Corbynism from below as challenge to neoliberal economic orthodoxy

The tension between commodified and decommodified approaches to ownership and democracy therefore emerged fairly early on in the programme and did not go away. This tension is resurfacing in debates about how the left should adapt its programme to the new leadership. As noted above, calls to reinterpret the Corbyn-McDonnell economic programme to give pre-eminence to its “bottom up” components have gained traction in the post-election defeat wash up. However, despite similarities in terminology and in the emphasis they place on ownership and democracy, there is an important divide between those which favour commodified forms of ownership and democracy and end up advocating a form of market socialism and those which favour decommodified forms of ownership and democracy and make the case for participatory socialism. In the remaining sections I evaluate each strand by examining some recent articles from each.

Socialism and the Market

The commodified interpretation of Corbynism’s economic programme as “socialism from below” predominantly focuses on the private sector, in particular, firms. For example, James Meadway argues for worker ownership of business as a way of changing the locus of decision-making in firms to achieve more desirable outcomes: “The evidence is clear that companies with even relatively limited worker ownership schemes behave differently, and generally focus more towards social and longer-term goals.” Christine Berry⁶ argues that Labour’s approach to democratising the private sector ‘can be summed up in three flagship policies,’ namely, the IOF, the Cooperative Development Agency to double the size of the cooperative sector and Community Wealth Building. In doing so she is emphasising firm-level reform over other policies that would’ve played a crucial role in democratising the private sector but do not sit at the level of the firm, including strengthening trade unions and rolling out sectoral collective bargaining; and an interventionist industrial strategy to deliver a Green Industrial Revolution.

Pursuing radical change through reforms introduced at the level of businesses rather than the state is firmly in the tradition of market socialism. Market socialists seek to socialise ownership of capital while retaining the market mechanism, with the socialisation of capital therefore occurring at the level of the firm rather than on any wider social base in order to be compatible with market exchange. Relatively little emphasis is placed on wider structural changes as the incentive and reward structures of the market are accepted and changes at the level of the firm used to improve social outcomes.

Though a suspicion of or hostility to state intervention is not necessarily inherent to market socialism, they often run together – as they do here - with part of the appeal of market socialism being ‘the added bonus of sidestepping the messy complexities involved with confronting the state.’ This begs the question of what is the theory of change that endows this market socialism with transformative power. This isn’t to question whether firms with a degree of worker ownership behave better – they do. It’s rather to ask how an expansion of worker ownership is to be achieved on a scale that is transformative, given that this would require a significant – and successful – challenge to the power of capital.

The irony here is that recent interventions in this tradition are highly, if implicitly, reliant on top down state intervention. For example, delivering Labour’s commitment to double the size of the cooperative sector – itself extremely modest from the point of view of systemic change – was understood to depend on state support delivered through a Cooperative Development Agency. Similarly, the IOF – which Meadway sees as a key “decentralising element” – was entirely reliant on utilising the power of the state to compel capital to introduce worker ownership.⁷ Indeed, behind the scenes it was this element of compulsion that was most objectionable to business organisations, who lobbied strongly to make the policy optional. This was resisted by the Party on the grounds that, without this element of compulsion, the policy would not achieve its objective of widening ownership. The IOF was a fundamentally and necessarily ‘top down’ policy.

Market socialism’s surprising reliance on the state is reinforced by Meadway’s explicit statement that he doesn’t think trade unions can be relied on to rebalance power in the workplace, saying both that rebuilding trade unions “will be a long struggle” (the implication being that expanding worker ownership can be achieved in a way that is quicker and easier than via trade unions) and that “union membership and recognition alone does not guarantee the sorts of shifts in economic decision-making we want to see.” Trade unions are thereby side-lined, and replaced with state diktat rather than some other form of worker self-organisation or spontaneous grassroots initiatives.

