Reviews

Owning the Future: Power and Property in an Age of Crisis by Adrienne Buller, Mathew Lawrence

n_ck's review

hopeful informative fast-paced

3.5

This is a pretty accessible, quick introduction to a left wing policy programme emerging from the pandemic. The basic argument is living in an age of crisis (climate, COVID, etc.) has proven the need for collective and democratic ownership models (co-ops, state-owned enterprises etc.) that will wrestle control of the economy away from capital.

If you follow left policy debates — especially those from people who were associated with the Corbyn-Sanders campaigns — very little of this is going to be revelatory reading. You'll recognize some of the greatest hits and shared indebtedness to both Marx and Keynes in the policy proscriptions, but you may also find some clarifying justifications and it may be helpful to just see all of these arguments collected in a single place and addressed to a non-nerd audience. 

I can kind of see this book being given to people who broadly identify as progressive, but don't specifically understand politics as a set of class relations between people who own stuff and people who need to do work on that stuff so they don't die. The book will explain why property is very important for understanding why everything seems like it's in crisis, but nobody seems to be able to fix anything. And, hey, that's not the worst thing. 

jaywithwhiskey's review

2.0

I learned some things but honestly the language in this book is so obnoxious. There were some sentences that made me feel so stupid, I would re-read them over again and say to myself "I do understand what their saying but why did they write it like that?!" 
It felt like someone took a thesaurus and changed a few words throughout to make themselves sound smarter. Maybe it really is above my head or above my understanding but the introduction seemed so intriguing and accessible but sadly the entire rest of the book was not in my opinion. I'm really sad to say I don't think I took much away from this book. 

isaisaisa's review

4.0

Owning the Future outlines why and how we need to democratise our economy and society, starting with our infrastructures of care, broadband access, and housing and land ownership. The common thread and political struggle inherent to all these areas is ownership, and the need to free ourselves from rentier capitalism.

The first three chapters were tough (at least for a non-expert/ academic reader such as myself) and maybe a bit repetitive… I’m glad I persevered though, because they act as a foundation for the rest of the book, analysing the historical and political reasons behind our entanglement in systems that are deeply exploitative and unjust, with a focus on the history of the corporation and its relationship with the financial system.

The middle section (Chapters 4, 5 & 6) brings the book’s thesis to life, first exploring current forms of exploitation and control, then imagining how they could be replaced with more just alternatives. Examples range from advocating for providing public infrastructure through democratic planning and ownership rather than market based mechanisms, to establishing a shared, socially beneficial technological commons.

The final chapter succinctly summarises the book’s thesis, uses the thread of ownership to weave together seemingly separate struggles for justice and identifies how some of the necessary economic and political changes might come about in practice (e.g. revolution vs reform; role of the state…).

Overall worth reading! It left me feeling hopeful and curious to deepen my understanding of what it means for economic and social systems to be truly democratic and participatory.

If you are struggling for time, read the final chapter only and be inspired :)

rebecavleal's review against another edition

• “by dispossessing individuals from access to the resources they need to live outside of the market, the world’s majority must sell their labour power for a wage to another, much smaller, class to survive”
• “Despite an explosion of pharmaceutical patents, tuberculosis (a curable disease that overwhelmingly impacts the global poor) remains the world’s deadliest infectious disease. Meanwhile the comparative unprofitability of developing new antibiotics means life-saving medicine goes undeveloped, even as rates of resistance surge, which could make routine surgeries and chemotherapy untenable.”
• “Ownership is often discussed as entailing some kind of absolute or ‘natural’ right for exclusive use and control of an asset or resource; however, the reality is more complicated. Modern property rights emerged in pre-democratic societies and were intimately linked to histories of colonial violence and empire-building.”
• “Taxation or other state intervention to challenge or redistribute market-derived wealth is seen as an indefensible intrusion on the natural prerogatives of private property. If property is first and foremost a social product, nurtured through a complex web of relationships and institutions, these claims make little sense. Existing distributions of wealth and income are only made possible by a system of property rights, entitlements, and markets that are themselves made possible by socially licensed government action to both create and enforce them.”
• “To think of capitalism as a realm of freedom is to overlook half of its nature. Property ownership, by definition, endows new freedoms on the owner, but it no less necessarily withdraws liberty from those who do not own.”
• “How a society uses its surplus capacities is absolutely central, raising fundamental questions about how people want to live - where they choose to invest their collective energies, how they propose to balance ‘productive work’ vis-à-vis family life, leisure and other activities - as well as how they aspire to relate to non-human nature and what they aim to leave to future generations. The privatization of this towards capital accumulation for asset owners, not the meeting of social needs - is an extraordinary ceding of control over the future from the many to the few.”
• Expropriation como o termo que define I roubo do valor criado, tempo usado, estabilidade emocional, “culpa” e impacto da crise climática etc por parte da classe capitaslita ao resto do mundo, mas em particular grupos desavantajados.
• O capitalismo permite-se a si mesmo definir valor diferencial a vidas humanas e não humanas, comunidades, ecossistemas, e formas de trabalho.
• Neoliberal era in the 80s: “The ‘economy’ was to be shielded from democratic intervention. Over time, a range of neoliberal actors, from jurists and politicians to corporate interests and international organizations, have encased property relations with legal protections, safeguarding them against the threat of a more democratically accountable ownership regime.”
• „In this new world, the explosive growth of finance was not (and is not) a bubble bound to burst. Rather, it is a growth whose sustainability is dependent on political intervention and access to credit rather than underlying attributes of the ‚real economy‘. This access is predicated on ownership - for households, access to loans is supported by ownership of assets for collateral, such as a car or savings account; for corporations, the cost of borrowing is significantly influenced by the health of their balance sheet - in other words, their ownership of assets. Consider that we have had two economic heart attacks in the span of a decade (2008 and covid). In both cases, the centrality of asset owners and their interests (that is, high and rising asset prices) meant that the central banks stood ready with the defibrillator, ensuring those interests were secured rather than letting the bubble burst.“
• „Financialisation and rentierisation have created a mesh of asset ownership through the global economy that is now far more complex than simply ‚the 1% versus the rest’, even as it has led to an explosion in wealth at the very top. Most obviously it had been translated into the widespread, politically facilitated increase in home ownership, which increasingly defined shifting class boundaries and political leanings. Moreover, the extension of private pension coverage and other forms of saving means many working people now have stronger ties to the relentless rise of public company share prices and financial markets than in the past, even if the feeling of entanglement is often much stronger than its actual effects on the majority‘s financial wellbeing.“ (2022 example of pensioners being misled by oil companies to be against a tax on the company‘s profits even when there was actually little ties between their potential profit loss and these people‘s pension decreases)
• „Governments and central bank interventions repeat an old pattern, whereby losses were socialized while gains were privatized on an unprecedented scale.“
• „The growth of modern corporation accelerated the separation of ownership and control. Before the capitalist had once been unified in a single figure - the owner-manager(…). The question is, if managers coordinated production and disciplined labour power, what role did the ownership play? Superfluous from production, why did share ownership grant income and control rights? (…) There were now two forms of property: one active, the tangible assets owned by the corporation and controlled by the managers; the other passive, revenue rights owned by shareholders that were ‘liquid, impersonal, and involving no responsibility’. (…) This was the post-capitalist potential within a corporation turned upside down: with the expropriator expropriated, the redundant claim of the shareholder could be replaced by corporate forms that organized production under truly democratic direction and shared the social product among the true sources of wealth: labour and nature.”
• “Speculation can be much more lucrative in the short-term… many investors prefer the capital gains made from speculation, to the detriment of investment in productive, generative enterprise or, indeed, the not-for-profit undertakings that deliver so much value to society. (…) Beginning in the late 1960s, legislative, judicial, and managerial action on both sides of the Atlantic facilitated the rise of hostile takeovers, corporate raiding, aggressive company restructuring, the revision of antitrust rules, the concentration of share ownership, and the growth of shareholder ‚activism‘ - that is, shareholders‘ assertions of the primacy of their interests under threat of disinvestment. (…) The financialisation of the corporation was not simply externally imposed on management by activist participants in this shift, recognising the utility of financial performance benchmarks for their interests, and happy to appropriate a share of the corporations‘  wealth for themselves.“
