Strategic socialism, strategic privatisation and crises

Abstract

An increasing proportion of the largest corporations in the world are majority publicly owned; a growing proportion of the biggest national economies have higher levels of public ownership than the North Atlantic economies that dominated the twentieth century. The Cold War contest between purer forms of capitalism and communism has given way to a more vibrant competition among different capitalist-socialist hybrids. The most successful economies in the twenty-first century will be those that are most strategic about when to privatize and when to opt for public ownership. The most fertile legal systems will be those that enable both strategic privatization of the public and strategic publicization of the private. That includes strategic privatization of the law itself, policing, prosecuting, judging and strategic publicization of self-regulation. Crises create the key opportunities for recalibrating varieties of capitalism by change agents who are in a more Rawlsian original position as a result of crisis. Show more