NOW AVAILABLE from the Distributist Review Press...

Jobs of Our Own

Building a Stakeholder Society:
Alternatives to the Market and the State

Race Mathews

Download sample pages (PDF, 2.3MB): Table of Contents, Chapter 1, Index.

There is little enthusiasm today for massive state ownership, and no trust in the alternative of unbounded capitalism. Third Way proposals to date have too often turned out to be no less sterile. Veteran Labor thinker Race Mathews argues for distributism—the belief that ownership should be widely distributed rather than concentrated in the hands of the state or wealthy minorities.

Jobs of Our Own draws on the legacies of Christian socialism, social Catholicism, mutualism, associative democracy and civil society for a new vision of society: evolved distributism. Mathews sees common ground between distributism and mutualist bodies such as mutual assurance societies, building societies, co-operatives and credit unions.

Mathews also warns that the conversion of mutuals into conventional companies is robbing the community of assets which are needed for social reconstruction. He points to evolved distributism on the model of the great employee-owned co-operatives complex at Mondragon in Spain as an authentic Third Way.

Race Mathews is a former academic, federal M.P., state M.P. and minister and municipal councillor in Australia, who has written and spoken widely on politics, political history, and public policy.

... places Distributism in the international context of the Antigonish Movement in Nova Scotia and the Mondragon Co-operative Corporation in the Basque region of Spain.

Fr. Ian Boyd, Editor, The Chesterton Review

... a fascinating and unexpected linkage between these apparently unconnected reform movements.

Fr. Greg MacLeod, Tompkins Institute, University College of Cape Breton

... penetrates to the heart of the Mondragon Co-operative Experience.

Sr. Jesus Larrañaga, Mondragon

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Coming Soon from the Distributist Review Press...

Social Justice Engagement Calendar 2011

Edited by Bill Powell

Have you ever wondered what the Catholic Church actually says, in writing, about just wages, unions, advertising, consumer culture, migrant workers, or how First World economies should treat the Third World? With this new weekly calendar, you can find out all these things and more. Each week features a selection on social justice taken from official papal documents or the writings of leading Catholics. Rather than a book to read once and slowly forget, this calendar brings social justice from a nebulous concept to concrete ideas for your consideration and reflection, all the year long.

Equity and Equilibrium

The Political Economy of Distributism

John Médaille

Distributists have often argued their case on moral terms grounds alone; they have placed their arguments in the necessary connection between free property and free men; they have argued on agrarian terms, on the natural rhythms of life and social order often disrupted by modern capitalism; they have argued from Catholic teaching and the social encyclicals. But while the moral argument is necessary, it is not sufficient. We must be able to make the case on economic grounds as well. Distributism forms a superior economic theory, one able to give a rational account of actual economic conditions. But it is often the case that Distributists are not able to put the case in purely economic terms.

The theme of this book is simple: Economics, or more properly, political economy, cannot be a proper science unless it is a humane science; to be a humane science it must embody some notion of justice, and particularly of distributive justice. Indeed, as a practical matter, as well as a theoretical one, there can be no balance between supply and demand without distributive justice; the moral question and the economic question are, in reality, one question. Economic equilibrium cannot be divorced from economic equity, and the attempt to do so will lose both equity and equilibrium; the economy will be unable to balance itself, and so will fall either to ruin, or to ruinous government attempts to redress the balance.

The book is written in layman's terms, yet intended to enable the reader to stand his ground in debates with the Austrian, the Keynesian, the Monetarist, the Neoconservative, the Socialist, and all other contenders.

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