Britain needs a democratic ownership revolution. Our deepening problems – wage stagnation, underinvestment, low productivity, widening inequalities of wealth and power – are not simply accidental or the result of poor policy choices but the entirely predictable outcomes of the basic organisation of our economy. The institutional arrangements at the heart of today’s capitalism – private ownership, credit creation by banks, global capital markets, giant publicly traded corporations – together form the most powerful engine for the extraction of value the world has ever known. It is this set of relationships, this basic institutional design, that drives the outcomes we are seeing in terms of crumbling public infrastructure, social atomisation, uneven development, environmental destruction and a widespread sense of popular disempowerment.
A political economy is a system, and our system is programmed not to meet basic needs but rather to steadily concentrate virtually all the gains to the economy in the hands of a tiny elite. Fifty-two per cent of all wealth in the United Kingdom is now held by the top 10 per cent, with 20 per cent held by the top 1 per cent – and inequality continues to grow. It follows that if we are serious about addressing real economic challenges then we need a different set of institutions and arrangements capable of producing sustainable, lasting and more democratic outcomes – an economy for the many not the few.
The Labour Party is now promising to deliver this fundamental change. Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership has opened up space for a broader political conversation on economics than has been possible for many decades. Not since the 1970s and early 1980s – when the party was committed to bringing about what Tony Benn termed ‘a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families’ – has Labour put forward as bold a plan for the transformation of Britain as is contained in the 2017 manifesto, For the Many Not the Few.
Although widely described as a social democratic programme, the manifesto in fact contains the seeds of a radical transformation beyond social democracy. Policies such as establishing a national investment fund to help ‘rebuild communities ripped apart by globalisation’, linking public sector procurement to a regionally balanced industrial strategy, creating a national investment bank and a network of new regional public banks, and democratising the economy by supporting public and worker ownership provide the vision of a break with established economic orthodoxies. In combination with a commitment to devolving and decentralising power and decision making to local communities, and forming a Constitutional Convention that ‘will look at extending democracy locally, regionally and nationally, considering the option of a more federalised country’, the contours of a very different pattern of political economy begin to appear.
The scaffolding of this emerging new approach can be found in John McDonnell’s ‘new economics’. At the core of this programme is a new set of models, institutions and strategies that, if put in place, would in and of themselves produce vastly improved societal outcomes. In his first conference speech as Shadow Chancellor, McDonnell pledged that Labour would ‘promote modern alternative public, cooperative, worker controlled and genuinely mutual forms of ownership’. Instead of the extractive and concentrating forces of corporate capitalism, the new economics would be circulatory and place-based, decentralising economic power, rebuilding and stabilising regions and local communities, allowing for the possibility of real democracy and participation, and providing the long-run institutional and policy support for a new politics dedicated to achieving genuine social change.
A few days before the June 2017 election Labour released Alternative Models of Ownership, a report to McDonnell and Rebecca Long-Bailey, Shadow Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, by a group of cutting-edge theorists and practitioners. This report represents the beginnings of the most exciting economic programme to be developed for the Labour Party in forty years. It models the way in which the wider left should now be rolling up its sleeves and getting to work, going beyond rhetoric to detailed institutional design and policy formulation. It starts from the premise that if powerful underlying trends are to be altered it is no longer possible to sidestep fundamental questions of ownership and control, and concludes that, ultimately, a truly impactful alternative left strategy must go after capital itself. The authors of the report call on Labour to ‘push issues of economic ownership and control to the front of the political agenda’ and ‘commence work on a strategy to win support’ for such ideas.
None of this is about selling a fantasy. Real-world examples of democratic, participatory economic alternatives already exist (or previously existed) in communities across the globe. Worker ownership, cooperatives, municipal enterprise, land trusts and a host of kindred institutional forms all represent ways in which capital can be held in common by small and large publics. They illuminate how practical new approaches can generate innovative solutions to deep underlying problems. They embody alternative design principles, relying not on regulatory fixes or ‘after-the-fact’ redistribution but on fundamental structural changes in the economy and the nature of ownership and control over productive wealth that go right to the heart of our current difficulties – and are capable of producing greatly improved distributional and other outcomes as a matter of course. They breathe new life into old traditions of economic democracy through the democ-ratisation of capital.
