Power & Ownership
Swedish Left Party

Edited By Michael Barratt Brown
Translated from Swedish by Gunnar Sandin
January 2003
Spokesman
ISBN: 0-85124-674-5
32 pages, Illustrated, 5 3/4" x 8 1/4"
$5.95 Paper Original

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The Swedish Left Party, occupying a minority but far from negligible position in Swedish politics, has prepared for the European Social Forum a paper on "Power and Ownership." This is most timely. It is not only in Sweden, but elsewhere, and most particularly in Britain, that the results of the privatization of public assets have greatly increased the power of capital over labor, and in so doing have diminished democracy and widened inequalities.

That this process is closely related to the increasing globalization of capital means that the response of labor has to be international as well as national, regional and local. The Swedish Left Party argues that the question of ownership has once more to be put on the agenda of socialists. The strategy of capital has been to expand ownership as an extension of power. The strategy of labor must be a counter-offensive, to re-establish public ownership. But the lesson of previous attempts at public ownership is that they have failed because they lacked democratic control.

Economics; Politics
Socialist Renewal New Series, No. 5

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