Modelos de propriedade alternativos (II)

Labour's Alternative Models of Ownership Report (New Socialist):

Today Labour launch a report, Alternative Models of Ownership, commissioned by Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell and Shadow Secretary of State for Business and Industrial Strategy Rebecca Long-Bailey, that could mark a major milestone in the development of the Corbyn project and its ambitious attempt to re-make the British left. The report, authored by a group of theorists and practitioners at the cutting edge of ‘new economics’ thinking in the UK, potentially provides the basis for the most far-reaching, radical, yet practical, economic strategy to be argued for within the Labour Party in forty years. In a political landscape long characterised by triviality and a sullen lack of imagination, the authors of the report – as well as McDonnell and Long-Bailey – deserve enormous credit and have further demonstrated that it is the left that is producing the only serious, grown-up ideas for tackling our deepening social, economic, and ecological crises. The ideas contained in the report manage to be both justifiably pessimistic about the consequences of continued business-as-usual for the vast majority of people and for the environment, while also demonstrating powerful optimism regarding our capacity to change things for the better – for the many, not the few. (...)

In considerable detail, the report sets out the practicality and necessity of a shift to a variety of alternative forms of ownership and control of productive enterprises, including co-operatives, municipal and locally-led ownership forms, and finally – and most ambitiously – new democratic forms of national ownership. Ultimately, Alternative Models of Ownership is a remarkable document to be circulating at the highest levels of a major political party, combining a sober and plausible practicality with a profound radicalism in demanding a new socialist political economy that goes beyond nostalgia for a reheated, golden-age social democracy (...)

More generally, the report also contains certain policy themes that have not always been the preserve of the left – or at least of the left exclusively. Such themes include co-operatives, which formed a large part of the Big Society agenda; greater devolution of budgets to regions and councils, which superficially parallels both the “Northern Powerhouse” and the reason given for the support of some right-wing Labour council leaders for Liz Kendall’s 2015 leadership bid; a concern with automation and Unconditional Basic Income, which have interested figures like Tom Watson and Jonathan Reynolds; and a suspicion of how far states subject to the discipline of globalised capitalism can redistribute that underpinned Ed Miliband’s “predistribution” agenda (...).

[Via A Very Public Sociologist]

Diga-se, já agora, que a a análise do New Socialist ao documento dos Trabalhistas parece-me ser maior (e talvez mais aprofundado) que o documento propriamente dito...