Mike Phipps reviews Owning the Future: Power and property in an age of Crisis, by Adrienne Buller and Mathew Lawrence, published by Verso

In the context of a global environmental crisis, economic instability and the Covid pandemic, any commitment to building a fairer society without transforming property relations, argue Butler and Lawrence, rings hollow. This they see as a primarily democratic project, extending “democratic principles and relationships into spaces currently ruled by the entitlements of private property.”

Ownership is inherently relational. It empowers the propertied at the expense of the propertyless, enriching the former, but imposing dispossession and insecurity on the latter. Yet property rights are not timeless, but contingent on political arrangements.

The authors’ prime complaint about capitalist property relations is that they are deeply illiberal. G.A. Cohen said, “To think of capitalism as a realm of freedom is to overlook half of its nature.” So expanding individual and collective freedom means challenging the economic system. New Right rhetoric about a ‘share-owning democracy’ is belied by the increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of a small minority.

The dynamics of ownership drive exploitation: “under capitalism waged labour is by definition paid less than the value it produces.” This exploitation is accompanied by enclosure and expropriation. Increasingly, Anglo-American economies are defined by rent – income derived from possession of assets. Ownership has replaced entrepreneurialism.

When Covid hit, those companies which owned most survived, while others went under. They were aided in the UK by “special-access loan negotiations to only the largest corporations, while in the US, over $2 trillion in government grants and loans were dished out to businesses which generally weren’t required to prove their need, or even commit to retaining employees.”

At the same time, businesses and landlords saw their asset values soar during the pandemic. Corporate asset management is now buying up homes at an unprecedented rate: in the US, Wall Street has bought hundreds of thousands of single-family homes, negatively impacting renters and driving up selling prices.

These companies are now spreading their tentacles to Britain too. By May 2021, house prices here had surged by over 13% on the previous year. In the US, the figure was nearly double. The result is obvious: scarce social housing and unaffordable rents and mortgages in the private sector.

For a slim book, the authors cover a vast amount of ground. They explore how private ownership of intellectual property can have devastating consequences, as when US company Turing Pharmaceuticals raised overnight the price of the life-saving drug Daraprim from $13.50 to $750 a pill. Between 2007 and 2018, the price of seven branded insulin drugs increased by 262% in the US, allowing the three companies that dominate the insulin market to distribute a staggering $122 billion to shareholders over the same period.

Pharma profits regularly outpace nearly all other industries in the US. Clearly “vaccine apartheid” during the Covid pandemic emerged from an already fundamentally skewed model. In any case, Big Pharma has largely walked away from unprofitable vaccine development and spends more on advertising than research and development.

Public ownership of energy is currently back on the agenda, given the exorbitant pricing and profiteering of the private companies running the UK sector. But while public ownership would undoubtedly benefit consumers, the authors also look at the issue from the standpoint of the impact on communities where private companies extract energy.

The Niger River Delta, source of vast profits for Big Oil, is one of the most polluted places on Earth, with an estimated 40 million litres of crude oil leaking into the environment every year, destroying ecosystems and livelihoods. Despite the Delta producing 40% of the US’s crude imports and 75% of the Nigerian government’s revenue, local people see very little benefit, with life expectancy at 40 and only 30% of residents having access to clean drinking water.

In response to the international public outcry against this and similar impacts elsewhere, oil companies now boast of their plans to offset carbon emissions, go ‘carbon neutral’, etc. These efforts are little more than branding exercises: “in 2019, the fossil fuel industry’s investment in renewable and carbon capture technologies represented less than 1 percent of their total capital expenditures.”

The backlash against Big Oil has helped fuel the push for greener technologies. Yet this creates new forms of extractivist exploitation, as with the corporate hunt for new sources of lithium, essential for batteries in electric vehicles. Extraction in the ‘Lithium Triangle’ on the borders of Chile, Bolivia and Argentina has resulted in ecological devastation, water table pollution and depletion, human rights abuses and the displacement of Indigenous peoples.

Democracy and justice demand a world where everyone has broadly equal access to the means to live flourishing lives. This will not be achieved, argue the authors, by piecemeal, progressive reforms, but something more fundamental: the democracy of production, the decommodification of provision and the defence of the commons. Above all, they conclude, we urgently need to move from a moral critique of the present state of affairs to taking action against the institutions that perpetuate it.

Mike Phipps’ new book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.