Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Successful modern co-ops, such as Mondragon in Spain, work because they have the support of local savings banks and because they’re complex structures – able to redeploy workers from one sector to another, or soften short-term underemployment through non-market perks for those laid off. Mondragon is no postcapitalist paradise, but it is the exception that illustrates the rule: if you look at a list of the top 300 co-ops in the world, many of them are simply mutual banks that resisted corporate ownership.

The strategic aim – shining in big letters from a PowerPoint projector in every public sector boardroom – would be to cheapen the cost of basic necessities, so that the total socially necessary labour time can fall and more stuff gets produced for free.

If, as suggested above, governments insisted that the results of state-funded research should be essentially free at the point of use – moving everything produced with public funding into the public sphere – the balance of intellectual property in the world would quickly tilt from private to common use.