The conflation of commodified ownership forms with decentralised/democratic political forms seems to stem from a reproduction of the market-state dualism found in neoliberal ideology. The characterisation of markets and the state as separable and distinct, and of the relationship between them in terms of a pendulum swinging back and forth, underpins the neoliberal dogma that “state=bad/market=good.” It also tends to reduce state intervention to direct redistribution – i.e. tax and spend - and cover over the diverse ways in which the state shapes markets and accumulation. A dismissive attitude towards the state’s redistributive role is seen, for example, in Meadway’s hostility to the IOF’s dividend cap on the grounds that is “centralising and state centric”⁸ and in the way Berry marginalises the importance of expanding public services, saying “the era of austerity, when the left/right debate was about whether the government should spend money or not” is ‘dangerously outdated’ and that “this is not really where the action is (albeit higher levels of state spending are essential).”

To side-line state spending in this way is overly complacent with regard to austerity as a defensive battle and far too dismissive of decommodification as an offensive battle. While the March 2020 budget’s relative fiscal loosening was welcomed by some as having shown that Labour had won the argument, it left the NHS – the public service by far the most protected from austerity – with barely enough to stand still and other public services at different degrees of desperate. There is zero indication that the government will cover the additional costs of Covid in anything but the very short-term, and some of the mood music points to a doubling down on austerity.

Furthermore, seeing the state mainly as an agent of redistribution overlooks the way in which neoliberal reregulation has left no part of the public sector protected from the expanding, if often insidious, role of private companies. Spending more on public services under these circumstances is like pouring money into a leaky bucket. Privatisation – whether internal, external, hidden, or flagrant – has also been a driver of other systemic changes, including casualisation, competition, fragmentation, and stratified service delivery, all of which severely impede the resilience and quality of public service delivery, as the Covid-19 crisis has starkly demonstrated. Rebuilding high quality, inclusive public services underpinned by a public service ethos will require extensive restructuring and reform. Far from being “not really where the action is” this must be one of, if not the, overriding priorities of a left programme.

In short, the neoliberal obsession with the size of the state distracts from the multiple and crucial ways in which the state has created, constituted and sustained neoliberal social forms. Instead of asking what size the state should be, we should be asking what the state is like – the answer to which is not some intrinsic feature but rather a reflection of the how the state is structured, contested and situated in a particular epoch. As Fine and Saad-Filho put it:

the roles of ‘the state’ and ‘the market’ (unduly undifferentiated) cannot be usefully identified through their simplistic opposition. Instead, the relevant patterns of accumulation, restructuring and social and economic reproduction can be understood only through relatively concrete and historically specific analyses. These must include the interaction, contestation and co-operation among specific institutions within, across and beyond that putative [state-market] divide. Those processes are themselves heavily influenced by, but not reducible to, the underlying economic, political and ideological (class) interests that act upon and through such institutions.

Market socialism from below?

By failing to carry out these kinds of ‘concrete and specific analyses’ in order to develop an understanding of the reconfiguration of state structures, market socialism is left with no plausible account of how the policies that it advocates will achieve transformative change.

A market socialist approach would favour community-owned energy over nationalisation. But to rely on the spontaneous creation and expansion of community ownership from below is implausible given the financialised structures that have been built on private monopolies of utilities and the concomitant weakness of the regulator, as a result of which:

community-owned companies struggle to compete with, and meaningfully ‘disrupt’, the Big Six companies. The troubles of Nottingham Council-owned Robin Hood Energy reveal the pitfalls of establishing individual municipal companies without altering the privatised system within which they operate.

It was because we understood both the ongoing role of the state in enabling profiteering from utilities and the barriers thereby created to establishing alternative forms of provision, that Corbyn’s Labour viewed nationalisation as a pre-condition rather than an alternative to community-owned and run utilities. An adherence to an artificial and ideological state-market dichotomy leaves one unable to address this.

Another revealing example is given by community wealth building. It is no accident that the Preston Model was inspired by community wealth building strategies in the USA, where there is a case to be made that federalist and decentralised political structures give community wealth building genuinely transformative potential regardless of the national political context. In the highly centralised UK, however, the successes of the Preston Model so far have de facto consisted in it being a survival strategy against austerity. For community wealth building to be more than this – for it to interrupt the circulation of capital and democratise the economy in a systematic rather than a piecemeal way, which it certainly has the potential to do – will require a new settlement between central and local government.

