Darrell Hammond no longer makes playgrounds. For 15 years, his organisation, KaBoom!, addressed the lack of safe spaces for play in poor communities across the United States by building them. But a couple of years ago, Darrell decided to revolutionise his methods. He put all the tools and techniques needed to create a playground online and focused instead on encouraging communities to build them for themselves. As a result, Darrell created more playgrounds in one year than he had in 15.

KaBoom’s story is a perfect encapsulation of the way our world is changing. It is one small part of a much bigger shift away from a world where elites provide products or services. Increasingly today people generate products or services for themselves or, at the very least, have much greater control over how they are delivered.

The new wave of technology that is disrupting so many sectors of the economy thrives on precisely this ‘empowerment model’. Social media grew exponentially in just a few years by giving millions the tools to create and share online bypassing conventional media. Companies like Etsy have well over a million small arts and crafts businesses using their website to sell across the globe without the need for wholesalers or marketing firms. 3D printing, the Internet of Things and blockchain are poised to introduce similar empowering disruption to manufacturing, energy generation and finance. If you work for a mass production company, a big energy firm or a large retail bank, you should be worried. The elite, top-down structure of these organisations is about to be shaken from the foundations.

The left’s false idols

This transformation is, however, not driven by the technology itself. It is driven by a global shift in values. Charted for 40 years by Ronald Inglehart and his World Values Survey, there has been a consistent growth in the popular desire for self-determination, self-expression and choice just as older generations’ overwhelming focus on salary, shelter and sustenance dies out with them. This is not to say the latter values are no longer important but they are taken far more for granted now than they were in the mid-20^th century.

The big problem we face on the left is failing to acknowledge these changes. We still follow two false idols. First, that a movement for political change can be built solely around the grievance of material suffering and inequality. Second, that we can deliver social and economic change through the top-down efforts of a governing elite. Corbynism is, in many ways, a desperate last attempt by true believers to reassert the holiness of these idols just as the old religion is in its death throes.

So it is extremely important that Progress is focusing on rethinking what left values might mean in an era in which these idols have been smashed. The underlying notion of Progress’s ‘responsible capitalism’ series, that the economy itself needs to have fairness hardwired into it rather than relying on the endless efforts of a top-down state to remedy social injustice after the fact, has never been more apt.

In the series one can see the beginnings of a left economic policy that is closer to the empowerment model transforming the world. It is one where the state reforms corporate structures, refocuses the financial sector, encourages workplace change so that people automatically have the power and the resources they need to live an autonomous, creative life.

Two more steps

There are two important steps required to take this vital project further.

The policies implied by the shift clearly need more development. In some places the policy detail is absent; in others, too meek and derivative of New Labour’s education obsession; and, in one article, downright retrograde looking to precisely the old top-down governmental solutions of nationalisation and state investment that this agenda must surely reject.

Much more exploration needs to be undertaken into encouraging a wave of mutualisation of our biggest businesses, radically reversing the decline in home-ownership, smashing the oligopolies that increasingly dominate the global economy and shifting the tax burden away from trade and income and towards undue concentrations of wealth.

The second step is for the ‘responsible capitalism’ agenda to more clearly and enthusiastically embrace the empowerment shift. The left should become the champion of disruptive businesses that seek to put power in the hands of customers, employees and wider stakeholders through new organisational models and new technologies. In fact, the left should be arguing for the change to happen faster and deeper. Such shifts hold the promise of an economy where power is more widely distributed. More importantly for the survival of socialism, they could also associate the struggle for equality with that popular search for self-determination and self-expression that is transforming our world.

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Adam Lent is director of research and innovation for Ashoka Europe. He is a former head of economics at the Trades Union Congress and director of the RSA’s Action and Research Centre. He tweets @AdamJLent

His book Small is Powerful: why we must end the era of big government, big business and big culture will be published by Unbound in 2016 and can be pre-ordered here.

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Photo: woolamaloo