There are huge potential benefits to pursuing a massive expansion of democratic ownership. The opportunity presented by the coming ‘silver tsunami’ of retiring baby boomer business owners, and the succession question this raises for large numbers of small and medium-sized firms, means that the time for such an expansion is now. For the Many Not the Few calls for a ‘right to own’, which would give workers the right of first refusal when their companies are up for sale. Alternative Models of Ownership takes this further, urging (among other things) that local public authorities in the UK should be actively supporting and funding the incubation and expansion of worker cooperatives as part of their local economic development strategies, as is now happening in cities across the United States. It also suggests that Labour should investigate the benefits and limitations of employee stock ownership plans, which – again as in the United States – could dramatically increase worker ownership with little risk or cost to workers.
A large worker-owned and cooperative sector could form an important institutional base for a new place-based economics and politics in Britain – one that is capable of overturning simplistic notions of ‘pro- or anti-business’ and replacing them with new alignments around embedded democratic local and regional economies in opposition to footloose, extractive multinational corporations lacking any real ties to place. In a political landscape fractured and divided by Brexit, decentralised public control of the economy could reconstitute the basis for democratic participation by giving people real decision-making power over the forces that affect their lives – a chance to actually ‘take back control’.
The June 2017 election showed genuine popular appetite for Labour’s new direction. Theresa May achieved a vote share comparable to Margaret Thatcher’s in 1983. That the Conservatives lost rather than increased their majority is due to the ‘Corbyn surge’, an unprecedented turnaround in public opinion resulting in Labour’s largest vote share increase since 1945. The Labour Party is now a government-in-waiting, poised for the next general election, which could come at any time and could easily carry Corbyn into Downing Street as prime minister.
Embracing the magnitude of this historic opportunity, the British left’s task now is to put flesh on the bones of a transformational agenda capable of living up to the hopes and responding to the deep structural challenges of a fluid and rapidly changing political and economic landscape. To consolidate the ambitious project they have initiated, Corbyn and McDonnell must now follow through on the construction of a radical new left political economy. The responsibility is enormous. As McDonnell has said, ‘I want us to surpass even the Attlee government for radical reform. The situation demands nothing less.’
Models of Economic Democracy: Spain, Italy, Canada
It’s easy to miss just how radical Labour’s new economics really is, in the original sense of ‘getting at the root of the matter’. When it comes to economic fundamentals, there has been a decades-long deficit of new thinking and ideas on the left. Most social democrats are still splashing around far downstream from where the real action is, seeking a way forward among the muddy puddles of ‘tax-and-spend’ transfer policies and modest redistribution left behind by the high tide of Keynesianism and the welfare state.
Even Thomas Piketty, in his bestselling book Capital in the Twenty-First Century – a masterwork of statistical analysis of capital accumulation over the longue durée that demonstrated capitalism’s ‘fundamental force for divergence’ – largely avoided grappling with the deep structural determinants of who owns capital, focusing instead on ‘regulating capital’ via a global tax on wealth. However, given that returns to capital are increasing at the expense of labour, it’s only natural that we should be looking at broadening and democratising ownership. Nobel laureate Robert Solow commented to this effect during a 2014 panel on Piketty’s book in Washington, DC. Among the ‘things we can do’, he observed, ‘democratising the ownership of wealth is perhaps the most obvious’.
Who owns and controls capital – productive wealth – is the most fundamental question of political economy, central to understanding the operations of any economic system. Karl Marx famously viewed human history through the lens of the differing forms of ownership of the means of production. In tribal societies, communal ownership and cooperative labour were widespread. Ancient societies, by contrast, were characterised by patrician ownership, with slave labour serving as the critical source from which the propertied classes extracted their surplus. In the Middle Ages, agricultural production by feudal elites was the primary economic driver, with labour provided by a peasant class tied to the land. Under industrial – and, more recently, financial – capitalism, the means of production has largely been in the hands of capitalists, to whom workers sell their labour for wages.
For socialists, responses to capitalist private ownership of the economy have traditionally been divided along two main lines. In vastly simplified terms, state socialism placed ownership and control of capital with the state, whereas social democracy left it largely in private hands but sought to redistribute the returns through taxation and transfers via the welfare state. A neglected third tradition, however, largely eclipsed by the left’s two great twentieth-century projects, is to be found in the long-running libertarian socialist commitment to economic democracy.