The point is stronger than that devolution in the context of austerity just means passing on cuts to councils – though that is important. It is that there is no simplistic opposition between central and local government any more than there is between state and market. Local authorities, like markets, are constituted and dependent on the state. In Britain, at the hands of successive governments over the last forty years, this relationship has played out through recurrent measures to “reduce the discretion of local authorities as much as possible,”⁹ including a three way squeeze on their spending power through controls on central government funding, statutory obligations and limits on authorities own tax-raising powers as well as hollowing out local authorities’ capacities through coercive “incentives” to outsource and privatise. The potential for community wealth building to drive change “from below” is therefore currently impeded thanks to decades of neoliberal reforms imposed by central government. Starting from neoliberal Britain, there is no systematic path to a genuine municipal renaissance that can bypass state power.

A final example concerns those who appeal to the Meidner Plan to argue that the IOF has the potential to be more than a profit sharing scheme by gradually socialising the ownership of capital over time. The original Meidner Plan was proposed in Sweden in the context of “an exceptionally strong social-democratic movement and a global economic order that afforded national governments significant flexibility in setting policy” which included capital controls and considerable trade union coverage and power and still failed to deliver its goal of disinheriting capital in slow motion. By contrast, Labour’s version of the policy did not address the wider configuration of state and other institutions, nor the relationships and balance of power between them, that would be needed for the IOF to be a plausible driver of systemic change. Without this kind of concrete, contextual theorisation of the policy, appeal to the Meidner Plan as evidence of the transformative potential is merely a shibboleth.¹⁰

In summary an understanding of the state primarily in terms of centralised tax and spend redistribution, tends towards an understanding of ‘decentralisation’ in terms of the market. Yet this, obscures the fact that markets are always constituted through state action, and, as such, a convincing theory of radical change will also need a convincing understanding of the state’s role therein.

This is neatly captured by Meadway’s mistaken understanding that, in heeding McDonnell’s call to be ‘in and against the state’ “fundamentally, you would end up doing more of one or the other.” Being in and being against are not in zero sum opposition to each other, they are integrally related. State power cannot be bypassed in achieving transformative economic change; the challenge for socialists is to capture it without being captured by it. In economic terms, this means, for example, making sure that nationalisation is a precursor to decentralisation and democratisation, that national funding enables and supports meaningful devolution, that collective organisations, such as trade unions, are strengthened at the expense of the state.

Beyond the firm

Lacking a consistent theory of its own implementation isn’t the only problem with the market socialist interpretation of Corbynite economic programme. A deeper one is that, even if such a programme were implemented, it would only “reshape the balance of interests around how production and work is organised” at the level of the firm and therefore leave the wider system of commodified production and exchange untouched. At a societal level what goods are produced and how they are distributed continue to be determined by the imperative of profitability and market exchange mediated by income. This presents three major problems for a transformative left programme.

First, there are inherent constraints on how much companies can “focus more towards social and longer-term goals than those without” because individual firms continue to be governed by solvency and vulnerable to the vagaries of the market. The case for employee-ownership and worker-owned coops is often made in terms of the benefits it can bring to company performance. But framing the argument in this way reduces social objectives to a by-product of company performance and obscures the fact that social objectives will be secondary should the two come into tension. This is necessarily the case because the survival of any private company depends on its solvency, regardless of its ownership structure.

Take pay, for example. If worker-owners choose to pay themselves more than can be justified by their company’s performance, their company will become uncompetitive and eventually go out of business. The need to remain profitable and the ultimate threat of unemployment thereby exercises downward constraint on wages in worker-owned companies in the same way it does for other companies. Worker-owned coops may be slightly better equipped to manage that pressure, but it is again a difference of degree rather than kind. To coin a phrase, worker-owners may set their own wages but they do so in circumstances not of their own choosing. The same is true for other potential benefits from worker ownership – the extent to which worker-owned coops are more likely to retain employees in a recession is limited by the risk they face of going out of business.

