I dissent! I don’t believe that a trustee model is an appropriate or neccesarily efficient version of worker’s control. Plus, co-operatives provide material individual incentive, which I feel has a role to play, provided that the every day struggle to exist can be eradicated.

However I do believe that the statist model is a necessity for states who have recently been under imperial control, or who have undeveloped and/or rurally based economies. It’s a phase you need to go through, but in the right way. A means, not an end.

Consider foremost the model supported in Venezuela, whereby co-operatives are given direct government funding to develop agricultural machinery, medicine etc.

I’d like to see us do that with the NHS, particularly if both patients and staff can be involved.

I admit I am not well versed in economics, beyond the classic texts of Smith and Hayek; it is a deficiency I’ve been seeking to rectify, but I can never find any literature which engages my interest. The only reason I’ve read Trotsky’s treatises against direct workers’ control and some of Preobrazhensky’s works because of their social and activist implications.

My instinct is in favour of non-statist approaches; I am, after all, a socialist. The classic texts of socialism speak against the view of the state as an inanimate tool. Only the post-Althusserian turn towards cultural studies would disagree with such a summation. I have been meaning to look into the practical applications of Parecon and so forth. Nevertheless, if these things are genuinely anti-capitalist, then by definition they would ultimately have to be revolutionary, no?

I guess the point I really wanted to make was that the Labour left continues (dissenters from this view are few and far between) to have a mystifying attachment to state control, despite the appalling record of ‘state socialist’ regimes throughout history, seemingly unaware of centuries of economic thought that has allowed for (what we would now call) free-market anti-capitalism, as evidenced by the development of cooperatism, from which the Labour Party itself sprung. One attributing factor is the ignorance of, and contempt for, the study of economics, within the contemporary left, perhaps due to being linked with ‘Thatcherism’ or to ‘materialism’.

I really don’t expect the electorate to be interested in a set of pre-1993 Labour policies, which don’t offer any new solutions, and whose answer (insofar as there was one) to job insecurity was ‘controls’, as if nothing has been learnt over the last 15 years. I don’t think I could support a party like that. Anything more radical is, due to the feebleness of collectivism in Britain (I’m including the public sector here, crippled as it is by managerialism), going to seem too alien, if pitched in a Manifesto rather than encouraged to develop over decades…

I’m very glad that your view is not in fact that the South East is naturally Tory territory, and I disagree that this is the position of Compass either.

Incidentally nice to find your real blog Lomas! I’ve added you to our blog-roll and hopefully there will be much more fruitful interplay between our articles.

The co-operative and mutualist networks didn’t depend on the Government for their creation: they developed in a much more democratic manner, and they seem to me to be the best hope for combining economic freedom and efficiency, outside capitalism. The likelihood of this approach creating greater well-being is surely greater than the likelihood of someone being able to create a mainstream, top-down socialist manifesto that the UK electorate will buy. It’s also more honest than trying to use a moderate Labour Party as a delivery mechanism for much more radical policies. Perhaps leave the party to tinker with capitalism, while investing in a movement that can offer a way out?