O novo modelo económico do Labour

The new economics of Labour, por Hilary Wainwright (introdução) e John McDonnell:

Shadow chancellor John McDonnell can usually barely breathe a word about nationalisation without setting off a media frenzy – so it’s strange that his most interesting comments yet on the subject passed with so little comment.

Speaking in London about the Labour Party’s new economics, McDonnell said: ‘We should not try to recreate the nationalised industries of the past… we cannot be nostalgic for a model whose management was often too distant, too bureaucratic.’ Instead, he said, a new kind of public ownership would be based on the principle that ‘nobody knows better how to run these industries than those who spend their lives with them’.

Maybe the media's silence on this profoundly democratic vision of public ownership is not so surprising : for it directly contradicts the attempt to warm up Cold War scares of a secretly pro-Soviet Labour leader whose public ownership plans are the first step towards imposing a Soviet style command economy onto the unsuspecting British people.

Now that the Czech spy stories have fallen flat – as false – we can discuss Labour's new democratic thinking more productively and maybe some of the media will pay attention; for this new thinking about public ownership opens up a rich seam of new economic thinking: beyond both neoliberalism and the post-war settlement. While neoliberalism says the market knows best, the Fabian-inspired model of the 1945 welfare state – while it has considerable merits – left workers with no role in the management of the newly nationalised industries. Beatrice Webb, a leading Fabian, declared her lack of faith in the ‘average sensual man’ (who can ‘describe his grievances’ but not ‘prescribe his remedies’) and wanted public industries to be run by ‘the professional expert’. In practice, this often meant the same old bosses from the private firms being brought back to run the public version, along with an few ex-generals or two.

Underlying Labour’s New Politics is a new and very different understanding of knowledge – even of what counts as knowledge – in public administration, and hence of whose knowledge matters. For industries to be run by ‘those who spend their lives with them’ means recognising the knowledge drawn from practical experience, which is often tacit rather than codified: an understanding of expertise that opens decision-making to wider popular participation, beyond the private boss or the state bureaucrat. As McDonnell put it, we need to ‘learn from the everyday experiences of those who know how to run railway stations, utilities and postal services, and what’s needed by their users’.