The second problem with failing to challenge the commodified system of production and exchange is that one ends up neglecting those whose needs are left unmet by that system. Firm level reforms, by their nature, only benefit workers employed in affected companies. Insofar as worker-owned cooperatives bring benefits such as higher pay, greater job security and more agency over working lives, the benefits only extend to those lucky enough to be employed in such a cooperative. The same goes for other forms of profit-sharing, cooperative and shared ownership schemes – none of them do anything for those who work for employers that aren’t affected, are unemployed or unable to work at all. Even for those workers who do benefit, the benefits will be highly stratified, reproducing uneven distributions of profitability and dividends payments across different companies, sectors and regions. The latter two are particularly important given the severe sectoral and regional imbalances created by neoliberalism. Indeed, it was the severity of these kinds of stratification that was the original motivation for the IOF dividends cap.

Of course, doing firm level reform does not preclude doing state level redistribution as well, but to the extent that such redistribution needs to be funded from profits that would otherwise be redistributed to workers at the level of the firm (whether through corporation tax, dividends or income tax) the two rub against each other in practice. For example, Meadway’s hostility to the state using the dividends from the IOF over the £500 cap to fund climate apprenticeships is based on concern that it would impede the ability of the policy to redistribute dividends away from corporate shareholders to company employees.

If firm-based reforms do nothing for those who are most in need, the market socialist reading of Labour’s economic programme offers little of substance to the unemployed, low paid, disabled, carers, long-term ill and others – people’s whose needs should be paramount in any left programme. Such people “ha(ve) to rely on the noncapitalist institutions that exist in capitalist societies: the family or the welfare system … [or] … try and cope with their needs being unsatisfied,” which makes the nature of these institutions fundamental to understanding – and dealing with – manifestations of poverty, discrimination and other inequities. Market socialism’s neglect of non-market institutions in favour of firm-level reforms leads it to ignore these questions and thereby overlook some of neoliberalism’s most acute injustices.

The fundamental cause of these injustices lies in the commodification of labour power. When labour is treated as a commodity, access to the means of subsistence are dependent on a person’s ability to sell one’s labour. Those who can’t are treated as valueless - as a surplus population, entitled to nothing more than survival. Any firm-level approach is ill-equipped to address the needs of this surplus population because it takes commodification as a given.¹¹

It is not just in relation to the surplus portion of the population that commodification distorts value. The crisis created by Covid-19 is highlighting the disjunction between the social value of essential work and how it is valued economically. The commodification of nature means valuing it in monetary terms rather than in terms of what it means to us as a species, and has resulted in overexploitation of natural resources and widespread environmental devastation. Unhealthy and alienating needs are manufactured by companies compelled to relentlessly pursue market advantage. Whole industries have been built around the art of creating needs and selling us their solution, regardless of the waste created or the way it irrationally allocates resources.

If the second problem with failing to challenge the commodified system of production and exchange was that it overlooks those whose needs are left unmet by that system, the third is that it is unable to address the way in which commodification creates and satisfies wants in ways that distort values and alienate us from our real needs.

These questions get to the core of capitalist injustice and raise fundamental questions about what is needed for a good life, or, indeed, what a good life looks like. They are fundamental to any left programme, but they cannot be answered without looking beyond firm-level reforms to confront the system of commodified production and exchange. This is because the creation of artificial need for an endless supply of new products through aggressive advertising and planned obsolescence – irrespective of its damaging consequences for our mental and physical health and for the environment - is the inevitable result of competition between private companies.

In summary, the market socialist brand of socialism from below – which foregrounds the commodified forms of alternative ownership in Corbynism’s economic programme - is neither ‘socialist’ nor ‘from below.’ Its claim to the latter is based on the idea that the market is the antithesis of a centralising state, as a result of which it either relies on the state to be the agent of change in place of a self-organised movement or lacks a theory of change entirely. Its claim to be socialist derives from its support for worker-ownership, which is elaborated only in terms of firm-level reforms and therefore fails to challenge commodified production and exchange and the alienation, inequality, and economic and social volatilities that go with it.

Participatory socialism

The alternative approach to interpreting Labour’s economic programme as socialism from below, which I call participatory socialism, differs from market socialism in two crucial respects, namely, the emphasis it places on decommodified forms of ownership and its approach to the state.

First, it retains Labour’s commitments to decommodified alternative forms of ownership, recognising the structural limitations production for market exchange imposes on attempts to subordinate profit to social objectives in allocating society’s resources. Thus firm-level reform to democratise the private sector is rightly understood as a component of a wider programme, which also includes policies to “restrict the reach of the market economy by expanding our ability to meet our needs outside it” and state-led nationalisation is seen not in opposition to community control but as a precondition to it, without which local control would be piecemeal, fragmented and inequitable if it occurs at all. For example, Berry emphasises that Labour’s policies on public ownership sought “a pluralist ecosystem of democratic ownership, with assets owned by different publics at different scales. This includes public, community, co-operative and commons ownership models, at national, municipal and local community level” and explains that larger scales are needed “where the big players are so entrenched that they cannot feasibly be displaced by bottom-up competition on any reasonable timeframe.”

Second, participatory socialism doesn’t shy away from the necessity of using the state to challenge the power of capital and implement radical policies. But it reconciles this reliance on the state with its commitment to extending economic democracy by centring the democratisation of the state and the movement as well. Hence, the democratisation “agenda is not at odds with reclaiming a strong role for the state … rather this is about transforming the state itself so that this power can be wielded in a more genuinely progressive and democratic way”.¹² This approach to the state is in line with Blackburn’s reminder) that change from below should not be counterposed to top down change but understood as in symbiotic relation to it:

For any ‘Corbynism from below’ to take hold and develop into a permanent feature of Labour Party life, the careful and patient encouragement of a corresponding ‘Corbynism from above’ is a necessary complement to it. But by the same token, a ‘Corbynism from above’ without an active and assertive ‘Corbynism from below’ is likely to degenerate into manipulative manoeuvring, technocracy, stage management and, in all likelihood, eventual indifference, decline and dissipation.

This insight is key. Applying the imperative of Corbynism from below to the economic programme doesn’t mean doing away with elements of the programme in an attempt to bypass the state entirely (which, as we have seen, is impossible). It means making sure that the economic programme is coupled with radical commitments to economic and political democratisation. This is what participatory socialism does and, in doing so, not only offers an interpretation of Corbynism’s economic programme that retains its transformative potential, but also advances that programme in important areas.

Why we need participatory socialism

Whereas market socialism simply wishes the state away and ends up doomed to failure because “the state stands at the center of property relations and capitalist power,” participatory socialism confronts the left’s ambivalent relationship with the state head on. It understands that the state cannot be bypassed in achieving transformative economic change and that the challenge for socialists is to exercise state power without being captured by it – to be in and against the state. And, with its emphasis on democratisation of politics as well as the economy and on democratisation as a means as well as an end, offers vital insights into what is needed to rise to this challenge.

There are two ways in which the state had an essential role to play in delivering Labour’s transformative programme. One concerns the technical aspects of policy. We need the state to challenge the entrenched power of big capital and expand the scope of democratic decision-making in the economy in a way the bottom up competition can’t, for example, by imposing policies such as the IOF and nationalisation. State-level coordination is also essential to coordinate economic activity to address social objectives such as climate change and to achieve the redistribution of resources that is an essential pre-condition of democratic participation for all. As Berry, whose work, despite being cited above to illustrate the market socialism approach, more often contains some of the most thoughtful and developed understanding of the economics of participatory socialism puts it:

We need its ability to coordinate at scale – essential for infrastructure networks like energy and water, and critical for rapid action to decarbonise the economy. We need its ability to secure universal access to basic goods and services on equitable terms, which a patchwork of community solutions cannot do. And we need its ability to manage decentralisation in a way that reduces, rather than exacerbating, regional inequalities.

