Compass are posing the question ‘How would a Good Society look and feel? And how do we move towards it?’ Here are a few thoughts on this seen through the lens of the need for a radical updating of economics.

The Good society?

Was it Aristotle who first talked of the ‘good society’? He certainly talked about the ‘good life’ and ‘the life well lived’. It was his view that no citizen should expect the right to a flourishing life unless they were an active participant in the flourishing of their community and state.

But does our current form of economics and politics encourage or block that active participation? Personally I think it does more to block than encourage. We live in a passive world where the citizen is seen as a consumer, a consumer of (often pointless) ‘stuff’ and of focus-group driven politics. Our role is, at best, to keep the economic money-go-round on its wheels, rather than to have any more active role in the evolution of society.

Economics for a ‘bad’, broken society

This form of neo-liberal ‘privatised Keynesianism’ has led to an insatiability-doctrine in which, as Tim Jackson puts it, “we spend money we don’t have, to buy things we don’t need, to impress people we don’t even care about”.

In short we are broke, unvested, passive consumers of rubbish ‘stuff’ and rubbish politics (and politicians). Our wellbeing flatlined in the 70’s (around the time The Good Life went off air) and whats more, in the process of this mindless, insatiable growth we’re trashing our one and only planet. 

And what are our politicians doing or saying about it. Nothing. Sweet fa. Yes they make the odd speech about the ‘perils of climate change’. But then they blithely carry on business as normal.

The best the left or right can manage is exhortations to go out and spend more borrowed money to shock the apparent corpse of the economy into a semblance of life.

And what happened to the dreams of the Golden Era ‘good life’ of the social-democracy dream? Its been washed away by the neoliberal storm which swept the world in the 80’s, and which right-wingers in left-wing clothes like Clinton and Blair (and their successors) welcomed (and continue to welcome) with open arms.

Indeed, some would say that social-democracy itself was a pyrrhic victory, an unsustainable compromise which left the keys firmly in the hands of capital and out of the hands of labor.

As I’ve argued elsewhere, I think Michael Jacobs is wrong to have suggested recently in the New Statesman “green social democracy can save capitalism”. I think that’s plain wrong. We’ll need to think far more radically if we are to come up with an economics fit for the challenges of our times.

Dreaming of a Good Society’s economics

So what’s the alternative? I believe it’s a new form of highly socialised participative democracy and economics where we all have a vested active involvement and control in everything from the means and outcomes of production through to local budgeting. A Res Communes economics of the commons and collaborative, cooperative values.

There are already great alternative economic visions and living examples of elements of this sort of economics and politics all around us. Already there are three times as many member owners of co-operatives as individual shareholders worldwide, with 328 million people who own shares, compared to 1 billion who are member owners of co-operative enterprises.

So, as I wrote in the Guardian recently, this new economics will have radical implications for the way we do business and the kinds of enterprises we need to encourage. It will need to channel the best creativity, enterprise and dynamism of markets with the unlimited human potential which collaboration and cooperation can unleash.

The principles which would guide such an economics would be of democracy, participation, equity, fairness, justice, wellbeing-focus and environmental sustainability/restorative. And this economics will need to focus on the task of providing good jobs for all without the requirement for infinite and impossible growth.

We need to finally give up on the myth that perpetual growth on a finite planet is anything but madness. If not for our sakes then for our children’s sakes and for those less fortunate than ourselves.

And we must accept that, despite the baffling inability of our current politicians to even begin to grasp these issues, the changes required will have huge implications for politics.

Left/right or forwards?

Perhaps the time has come to move on from the tired, left-right dialectic of state-versus-market, capitalism versus communism. Nether state nor private ought to have the upper-hand. In a truly participative economic democracy it should be the people and the notion of the commons which calls the shots.

As this is fundamentally a change-manifesto, which recognises the current system is badly faulty, its not necessarily going to be an easy agenda for conservatives. But for the left, for whom this ought to have been home-turf, these changes represent an exciting opportunity for renaissance.

Despite Blair’s dragging of the Labour Party across to the right of centre, Labour could once again find its roots as the party of the people. Its worth remembering that Clause IV, despite its characterisation as wholly and dogmatically about nationalisation and state control, was in its original 1918 vision in fact about common ownership. The text ran:

“To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.”

Only after 1944 did Clause IV firmly become a policy of nationalisation. If the Labour Party had stuck to its earlier vision and explored opportunities beyond both state and private, we would not have had to put up with the traumas of Blairism.

So if the Labour Party in the UK stands, and deserves, any chance of finding a solid footing and rising to the challenges of our time, then a vision of Res Communes ought to be central to its reinvention.

There’s a C17^th poem which starts:

“The law locks up the man or woman, who steals the goose from off the common, but leaves the greater villain loose, who steals the common from off the goose”.

Perhaps, if our politicians are asleep at the wheel, its time we citizens stole back the commons?