The central idea of economic democracy is the notion of extending principles of popular sovereignty from the realm of politics and governance into economics. In A Preface to Economic Democracy, the renowned American political scientist Robert Dahl defined economic democracy as ‘help[ing] to strengthen political equality and democracy by reducing inequalities originating in the ownership and control of firms’. Approaching the question from the opposite end, G. D. H. Cole, the British guild socialist theorist and economic democracy advocate, argued that principles of democracy should apply ‘not only or mainly to some special sphere of social action known as “politics”, but to any and every form of social action, and, in especial, to industrial and economic fully as much as to political offices’.1
Labour is no stranger to the economic institutions involved. Many of them have their origins in the struggles of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century European workers’ movement. In Britain in particular, economic democracy has a long and impressive lineage going back to the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, from Luddite insurrections to the Owenite movement, the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union, and the syndicalism of Tom Mann. The birth of the modern cooperative movement can be traced back to the Rochdale pioneers – and today it boasts a billion members worldwide. There have also been many overseas experiments, ranging from Algerian ‘autogestion’ and Yugoslav workers’ self-management to Argentine factory reclamations, each providing important design and operational lessons for the future. In Italy and Spain – both on the front lines of recent austerity struggles – and in Canada there are prominent examples that show the power of the institutions of economic democracy when taken to scale in particular geographical locations.
In the Basque region of Spain, the famous 73,000-person Mondragon Cooperative Corporation – one of the largest corporations in the country – has annual revenues of around €12 billion across a network of companies that include retail, manufacturing and financial services. The first cooperatives date from the mid-1950s, and the network has since evolved into a federation of 102 cooperatives, 140 subsidiary companies, eight foundations and a benefit society. Each year it teaches some 10,000 students in its education centres, and has roughly 2,000 researchers working at fifteen research centres, at the University of Mondragon and within its industrial co-ops.
Mondragon has, over time, evolved a participatory decision-making structure, and a far more egalitarian compensation structure than is to be found in similar-scale capitalist enterprises. Mondragon’s pay ratio, top to bottom, is a maximum of around nine to one, whereas comparable private companies in the UK often operate with pay ratios between the chief executive and the average worker of over a hundred to one. There are also multiple levels of democratic representation and participation at Mondragon, including direct election of managers by workers, general assemblies (both annually, and to deal with specific issues) and representative councils made up of delegates from each co-op in the network.
Mondragon is not without its limitations. As Sharryn Kasmir has pointed out, it has made certain compromises to its cooperative principles over the years in order to compete in global markets, including hiring lower-cost wage labourers in its foreign plants and temporary and short-term contract workers in some of its Spanish businesses.2 Unlike most traditional large corporations, however, Mondragon acknowledges these practices as deficiencies to be corrected rather than advantages to be exploited. Many observers have also noted its highly egalitarian and cooperative internal culture.
Moreover, Mondragon has served as an important anchor amid recent economic storms. The unemployment rate has remained much lower in the Basque country than in Spain as a whole, and when Mondragon was forced to lay off workers in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis – and again in 2013, with the bankruptcy of Fagor Electrodomésticos, its flagship white goods manufacturer – many were rehired by other companies within the network or provided with support from its social insurance funds.
Another oft-cited, significant-scale modern experiment in economic democracy is to be found in Emilia Romagna in Italy’s zona rossa. The so-called ‘Emilian Model’ consists of a grouping of more than 8,000 worker-owned enterprises in the region’s cooperative economy, which now accounts for around 40 per cent of area economic activity. It has helped transform Emilia Romagna from one of the poorest regions in the country in 1970 to one of its most prosperous (and one of the richest in Europe) today. Significantly, the region also boasts Italy’s most equal distribution of wealth.
Author and cooperator John Restakis calls Emilia Romagna ‘the world’s most successful and sophisticated cooperative economy’.3 It represents one of the primary examples of a networked model of economic organisation. ‘Networking’, as University of Bologna economic historian Vera Zamagni recently observed, ‘is the alternative to full integration, to reap economies of scale and scope. If and when mergers and the building up of a single integrated firm is not acceptable either on technical grounds (need for specialisation) or on cultural ones (no propensity to work in a big business), networks can provide the necessary cuts in transactions costs.’4
The development of Emilia Romagna’s network model of production was aided in its early stages by the creation, in 1974, of a majority publicly owned economic development agency, ERVET (Ente Regionale per la Valorizzazione Economica de Territorio). ERVET’s mandate was to implement a regional industrial strategy, to which end it established a network of specialised subsidiaries to provide local firms with a variety of services and support, ranging from certification and marketing to business development.
