“If you were to design the ultimate system, you would have mass transit be free and charge an enormous amount for cars.”

So said Mayor Michael Bloomberg last April, right about the time he unveiled his plan to charge motorists a fee to drive into Manhattan’s central business district. Eight months later, as the mayor’s original proposal mutates for better or worse, the MTA is hours away from raising transit fares. Neither idea has exactly caught fire with the public, and the fare hikes could actually end up a foil for congestion pricing — a plan originally intended as a sustained financial boost for the transit system.

And then there’s Theodore “Ted” Kheel. The environmentalist, philanthropist, and renowned labor attorney has lobbied…

Liberal ideology insists that a society in which conscious solidarity is the dominating attitude/approach is impossible, because humans are primarily and perpetually motivated by individual material incentives. But the revolutionary process that Venezuela embarked upon in 1999, known as the “Bolivarian Revolution,” is challenging the core liberal tenet that narrow self-interest is the immutable human condition.

In common with notions of participatory democracy and democratic socialism, the Bolivarian process asserts that solidarity and collective action are possible because individuals’ preferences (i.e., needs and desires) are socially and historically constructed through their practices. Rather than being invariably egoistic, humans can come to value social solidarity if institutions are designed to facilitate and not to penalize cooperation.

Workplace Democracy and Collective Consciousness: