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"Owning the Future" is out today from
It traces how extractive ownership models connect & drive our age of crisis & how reimagining property relations can secure abundance.
versobooks.com/books/3981-own
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The book explores the contradictions & inequalities capitalist property relations set in motion; the patterns of exploitation & domination they engender; & what an alternative agenda & politics would look like – one that dethrones the rule of property & unlocks shared abundance.
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From the corporation to climate emergency, from the provision of life’s necessities to technological development, we explore how ownership shapes a world marked by stagnation, inequality, & ecological crisis - & why systemic change requires systemic transformations of ownership.
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The origins of our overlapping crises & their resolution are inseparable from ownership: corporate power & inequality; the energy crisis & fossil capital; its centrality in the “asset economy”; inflation as distributional struggle with a wealthy owning class currently winning.
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We trace the primacy of property – how, in response to systemic slowdown & rising egalitarian demands, asset owners re-asserted their interests – & its effects: a world of wage stagnation, asset-price inflation; of exchange value over use; of rentier power at labour’s expense.
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Macro policy from the 70s onwards forged this new settlement; law disempowered labour & insulated property from challenge; privatisation, regressive fiscal change, & re-regulation strengthened the rentier.
Politics made property primary. But what it created, it can remake.
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Against the primacy of property, there is an alternative:
🌱Democratise production
🌱 Decommodify provision
🌱 Defend the commons
This is not just about redistributing the present, but the reimagination of value, of how we produce, evaluate & share in socially created wealth.
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We explore the corporation's embryonic potential – “the abolition of the capitalist mode of production within the capitalist mode of production itself” – to transform from an engine of extraction & private power to an institution of democratic production & collective enterprise.
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From the corporation’s roots in colonial dispossession to the rise of asset manager capitalism, the corporate form is central to the production and expropriation of value.
But its political ordering – generated by law, maintained by public power – means we can reimagine it.
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Dethrone the vestigial claims of shareholders, "abolish the stock market", & remake the company as an entity of the commons: in place of oligarchy & extraction, democratic production, social coordination, embedded finance, & collective entrepreneurialism liberated from capital.
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We argue the climate emergency is rooted in nature’s enclosure for profit: how the living world has been “assetised” & thrown into the flywheel of accumulation; how - with profitability their Alpha & Omega - the energy giants are fatally ill-equipped to deliver a just transition.
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From Big Oil's soaring profits to flat-lining new global investment in renewables, a transition where investment is guided by profitability - & where returns on fossil fuels far exceed renewables - has created a world of disorder, inequality, fragility &, now, surging inflation.
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The alternative: against enclosure, common the Earth.
In place of fossil capital’s rule, an energy democracy: investment guided by social & environmental need, not the profit imperative; coordination via market competition replaced by conscious planning & democratic control.
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We examine how life’s essentials – from care to housing – have been turned into sites of profit-making.
From private equity's debt-laden grip on social care to
housing's centrality in the 'asset economy', privatisation & financialisation drive today’s inequalities & politics.
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In the process, ownership has become a central political & economic dividing line. Security increasingly depends on owning wealth; the divide between those who work & those that own ratchets higher, worsened by the unequal impacts of Covid-19 & now severe inflationary shocks.
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The alternative: public luxury as the foundation of abundance.
Ensure everyone has a decent home, regardless of whether they own housing wealth; roll back privatisation to guarantee access to what we all need to live well; & reorganise social reproduction as a collective effort.
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Democratic ownership & provision of life's essentials wouldn't be perfect. But it would remove the flaws endemic to the status quo: financial engineering; higher costs of capital; vast wealth extraction at public expense; lack of democratic control; gendered, racialised outcomes.
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Finally, technological development bears the decisive imprint of dominant ownership structures: in how it is developed & whose interests it serves. Tech is ambiguous, containing possibilities of liberation & heightened oppression depending on its organisation. Nothing is fixed.
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Today, in an age of unequal power, too many technologies are developed to sweat labour & enrich capital; too few are developed to liberate our time & capabilities as investment decisions are made in the interests of a wealthy ownership class, against a backdrop of stagnation.
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We can liberate technology. From co-op platforms & pro-labour automation strategies, to commoning calculation & IP, technologies of freedom & generosity are possible.
But securing them is primarily a question of social organisation & political struggle, not technical capacity.
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The book’s argument is simple. We have the capacity to guarantee economic security & freedom for all, without exploiting people & places.
But that will require challenging the primacy of property:
democratising production, decommodifying provision, defending the commons.
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A world of care, solidarity, & reparation, of play & invention, of genuine liberty not secured at the expense of others, will need new tools: democratic ownership & coordination, investment & planning based on need, the nurturing of the commons, & expansive decommodification.
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And how do we win a world where people & planet come before property, where we overcome the injuries set in train by dominant ownership relations & root out systemic exploitation & expropriation?
For that, the conclusion awaits!
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If you like you'll find echoes, as well as inspiration from brilliant thinkers - & many more.
& finally, thanks to our Verso team - & AB again for the company & inspiration 🐋
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