Forms of Shared Ownership and the ‘Consolidation State’
The declining legitimacy of the liberal-democratic state in the period following the Progressive Era, after the catastrophe of the Great War, prompted a wide-ranging and extensive reconsideration of the question of how a more optimal distribution of wealth be achieved throughout the intellectual and political classes of Europe. As Charles Maier points out in ‘The Search for Stability’ (1987), a general theme in the varied responses to the question of wealth distribution was that the ownership of productive resources must be more widely and evenly distributed amongst all social classes, in order to avoid explosive social conflict. Remarkable to note now that these ideas were advocated across the political spectrum; in Great Britain, the now-bowdlerised idea of a “Property-Owning Democracy” advocated by the Conservative intellectual Noel Skelton articulated the implementation of a form of worker-owned production that mirrored the syndicalist ideas being advocated by left-liberals such as Walter Rathenau in the new German Republic. In France and Italy similar discourses around shared ownership of the means of production were in circulation amongst the liberals and radical left and right alike. (ibid)
Considering the widely-held enthusiasm for communal forms of ownership in this period prompts the question of why, if the radical left has a commitment the ownership of the means of production by the working classes, this ownership should necessarily be mediated by the workings of the bureaucratic nation state. In more general terms, it prompts the question of the necessary boundedness of shared-ownership, and why on the radical left we should consider some forms of communal ownership more or less desirable than others.
Neoliberal statecraft in the age of what Wolfgang Streeck calls ‘the consolidation state’ is committed to the ongoing and perpetual autophagy of the institutional and organisational integrity of the (welfare) state apparatus, as financial capital demands that these bodies are defunded, starved of operational resources, and eventually privatised and sold off to hedge-funds. As such the neoliberal state becomes a paradoxical agent for its own dissolution, and the post-war welfare state succumbs to a process of ever more complete dismemberment and self-cannibalisation.
With international financial capital now totally unmoored from any political oversight, and the bond markets able to “intimidate everybody”, I am not personally convinced that any left government able to get into power would be able to do much to resist the process of destruction of the centrally funded welfare state. This must prompt consideration of how more equitable models of shared ownership and production might be made possible — if at all — inside the decaying ruins of the once well-integrated state.
One answer might be in that general form of Housing Associations, Cooperatives, Mutuals and Social Enterprises advocated at the end of the Progressive Era. It might be that these can form models of a more locally bounded shared ownership which function outwith the direct involvement of the state, now too much at the mercy of the whims of international financial capital. Extension of shared-ownership in more localised and voluntarist forms may present opportunities for the left which do not depend on party-politics and statecraft that now seems to shut out progressive policy by design. These considerations raise more questions than they answer, and there would be no doubt an ever-present possibility that these institutions might themselves be in danger of coercion by the overweening power of the neoliberal state and global finance. However, by considering the variety of concrete forms shared ownership may take, and how the left might implement these at some remove from a centralised state, we might see one way of of implementing progressive social programmes in an age of ‘the consolidation state’ and a preponderant financial capital.
