Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Derek Wall — What Elinor Ostrum taught: democratic control is not only possible, it's normal

The market fundamentalism of Hayek seems to dominate political discourse. Hayek, the liberal free market Austrian economists, argued that state planning would end in failure and only the market could promote economic efficiency. This agenda seems, since Thatcher and Reagan, to have swept the world but it is, of course false. Neo-liberals far from reducing state intervention use the state to support corporations. Privatization is about helping powerful firms and market competition is no longer an issue. A good example is the current transformation of the NHS into a cash cow for Virgin and US health corporations. Neo-liberals promote corporate welfare and monopoly. Elinor Ostrom is powerful ally for all those of us who want to challenge that neo-liberal dogma and create people centred cooperative economics. 
Elinor Ostrom, who sadly died in 2012, was the first and so far only women to win a Nobel Prize, strictly speaking the Swedish bank prize, for economics. She was awarded it for her work on commons, collective resources and collective communal property. If we want a practical alternative (s) to privatisation she helps in a number of ways.…
Open Democracy
What Elinor Ostrum taught: democratic control is not only possible, it's normal
Derek Wall | International Coordinator of the Green Party of England and Wales. He is a political economist, whose last book was ‘The Sustainable Economics of Elinor Ostrom’ Routledge 2014. He is married to the community musician Emily Blyth and is a founder of Green Left, the anti-capitalist network in the Green Party. He is also a columnist with the Morning Star and is completing his new book for Pluto ‘The Economics of anti-capitalism’ which will be published in 2015.

1 comment:

Andy Blatchford said...

Great to see this here. Derek is a friend of mine.