster the world has seen since the Chernobyl crisis of 1986. Prior to this disaster, Japan had the third largest commercial nuclear program in the world, surpassed only by those in the United States and France--nuclear power significantly contributed to Japan's economic prosperity, and nearly 30% of Japan's electricity was generated by reactors dotted across the archipelago, from northern Hokkaido to southern Kyushu. This long period of institutional stasis was, however, punctuated by the crisis of March 11, which became a critical juncture for Japanese nuclear policymaking. As Akihiro Ogawa argues, the primary agent for this change is what he calls "antinuclear citizens"-- a conscientious Japanese public who envision a sustainable life in a nuclear-free society. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic research conducted across Japan--including antinuclear rallies, meetings with bureaucrats, and at renewable energy production sites--Ogawa presents an historical record of ordinary people's actions as they sought to survive and navigate a new reality post-Fukushima. Ultimately, Ogawa argues that effective sustainability efforts require collaborations that are grounded in civil society and challenge hegemonic ideology, efforts that reimagine societies and landscapes--especially those dominated by industrial capitalism--to help build a productive symbiosis between industry and sustainability"--

In an effort to shed light on the erosion of social change practices within Quebec community organizations, it is necessary to analyze how several these community groups have, to various degrees, adopted some of the management techniques, practices, and culture of corporations through the implementation of New Public Management methods by government. We will also illustrate the challenges that this situation entails for local grassroots democracy. This article focuses on the Quebec experience while being aware, as indicated by the introductory sentence, of the influence global trends have had on the evolution of State-community sector relations. For this reason, our use of theoretical literature is not limited to, although drawn heavily from, Quebec, thus recognizing the specific situation of Quebec within global capitalism. Adapted from the source document.

International audience ; In an effort to shed light on this erosion of social change practices within Quebec community organizations, it is necessary to analyze how several of these community groups have, to various degrees, adopted some of the management techniques, practices, and culture of corporations through the implementation of New Public Management methods by government. We will also illustrate the challenges that this situation entails for local grassroots democracy. This article focuses on the Quebec experience while being aware, as indicated by the introductory sentence, of the influence global trends have had on the evolution of State-community sector relations. For this reason, our use of theoretical literature is not limited to, although drawn heavily from, Quebec, thus recognizing the specific situation of Quebec within global capitalism.

"Cooperatives, Grassroots Development, and Social Change" presents examples from Paraguay, Brazil, and Colombia, examining what is necessary for smallholder agricultural cooperatives to support holistic community-based development in peasant communities. Reporting on successes and failures of these cooperative efforts, the contributors offer analyses and strategies for supporting collective grassroots interests. Illustrating how poverty and inequality affect rural people, they reveal how cooperative organizations can support grassroots development strategies while negotiating local contexts of inequality amid the broader context of international markets and global competition.

The contributors explain the key desirable goals from cooperative efforts among smallholder producers. They are to provide access to more secure livelihoods, expand control over basic resources and commodity chains, improve quality of life in rural areas, support community infrastructure, and offer social spaces wherein small farmers can engage politically in transforming their own communities.

The stories in "Cooperatives, Grassroots Development, and Social Change" reveal immense opportunities and challenges. Although cooperatives have often been framed as alternatives to the global capitalist system, they are neither a panacea nor the hegemonic extension of neoliberal capitalism. Through one of the most thorough cross-country comparisons of cooperatives to date, this volume shows the unfiltered reality of cooperative development in highly stratified societies, with case studies selected specifically because they offer important lessons regarding struggles and strategies for adapting to a changing social, economic, and natural environment.

Abstract
This article critiques industrial-scale solar energy development in Puerto Rico as a form of green capitalism that threatens the archipelago's self-determination. Rather than uncritically embracing supposedly benign 'green energy' as necessary for advancing environmental, climate and energy justice, we argue that where, how and with whom this energy transformation takes place is crucial for calling attention to and challenging the continuance of inequitable and unjust power relations. To counter Puerto Rico's ongoing exploitation as a 'blank slate' for development, we visually juxtapose the harms of industrial-scale solar 'farms' with distributed on-site, rooftop solar projects organized by grassroots group members in south-eastern Puerto Rico's Jobos Bay region.

This dissertation examines the upsurge of working-class social movements in rural and urban California during the Great Depression era. As the twentieth century's worst economic crisis unfolded in one of the most rapidly modernizing regions among industrialized nations, Grassroots Surrealism traces how Depression-era Californians made sense of conditions they confronted, pursued self-defined needs and aspirations, and contributed to the making of a broader, multiracial and transnational oppositional culture in the process. It argues that significant currents of grassroots movements in 1930s California advanced a politics of "grassroots surrealism," which rejected the rationalist strictures that dominated modern, Western thought and regarded desire, imagination, and creativity as indispensable political priorities. Rather than reflecting a unifying social- democratic agenda or a homogenizing American identity, California's grassroots surrealists asserted political visions that underscored the interconnectedness and interdependence of global struggles for dignity, against the dehumanizing effects of Western imperialism and racial capitalism. Grassroots Surrealism offers a comparative and relational examination of the struggles of multiethnic Mexican, Filipino, Asian, African American, Native American, and European American working populations in the Imperial Valley's agricultural fields, San Francisco's waterfront, Los Angeles' culture industry, and Mendocino County's Round Valley Indian Reservation. It excavates the under-examined sources of rank and file workers and working-class communities--in oral histories, community newspapers, and expressive culture--alongside the records of union leaders and politicians that have traditionally anchored the field. As it analyzes grassroots politics in forms that ranged from strikes to jazz music across the capitalist landscape--from rural to urban and north to south in California--it reveals how seemingly disparate communities were linked in their myriad struggles against Depression-era capitalism. Ultimately, this dissertation destabilizes dominant narratives of the New Deal by demonstrating that corporatist and social-democratic politics were far from popular consensus. It brings into focus California's place in the global capitalist map, locates multiethnic working communities within that cartography, and shows how their efforts to remake the 1930s were far more heterogeneous, multivalent, and contested than scholars have previously recognized

Examines a developing theory of socialism, distinct from the former real socialism, that can improve current global socioeconomic trends. It is argued that both capitalism & social democracy have failed to adapt to the social & economic needs of the majority working class; Swedish social democracy is used to illustrate. It is concluded that, because the economy is controlled by a central government that is influenced by the source of production, ie, business, the social democratic system is doomed to failure. The proposed system calls for a shift from global to regional production, & from a social marketplace to social corporations, similar to the autonomous structures of cooperatives, rather than a social marketplace. Several proposals for the control of capital are discussed, & criticisms that the new socialism will not permit risk taking are countered. Finally, it is noted that this change in social order will not be an abrupt one, but rather, a gentler, grassroots transformation. 2 References. T. Rosenberg