The Emilian Model – and Italian cooperatives more generally – also benefited from other forms of state support. In addition to the provisions of Italy’s postwar constitution guaranteeing recognition of cooperatives, supportive legislation has included a 1977 tax exemption for co-op profits designated for indivisible reserves, a 1983 provision allowing co-ops to hold shares in and control joint stock companies, and a 1991 law formally recognising social cooperatives. There is also the famous ‘Marcora Law’ – first passed in 1985, struck down by the European Union as illegal state aid, and then revived in modified form in the early 2000s – which set up funds to invest in co-ops formed by workers who have been laid off from companies that are closing or downsizing.
A third example is the so-called ‘social economy’ (or solidarity economy) in Québec, Canada. In a province of around 8 million people, cooperatives and enterprises linked to nonprofit organisations account for upwards of 200,000 jobs, CAN$40 billion in assets, and between 8 and 10 per cent of GDP. ‘We always say the social economy is simply the formalisation of the commons’, Nancy Neamtan, co-founder of Chantier de l’économie sociale, a network of social economy organisations, has stated. ‘It’s social ownership, the goal of which is a sustainable, democratic economy with a market – instead of a market economy.’5
In Québec, solidarity economy enterprises in sectors ranging from agriculture to housing, and from childcare to media to manufacturing, are supported by a diverse array of public and private institutions, including government, philanthropy, trade unions and non-profits. For instance, the Fonds de solidarité is a Can$13 billion capital fund established by the FTQ union (Fédération des travailleurs et travailleuses du Québec) that invests in small and medium-sized businesses across the province under the guiding principle of ‘sustainable economic development where people come first’. It also serves as a vehicle for residents to save for retirement by selling shares, which return a dividend and are given favourable tax treatment by the government.
A New Wave of Democratisation: The United States
Mondragon, Emilia Romagna and Québec are only the most prominent longstanding attempts around the world at building a more democratic economy. Recent decades have also seen a more general uptick of interest in economic democracy, and of experimentation with its institutions and approaches – especially with the onset of neoliberal crisis and austerity.
The collapse of the Argentine economy back in 2001 saw unemployment soar to 25 per cent, prompting the emergence of the sin patrón (‘without bosses’) movement, numbering over 10,000 workers in around 200 recovered workplaces – ‘an old idea’, as Naomi Klein remarked, ‘reclaimed and retrofitted for a brutal new time’.6 More recently, new waves of factory occupations have followed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, especially in Europe (in Spain, Italy, France and Greece) but also in Egypt and the United States.
The shuttering of Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago and its reopening (after two occupations) under cooperative worker ownership as New Era Windows garnered international attention, as did the experiment in economic and ecological self-management at the Vio.Me factory in Thessaloniki, Greece. Such crisis-driven, worker-led transitions of previously capitalist enterprises into collective ventures offer hope for a new future rising out of the ashes. The growing sophistication of older cooperative networks in Spain, Italy and Canada, described above, demonstrates the ongoing viability of such models over time and at scale.
In the United States, deepening structural problems and the inability of traditional politics and policies to address fundamental challenges are now fuelling an extraordinary amount of experimentation along similar lines, much of it unreported by the corporate media. As federal and state transfers dry up, social pain is intensifying in communities that have long suffered high levels of unemployment and poverty. Precisely because large public expenditures for jobs and housing have become increasingly impossible politically, more and more people are turning to economic alternatives in which new wealth is built collectively and from the bottom up.
The Democracy Collaborative has been tracking and promoting the growth of these innovations across the United States for almost two decades, under the rubric of ‘community wealth building’. They include cooperatives and municipal enterprises, non-profit community-owned corporations and land trusts that keep housing affordable over the long term, as well as community financial institutions responsible for US$60 billion a year in local investment. Employee ownership now encompasses over 10 million US workers, around 3 million more than are members of unions in the private sector. Fully a third of Americans (over 100 million people) belong to various urban, agricultural and financial cooperatives, including credit unions that have around 111 million members and manage US$1.3 trillion in assets – more than Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs.
Worker co-ops are emerging in every sector of the economy. In New York City, a coalition of grassroots community organisers and cooperative advocates – including the New York City Network of Worker Cooperatives, an affiliate of the United States Federation of Worker Cooperatives, and the Working World (which originated in the Argentine factory reclamations) – secured multi-year funding from the city’s budget to support the development of worker-owned businesses in low-income communities. One of the driving forces behind the New York City legislation is Cooperative Home Care Associates, the largest worker co-op in the United States, with 2,000 unionised workers (most of whom are women of colour) who enjoy above-average pay and benefits as a result of their cooperative business model.