The other main role for the state stems from the way in which it has been transformed under neoliberalism. Just as neoliberalism has been strengthened through state power so state power is needed to challenge it. Neoliberalism has seen the rise of technocratic governance and the hollowing out of collective and democratic institutions. Thus the state is needed not just to implement radical policies but to dismantle neoliberal practices and institutions in ways that forge solidarity and expand the scope of democracy.

One aspect of this, namely, using state power to create and strengthen collective institutions outside of the state can be found in the programme in the form of legislative and economic reforms that help to strengthen trade unions, rehabilitate local government and other devolved administrations, remove constraints on social movements and establish decentralised public ownership of utilities. However, another aspect, namely, constitutional reform to change the ideological character of the state and redistribute power within it, was neglected in both the 2017 and 2019 manifestos (which in my view explains why it became the meatiest policy area discussed in the leadership election).

But even if we had given more attention to constitutional reform, being ‘in and against the state’ requires more. The insight provided by participatory socialism is that state power cannot be wielded against neoliberalism simply by taking control of the machine. However well-developed and well-intentioned its policy programme, a radical government will face major political barriers to implementing it, including but not limited to: the co-option of individuals put in positions of power; an obstructionist civil service; capital flight or an investment strike; internal opposition within a Labour Party (as the leaked report starkly demonstrated) which operates as an extension of the state.

These political barriers to implementing its programme — and the need for a strategy to overcome them - were given far less attention by Labour under Corbyn and McDonnell than the details of the programme itself. A serious attempt to start developing such a strategy was made in People Get Ready, co-authored by Berry and Joe Guinan, which also provides a compelling account of the challenges a Corbyn-led government would face. But though warmly received by senior politicians and officials within the Party, its lessons were not taken seriously enough. A Preparing for Government programme was established after the 2017 general election, and was intended to prepare the shadow cabinet to navigate parliament and the civil service in order to implement large and, by recent UK standards, complex policy programme. In practice this programme barely got off the ground and, to the extent that it did, its focus was almost entirely procedural and bureaucratic rather than political or strategic.

What was needed instead, Berry and Guinan argue, was a strategy focused on democratising and strengthening the movement as an independent power base, both inside and outside the Party. A strong, independent grassroots movement would “help resist the inevitable backlash from vested interests”¹³ while holding the leadership “to its promises and push[ing] the boundaries of the possible.”¹⁴ It is likely had Labour won in 2019, the lack of such a strategy would have been a major impediment to its success. But the consequences extended beyond weakening a hypothetical future left government; that “Corbynites never squarely confronted the fact that you cannot democratise the economy without democratising politics” was a major factor in their failure to get into government in the first place.

Tactically speaking, a large and empowered movement was the only weapon Corbynism had against a highly hostile establishment that extended to the traditionally centre-left Guardian and a majority of Labour Members of Parliament. A strong, popular grassroots mobilisation was needed to cut through negative national representations of Corbynism and build on the ground support by demonstrat[ing] practical solidarity with working, oppressed and marginalised people. The failure to mobilise Corbyn’s broad base of support within the Party beyond door knocking around election times “to do the vital work of reaching out and building broad social bases of support for a new politics”¹⁵ was fatal to the success of the project and risks continuing to be so if the left continues to wage wars of position at the expense of reaching out to wider society.

But this tactical necessity had deeper roots in the way that neoliberalism stifles opposition:

the institutional shifts, the changes in the structures of political representation, and the social and economic transformations wrought by neoliberalism systematically reduce the scope for the expression of collective interests, the emergence of transformative programmes, and even the aspiration to change society beyond neoliberalism.

Corbyn’s Labour bucked the trend by putting forward a transformative programme. But simply presenting more popular policies, without at the same time forging and strengthening collective political identities founded on hope for something better, was never going to be enough. Bluntly put, the picture of radical democratic participation at the heart of the economic programme doesn’t correspond to the lived experience of activists let alone the electorate. On the contrary, for forty years we have been encouraged to remake ourselves in the image of the ideal of the self-reliant, self-interested, competitive individual, to make life decisions on the basis of calculations of rates of return — whether by seeing our homes as not simply somewhere to live but as a potential source of speculative returns, or treating education not as a way of broadening our knowledge, skills and understanding but as a way of investing in our own human capital.

