I have discussed social and economic alternative societies or utopias, within and beyond capitalism and current societies. Many involve collective ownership or control on a democratic basis, often in the economy, and socialism has been distinguished by its commitment to collective ownership. In the last two chapters, I focused on utopia and socialism as core approaches that came out of the survey of alternatives in Chapters 1 and 2. In this chapter, I will go into more detail on collective ownership and control in the economy, especially on contemporary proposals for, and experiments in, a democratic economy. This is the third key approach I think came out of the alternatives surveyed in the opening chapters of the book.

On the social democratic as well as the revolutionary Left, public ownership has been a major commitment. In some parts of the world, as neoliberalism got a grip on the political agenda, public ownership moved from the mainstream to the margins. Centre-Left parties shifted away from state ownership and forms of planning – often indicative rather than direct planning anyway – towards a commitment to private ownership and markets.

In the austerity and post-austerity period, there was a rise of a ‘radical’ or ‘populist’ Left (see Mouffe, 2018); I prefer to call it the ‘proper’ or ‘firm’ Left. While social ownership never went away as a part of life in many countries, where it was pushed to the periphery it has returned more to the political agenda. Where the private sector and market became default policy choices, public ownership has come back into conventional politics. Social ownership can be combined with greater equality, but with equality coming as much through the structural change of social ownership as through redistribution of income. This a predistributional path to egalitarianism, with collective ownership of production and equality of distribution linked. The structure of the economy creates a more equal distribution (predistribution), rather than unequal distributions growing and then being corrected after the fact (redistribution). Social ownership can also ensure that public rather than private goals are achieved, including environmental objectives, greater accountability to society, long-term over short-term thinking, and more economically efficient operations in several ways.