Similar advances have been made in other American cities. In Madison, Wisconsin, the city council passed a measure earmarking US$3 million for cooperative development. Supported by Mayor Paul Soglin and backed by a diverse coalition that includes the University of Wisconsin Center for Cooperatives, the South Central Federation of Labor and various other community organisations, unions and economic development groups, half the funds will be used to capitalise a loan fund that will facilitate the conversion of existing businesses to worker cooperatives, help form worker-union cooperatives and provide general startup capital for all forms of cooperative enterprises, while the other half goes to build technical assistance capacity.
Another variation on the theme has seen a number of trade unions begin to explore new directions involving worker cooperatives and community structures. Some are moving to act in a significant way, notably the United Steelworkers (USW), who signed an agreement with Mondragon in 2009 and are now actively supporting new worker-union co-ops in Cincinnati, Ohio and other cities. The union co-op model is based in significant part on the Social Council, which functions as a voice for workers at Mondragon.
In the public sector, state and local government economic development programmes now invest in local businesses while municipal enterprises build infrastructure and provide services, raising revenue, creating employment and diversifying the base of locally controlled capital. Publicly owned utilities, together with co-ops, currently provide a quarter of America’s electricity – including in Nebraska, an all-public-power state in which every resident and business gets electricity from one of 166 community-owned entities. From California to Alabama, public pension assets are being channelled into job creation and community development. Many states and a growing number of cities (from Santa Fe, New Mexico to Philadelphia, Oakland and Los Angeles) are looking to the creation of public banking systems like North Dakota’s, widely credited with ensuring that the state had no bank failures and a low unemployment rate during the financial crisis and Great Recession. Giant public trusts that capitalise on public ownership and management of natural resources are providing revenue streams from capital and directly funding public services in places like Alaska, Texas and Wyoming, recalling the unjustly neglected ideas of the economist James Meade.
The full scale of the possibilities is just beginning to be understood. From parks and blood banks to libraries and the internet, commons management systems can provide an expanding zone of decommodification to buffer against the market. Public trusts can be extended into additional domains, from water and air to the electromagnetic spectrum, underwriting public services or issuing a citizen dividend. Platform co-ops can offer a democratic alternative to the increasingly evident depredations of the ‘sharing economy’. Community land trusts can ensure the long-term affordability of housing and prevent disruptive gentrification and speculative real estate bubbles. Participatory budgeting and planning approaches can establish local democratic control over the allocation and distribution of public funds. It is becoming possible to project and extend a vision of fully democratised local and regional economies, oriented towards local multipliers, as an alternative to neoliberal austerity and corporate extraction.
Examples of such strategies are increasingly thick on the ground and growing in sophistication. The ‘Cleveland Model’ in Ohio – our own flagship initiative – involves redirecting the massive purchasing power (around US$3 billion a year in goods and services) of large non-profit ‘anchors’ (hospitals and universities) in support of a growing community-based network of linked green worker co-ops in historically disinvested and predominantly black neighbourhoods. Meanwhile, several jurisdictions have been investigating the possibility of using eminent domain (a form of compulsory purchase) to seize and refinance underwater mortgages in radical new principal-reduction schemes, or have established publicly owned or non-profit land banks to take direct ownership of vacant and foreclosed properties. This builds upon efforts begun in the late 1980s, when the city of Boston granted the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI), a non-profit community development corporation, eminent domain powers over vacant land in a neglected sixty-acre portion of the city and entered into a partnership agreement with the organisation related to publicly owned vacant land in the area. DSNI has subsequently established a community land trust to ensure permanently affordable housing and developed more than half of the neighbourhood’s 1,300 previously vacant lots.
Examples of the power of such strategies can also be found in places where they might least be expected, deep behind enemy lines in Trump’s America. Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, for example, organised for participatory economic planning around a post-coal future in Appalachia, fighting for the Clean Power Plan when it was blocked at the state level. Greensburg, Kansas became – in a deep red state, under a Republican mayor – one of the greenest towns in the country when the government acted as partner and catalyst to rebuild the town after it was levelled by a tornado. Chattanooga, Tennessee has one of the fastest internet connections in America, thanks to a municipal fibre broadband network, whereby public ownership of digital infrastructure is driving local economic revitalisation.
Such approaches point in the direction, ultimately, of rebuilding a power base, in both ‘red states’ and ‘blue cities’, for a transformative politics capable of standing on its own feet and managing the economy for the benefit of the many, not the few. They suggest a way forward to a more democratic economy that is rooted in place, one that can deliver local development, jobs, environmental sustainability and new public revenues without requiring drastic cuts to social services or massive burdens on local taxpayers. They indicate the likely future preconditions of genuine regional, national and international cooperation built on mutual benefit and solidarity in a world faced with global challenges such as climate change and war. They embody the social architecture of a new economy – a quiet ownership revolution that is slowly gathering pace, offering a powerfully appealing alternative vision to set against the current downward trajectory of deepening inequality and ongoing crisis and decay.
