Allan Engler
Al Engler worked for many years as a cook on coastal towboats and for a decade as secretary-treasurer and then president of Local 400, Marine Section, International Longshore & Warehouse Union - Canada. He has participated in movements to protect environments, against militarism, war, and imperialism, for the rights of women, native people, immigrants and gays and lesbians, and for social housing. He is author of Apostles of Greed, Capitalism and the Myth of the Individual in the Market (Pluto Press and Fernwood Books, 1995).
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Economic Democracy
The Working Class Alternative to Capitalism
Identifying capitalism as a system of socialized labour, privately owned capitalist collectives (corporations) and workplace (dictatorships), this book proposes economic democracy as an alternative form of organization. Unlike the capitalist system, which centralizes power with a small elite, economic democracy entitles everyone to a voice and equal vote in their communities’ economic and political decisions. Workplace and community democracy will replace capitalist (corporate) dictatorship. Engler proposes that working-class change will be based on workplace organizations, community mobilizations and democratic political action; on gains and reforms that improve living conditions while methodically replacing wealthholders’ entitlement with human entitlement, capitalist ownership with community ownership and master-servant relations with workplace democracy.
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Apostles of Greed
Capitalism and the Myth of the Individual in the Market
“Provides a readable history of the eighteenth century origins of the ‘myth of the individual in the market,’ traces subsequent modifications of this idea, and details its contemporary revival…Like other religious relics, once removed from its ritual setting, the mythology of the individual in the market looks so tawdry and illogical one wonders how it became so potent.” - Libby Davis, Pacific Current