• „Passive investors use indices to construct portfolios that simply track the performance of a given market. (…) Because the composition of the portfolio is largely fixed by the index, the thread of a shareholder „exiting“ a large company to pressure it for changes in behavior all but disappears. The rise of this „asset manager capitalist“ system of ownership thus undermined the fundamental assumptions used by its advocates to justify the shareholder value doctrine - yet we continue to live by it, with highly destructive results.“
• Asset Management monopolies are the devil: „These (asset) managers together control increasingly make-or-break quantities of voting power in the decisions at the world’s largest companies - many wealthier than national economies - with world-shaping impacts. (Comparable to 3 people (the Big 3 asset management 
• companies existent atm) amongst thousands who o have a fifth of the voting power in a given country.) (…) Asset management firms hold large sums pf Global South governments‘ debts, borrowed on steep terms.” These debts risk decimating 77 of the poorest governments’ abilities to address poverty reduction or climate adaptation, amongst other challenges. And when Global North governments suspend the debts of these countries to them (for example during the pandemic) that ends up as a payout to the big Asset Management companies for the debts the latter did not lift and still have from these countries.
• “We do not, then, live in the world envisioned by the advocates of shareholder primacy, nor in the socialized corporation images by Marx or Keynes. (…) Corporations (are) increasingly reduced to vehicles for extracting income for passive rentier investors.”
• “Many of us intuitively recognize that, although we may live in formally democratic countries, “democracy” is at best partial if limited to occasional votes at the ballot box. Power in the economy and consequently our societies remains disproportionately vested in the hands of shareholders and corporate executives.”
• “The corporation is not in any meaningful sense a “private” institution; to the contrary, it’s a thoroughly public space” and needs to be reimagined. A ideia da corporação como algo útil e que produz PARA a sociedade e conforme as necessidades da sociedade.
• “The primacy of property is the product of legal regimes developed to serve asset holders and structure bargaining power in their favour. (…) the critical resources of coordination in the modern economy - money and capital - are not scarce. But the law encodes their scarcity in ways that generate extraordinary inequalities. (…) Instead, the law could be used to unpick forms of false scarcity and broaden access to resources and services.”
• “A more just and ecological economy therefore begins with (…) the recognition that markets must be subordinate to the needs of society, not the reverse.”
• “The stock market is also how capital ‘exits’ production in liquid monetary form, rewarding the ownership class.”
• Housing: “At once a driver of inequality and a critical source of wealth and reassurance for millions, home ownership in Anglo-American societies is both complicated and politically disorienting. For many, there now exists an in-built preference towards rising real estate values not only with respect to their own home, but also through rapidly rising exposure via pensions to institutional landlords and real estate investment trusts. (…) Margaret Thatcher’s policy of ‘Right to But’ helped consolidate a new political coalition for the right, centered on defending the interests of asset owners, regardless of the widely unequal patterns of ownership within this coalition. This was not some haphazard sale of public housing wealth; it was a targeted and successful effort to realign interests of a new cohort of homeowners with wealthy asset owners instead of ordinary wage-earners, and with market-dominated over public provision.”
• Care: “Women in the Global South who migrate to become care workers are often forced to leave their own children or elderly parents behind, to be looked after by relatives or social networks, thus driving the formation of a ‘global care chain’. Too often, our policy response has been to approach adult social care as a ‘low productivity’ sector in which productivity must be raised if wages and outcomes are to improve. However, this approach (…) neglects the distinctively human dimension of care. (…) Isaac Stanley argued, the significance of care as a collective service that secures well-being and dignity for care recipients and care workers, rather than simply a source of income and a series of ‘bio-maintenance’ tasks.”
• Care: “our economies rely upon ‘the off-loading of the cost of care onto the shoulders of underpaid and unpaid realms of society’. Above all, we must recognize that care is not a private concern or responsibility, whether in the household or via for-profit providers, in either cases shouldered disproportionately by women, nor something to be managed according to the financial interests of absent corporate owners.”
• Internet: “If, as the UN argues, we have a human right to communicate, today that means a human right to the internet. (…) In the USA, 21.3 million people did not have access to the minimum speed broadband connection during the pandemic. And globally, of course, connection was very often far worse. A central reason for this slow and unequal deployment is the ownership structure of the entities tasked with delivering the digital infrastructures of the twenty-first century: the for-profit corporation. (…) Relying on profit-making actors to deliver critical infrastructure has consequently left us with a heightened digital divide and reinforced regional inequalities, as these networks are characterized by high fixed costs and economies of scale that make its deployment unprofitable in rural or poorer areas. (…) A 21st century digital infrastructure can provide the conditions for a more democratic, sustainable, and prosperous society if it’s democratically owned and decommodified. (…) In 2018, an independent analysis commissioned by the UK government found that the fastest, cheapest way to deliver a 100%  full fiber network was through monopoly provision, rather than market competition. Indeed, the analysis suggested private providers would likely never achieve 100% coverage, as doing so was not sufficiently profitable without public subsidy.”