Perhaps the most important lesson from the discussion of neoliberalism above is that neoliberalism isn’t simply a rival policy programme to be weighed up by voters in an election campaign. It is a system of social and economic reproduction whose influence extends, not just to how we organise economic matters but to our individual and collective identities, and must be confronted as such. If we are to challenge neoliberalism it is not enough to be equipped with the right policies. For those policies to be both credible as aspirations and viable as alternatives, our movement needs to reconstitute people as political agents by building collective identity and democratic sensibility through everyday experiences of empowerment and solidarity. It needs to give people real world experiences of non-capitalist and decommodified forms so that instead of seeming dubious or fantastical, offers of “free stuff” are seen and understood as an alternative way of doing things.

Hence radical community organising was not just tactically important in order to demonstrate practical solidarity with people on the receiving end of cuts and hardship, and hopefully to begin winning back their trust after decades of neglect. It also served a longer-term purpose … that of building up new capacities and self-belief, both of which will be indispensable in creating a movement which is genuinely capable of radically democratising society and the state. Putting democracy at the heart of our economic programme without putting it at the heart of our organisational strategy was always doomed to fail.

Participatory socialism therefore has the potential to fill important gaps in the Corbynite programme by highlighting the importance of political democratisation – of the state and of the movement – both to getting into to government and to overcoming the barriers they would face if they did.

Another way in which participatory socialism helps to identify and fill a gap in the programme is by reminding us that public services should be central to the democratisation agenda. I’m the first to put my hands up and admit that this is an area we seldom got beyond signalling intent. For example, while Labour committed to scrap the academy and free school system and replace it with a system that gave parents, teachers and communities a stronger role in the running of schools and the design of the curriculum and assessment, a detailed alternative was never articulated. Ditto internal privatisation of the NHS – we committed to reversing the Lansley reforms but not to going further. In general, there was an asymmetry between our commitment to new forms of democratic public ownership in newly nationalised utilities such as water and energy and relative lack of ambition in existing areas of public provision.

But the role of democracy in public services goes beyond how particular services are delivered to more fundamental questions about how needs can be identified and met without relying on market imperatives. We saw above that commodified production and exchange creates artificial, alienating needs that have perverse effects on our mental and physical health, our environment and our quality of life and that decommodification promises to end the distortion of values by the imperatives of capitalist competition and create a society in which everyone has the chance to lead a healthy and fulfilling life by having their real needs met. This, of course, begs the question of how real needs are to be determined. Labour’s report on Universal Basic Services provided the beginnings of an answer, saying that real needs should be decided democratically:

just as the question of what is ‘basic’ to citizenship or essential to the good life is a social question, so what goods and services are most suited to universal public provision is something that must be decided democratically

However, the report offers no more detail on how society as a whole can decide what is essential to a good life or what institutions would be needed to facilitate this kind of collective decision-making. In practice, our radical aspiration to the democratic determination of real needs was reduced to electoral offers to expand universal, free at the point of use provision of certain goods and services at elections (including broadband, personal care, dental check-ups, prescriptions) – derided as ‘too much free stuff’ in some quarters.

Participatory democracy, by contrast, has the potential to enable experimentation, innovation and emotional involvement. This is essential because:

Defining needs is not only a matter of rational deliberation. It also has to do with experimenting — with discovering, through practice, fulfilling individual and collective needs. Needs have a strong emotional component — one often feels the need rather than infers it.

Only by democratising all parts of the state and society is there space for people’s individual and collective needs to emerge and grow over time. Of course, there is no easy path from this understanding to a workable system for defining needs democratically and much work remains to be done to develop such a system. But “with its emphasis on mobilisation “from below,” direct democracy is the only political regime that factors in this experimental dimension” and is hence the necessary starting point for this work.