Welcome!

There are several things going on here. This site serves as a blog for rants, comments and possibly longer pieces and a place to archive work.  For the origins of Ztangi Press go here .

It has been some years since I last reviewed a book, recently however I reviewed Bernard Harcourt’s Cooperation: A Political, Economic, and Social Theory . GEOGrassroots Economic Organizing  posted an audio version. Afterwards I reviewed  – After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time and you will find that review here. I plan to review, in May, 2025, Hannes  Gerhardt’s From Capital to Commons: Exploring the Promise of a World Beyond Capitalism.

From my book Jobs, Jive, & Joy, I have posted the Prelude and the Introduction on the Jobs, Jive, and Joy page.  Jobs, Jive, and Joy: An Argument for the Utopian Spirit is a joint publication of Ztangi Press and C.H. Kerr Publishing. Please visit the C.H. Kerr website for more information.

There are seven sections to the book. The first section was completed in the Summer 2019. It focused on Western Electric’s massive Hawthorne Works near Chicago and the early forms of worker-focused leisure that the company provided. It was called The Club. The second section on Time was finished a year later. It was followed by Play, The Work Ethic, Beyond Work and concludes with a Coda on strategy all written during the early years of the pandemic. The substance of the strategy section, and the theme running throughout the book, relies on my knowledge of the international movement for a cooperative society.

NEW TO THE ZTANGI PRESS website are two sections. The Graphic Archive, will be attended to in the coming months, and the other new section – JASecon History – relates the history of an attempt from 2007 to 2011 to forge and alliance with democratic economic alternatives, including staff-run non-profits, urban farms, healthcare collectives, an alternative currency group, publishers and worker cooperatives. Uniting all these groups was the Grassroots Festival held in Oakland, CA in 2009 and organized by two members from the worker cooperative community and two members of non-profits.

Latest

Essays

UCB – a public university or a corporate innovation center?

A recent Chronicle article featuring Richard Lyons (class of ’79), the university’s 12th chancellor depicts the university as a study in juxtapositions, or maybe, better, to use that antiquarian notion, contradictions.

On the one hand we have the former “chief innovation officer in 2020” at UCB, who banks almost a milliondollar paycheck for his services, who, before his academic career with the Haas Business School is 1993, was the “chief learning officer” at Goldman Sachs for a few years.