Bringing Home the Revolution
Twice in the course of the last century, radical reforming governments have brought about fundamental transformations of Britain’s political economy on the basis of significant changes in ownership. In the first instance, the nationalisations of the 1945– 51 Labour government brought the Bank of England, coal, steel, civil aviation and the major utilities into public hands. This was conducted in the teeth of vehement political opposition, including interventions on behalf of the UK private sector by the United States government. By 1951, Labour had reorganised large chunks of British industry and assembled a public sector workforce of 4 million, 18 per cent of the total. A fifth of the economy was in public ownership, with the government sector responsible for a third of net fixed capital formation. Despite a great deal of mythology to the contrary, the nationalised industries were quite efficient, outperforming both their US privately owned counterparts and the British economy as a whole in terms of total factor productivity. For all its shortcomings, this remains today the most radical economic programme ever implemented in Britain.
The second occasion saw a counterrevolution. The Conservative governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major substantially reversed the earlier transformation of ownership. The commanding heights of the economy – electricity, gas, water, steel, civil aviation, telecoms and railways – were all delivered up for auction. Between 1980 and 1996 Britain racked up fully 40 per cent of the total value of all assets privatised across the OECD, an astounding figure. The only remotely comparable experiences occurred in countries – Pinochet’s Chile and the disintegrating Soviet Union – that were undergoing exceptional transitions and in which the rule of law was basically inoperative.
Thatcher’s privatisations amounted to a massive transfer of wealth from public to private interests. Most small individual investors sold their shares within a relatively short period, reaping quick capital gains from undervaluation but giving the lie to extravagant promises of a shareholder democracy. Privatisation not only allowed for attacks on the trade unions and a restoration of capital’s ‘right to manage’ but was also – together with Big Bang deregulation – instrumental in the expansion of London-based capital markets. The £3.9 billion rollout of shares in British Telecom in 1984, for example, was six times larger than any previous stock offering. In this way the serial privatisations of the 1980s and 1990s helped secure the ascendancy of finance capital and the City.
Today, we are within sight of another revolution in ownership. The current Labour leadership is carefully putting together a new twenty-first-century socialist political economy – one with a direct focus on democratised ownership at its core. ‘Co-operatives, shared ownership, and workplace democracy’, McDonnell has stated, ‘all have a central role to play here’ – ‘here’ being at the heart of what he terms ‘the new economics’.7 Corbyn, for his part, has called for local councils to have more freedom to run utilities and services in order to ‘roll back the tide of forced privatisation’.
It’s also clear that a Corbyn government would have no intention of simply reverting to the postwar model of public ownership – that of large, top-down, centralised public corporations at arm’s length from democratic control. McDonnell has spoken of the limitations of such bureaucracies, stating that ‘the old, Morrisonian model of nationalisation centralised too much power in a few hands in Whitehall. It had much in common with the new model of multinational corporations, in which power is centralised in a few hands in Silicon Valley, or the City of London.’ The alternative, he argues, is plural forms of democratised and decentralised common ownership at a variety of scales: ‘Decentralisation and social entrepreneurship are part of the left … Democracy and decentralisation are the watchwords of our socialism’. This dual emphasis on democratised ownership and radical political decentralisation is truly remarkable coming from the national leadership of a major political party.
Corbyn and McDonnell have created a hugely important opportunity. The tools and strategies exist to enable the British left to pursue a bold economic programme based on alternative economic institutions and approaches and the centrality of ownership, control, democracy and participation. Given the growing systemic challenges facing our politics and economics – not to mention the impending threat of climate catastrophe – it’s imperative that we now begin thinking and planning for the long haul, as well as developing strategies that contain the potential for creating (as neoliberalism was able to do in a different way) a new politics and culture based on a new notion of collective agency and democratic economic citizenship.
In this way we can aim to generate the fundamental transformation Britain so urgently needs – and, in so doing, create a powerful model for emulation far beyond our borders. As the long dark night of neoliberalism comes to a close, radical economic change appears once again to be within our grasp, making this the most exciting time to be active on the British left in a generation. To borrow from Raymond Williams, ours will doubtless be a Long Revolution but it’s under way at last.