Outreach

Facing threats to their academic jobs and exclusion from the eminent institutions that had once welcomed them, many radical economists turned their focus away from the campuses. To some this was a return to familiar strategies of community and movement organization which they had learned as New Left and Feminist activists. Within the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE) a string of initiatives brought together volunteer research and writing to create a series of pamphlets designed to energize popular mobilization around inflation, corporate power, and women’s work. It began a tradition of popular publishing at the Union. By 1975 these initiatives began to unravel as URPE was assaulted by the sectarian mood that was wrecking the American leftwing. A continued commitment to educate organizers and activists about alternative economics and the facts of the American economy was secured through fringe academic institutions: the Labour Institute in New York City, with ties to the New School; the Center for Popular Economics at Amherst, with ties with UMass.