• “Private, for-profit ownership of vital utilities is typically worse for workers, communities, and users, with asset sweating and the prioritization of shareholders over investment. Across the world, this approach has been associated with a drive to reduce labour costs, hostility to unions, reductions in pension security, efforts to externalize social and environmental costs as much as possible, and the use of offshore tax havens and other tax avoidance mechanisms. (…) In his comprehensive analysis of the overall welfare impact of widespread privatization under the Tatcher-Major governments, economist Massimo Florio found the shift to private ownership had little effect on long-term trends in prices and productivity; it did, however, contribute to regressive distribution. (…) Comprehensive analysis of the scope and scale of public ownership in the USA has also challenged misconceptions about its alleged inefficiency and underperformance.”
• “Treatment of our collective activity to transform the world as if it  slinger exclusively to whoever holds the relevant property rights, is a fundamental obstacle to redirecting that activity in a rational way.” - J.W. Mason
• “Reanimating public ownership (…) can actively involve users, workers, and other stakeholders in governance structures, with enhanced public participation, accountability, and transparency.”
• Intellectual property: „It’s not merely the labour of cloistered geniuses working away on new developments, but the accumulation of knowledge and effort that has been passed down over generations. This knowledge is a common and social inheritance, yet knowledge and it’s products are increasingly enclosed behind private intelectual property regimes: a unique set of rights and protections, that applies to the creations of human intellect. (…) The expansive, exclusionary forces of modern intellectual property regimes impose conditions of false scarcity where cheap and abundant forms of production and exchange could emerge, often with devastating results. (…) The public sector plays a central role in many technological breakthroughs - innovation that is then habitually privatized and monetized by corporate actors.”
• Big Pharma: “The sector routinely spent more on advertising than research and development. (…) If funding a model to develop new medical technologies requires higher prices that reduce patients‘ access to existing treatments, we have to question to what extent it is worth pursuing or even constitutes „innovation“ at all. (…) A fundamental dynamic constitutive of contemporary capitalism: the enclosure of public knowledge through property claims for extraction of private profit.”
• “What Facebook does to journalism, Spotify to musicians, and Uber Eats for independent restaurants. The basic means of access to a market of a pu luv is privatized, and becomes an opportunity for rent extraction. This represents accumulation by dispossession, only it is the infrastructure of civil society that is being seized, and it is rapidly capitalized start-ups doing the dispossessing without the direct intervention of the state.”
• Big Data: “The problem is that all this knowledge is about us, but it is not for us. Rather than helping us to create planning and automating systems that can abolish unnecessary tool, this knowledge is used to fine-tune the manipulation of our behaviors, psychologies, and desires to create predictable human subjects - all to better generate income for the dominant platforms.”
• “As workers accepted wage stagnation and insecurity as the costs of employment, the gap between the average growth rate of real wages and of productivity levels widened, contributing to the 9% point shift from labor to capital incomes in the G20 countries in the past 50 years.”
• Robots/technology: “The pace and direction of technical change is shaped by institutional arrangements that it is embedded in: who controls the allocation and rate of investment, and towards what goals, and the dynamism and priorities of the wider economy. (…) We will not be “saved” by technology. (…) From militarized equipment that has been used to police the Black Lives Matter protests to biased algorithmic management, existing technologies are bound up in the control, coercion, capture, and exile of entire categories of people.”
• “Absent these institutional arrangements, uneven processes of automation in a world of low growth risk feeling a paradox of plenty: the advance of technical systems will expand social wealth and collective capability, but this will be narrowly and privately appropriated through inequalities in ownership. If, though, we democratize ownership and control, then the advance of our collective capability can secure the conditions of material security and freedom for all. In the process, our expanding capacity can help us progressively reclaim our most precious resource of all from the command of capital: our finite time.”
• “By definition, these solutions require carving off large parcels of land in order to ‘balance out’ emissions made elsewhere - in Shell’s case, in its production of millions of barrels of oil per day. (…) This often means expropriation of land from local communities, farmers, and ecosystems - largely in the Global South - to sustain the demand for emissions from corporations in the Global North.”
• “In 2015 Oxfam published that the wealthiest 10% of the global population (are) responsible for half of all lifestyle emissions. (…) The wealthiest 10% of the world’s population earns the equivalent of just 27000 £ per year (35000€). If you live in the UK, this would place you below the median income of nearly 30000£ - hardly a lavish income (…). It implies an honest reckoning with the hard truths of the global economy: maintaining the daily life of a middle-class worker in the USA, while hardly extravagant, is nonetheless predicated on the exploitation of cheap laborers (…) as well as the degradation of natural resources and sinks in an often invisible “elsewhere”.”
• Offsetting: “As the climate scientist Kevin Anderson has argued ‘offsetting is worse than doing nothing’, because it creates the veneer of climate action where none has been taken and, as a consequence, potentially encourages even more harmful activity. The offsetting industry has been plagued with issues surrounding additionality (in other words, would this have happened anyway?), permanence (planting a forest will accomplish little if it is subsequently razed), and double counting.”
• “The argument for common ownership is not to eliminate governance, but to build it, democratically, such that critical resources can be carefully managed and shared sustainably by all.”
• “Individual freedom (…) should be understood as only possible through collective liberation. This is a much deeper freedom then the form that we enjoy today, in that enjoying it does not, by definition, require the domination of others.”

aurora_is_reading's review

challenging hopeful informative slow-paced

3.0

ge0rgiamae's review

challenging informative reflective medium-paced

3.0