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What might be the focus of Starmer's economic agenda?
Given his legal background, one potential avenue could be looking to the US - to the 'law and political economy' movement and work of people like @KatharinaPistor @JedediahSPurdy @alybatt et al
Why so?
Given his legal background, one potential avenue could be looking to the US - to the 'law and political economy' movement and work of people like @KatharinaPistor @JedediahSPurdy @alybatt et al
Why so?
A key LPE claim: politics & the economy are inseparable, law is the mediating institution that ties them together, & breaking down insulation of the economic from the political will require alternative legal infrastructures that inject democratic relations into everyday life.
If law is a social coding system that conditions social life, defining the terms of co-operation & economic co-ordination, how wealth is produced & distributed, how inequalities are (re)produced, it can be reclaimed & re-coded toward an economy democratic & sustainable by design.
That requires transforming foundational legal institutions that construct 'the economy' – contract, property, credit, etc - which produce capital & hardwire inequality and hierarchy into society.
Take the corporation, a legal institution of deep economic & political importance.
Take the corporation, a legal institution of deep economic & political importance.
Granted extraordinary privileges to organise production, it isn't simply a private nexus of contracts, whose actions should be shielded from intervention. Instead, it is undergirded & made possible by public power, its rights are publicly granted, legally defined, & re-codable.
Far from Hayekian institution of spontaneous ordering, the company - how organised, in whose interest - is produced & contestable. As with corporation, so with markets & infrastructures of social reproduction: they're not 'natural' but constituted by politics & law, among others
Powerful shifts in legal, managerial, and ownership structures have transformed the corporation into an engine of wealth extraction for elite shareholders & executive management, via dividends, buybacks, rising corporate debt, exploding pay etc. See @sahildutta et al
But politics can* reclaim the company, transforming it from an institution of extraction to a generative entity: purposeful and democratically governed, where all its stakeholders have stake and a say and share in the common wealth.
*with a fight, and struggle on multiple fronts
*with a fight, and struggle on multiple fronts
That will require democratising the firm's constitution, reallocating the rights and powers of stakeholders - downgrading the present oligarchic power of shareholders over the corporation & it will require transforming ownership, incl. democratising asset management.
For Labour under KS, then, think potentially instead of 'varieties of capitalism', 'varieties of legal ordering': a greater focus on the plasticity of property & markets, and the possibility for more democratic, co-operative forms of legal institutionalisation.
Think - as @TomPowdrill suggested - a Company Law Review 2.0
Dust down the Companies Act 2006
Imagine the Green New Deal given a legal inflection
Dig out the Labour Law manifesto 2019 https://www.ier.org.uk/product/manifesto-labour-law-towards-comprehensive-revision-workers-rights/
Dust down the Companies Act 2006
Imagine the Green New Deal given a legal inflection
Dig out the Labour Law manifesto 2019 https://www.ier.org.uk/product/manifesto-labour-law-towards-comprehensive-revision-workers-rights/
We shall see. What we know is Covid-19, as with all crises, will buckle & reshape the order of things; in what direction & in whose interest depends on politics & power. But timidity won't work. A systemic crisis requires systemic change, rooted in institutional reconstruction.
Anyway. About to start the final run in of this, and I won't lie, it's not looking good for another lawyer, albeit a 16th century one.
