Public ownership and alternative political imaginations

One of the currently most pressing tasks for the left is to come up with alternatives to neoliberalism that can inspire and shape new political constituencies and support. This roundtable discussion draws together four contributions that seek to do this in relation to questions of public ownership, and to explore some of the alternative institutional forms that have been developed in the recent past. The contributors argue for a break with the hierarchical and managerial approaches that blighted previous forms of state ownership, and look at some of the contemporary experiments with new forms. Sometimes such new forms have emerged at least in part because of political necessity, in a context where existing state forms are not delivering basic necessities such as health care - as in austerity-hit Greece. In other cases, movements for re-municipalisation - as in key sectors in Berlin - have shown that neoliberalism is not an irreversible process. Some of the emergent new forms of ownership also suggest that processes of experimentation can be enriched if they learn from the tensions of past left projects.