Vielen Dank. across to the speakers, to Andy Kambas und Alexandra Strickner. Ich werde die Vorstellung und Einführung dann jetzt auf Deutsch weiterführen, aber dann beim Übergang zur Moderation wieder auf Englisch umsteigen. Der Vortrag wird wie angekündigt auf Englisch stattfinden. Es wird auch eine Diskussionsmöglichkeit geben, das sage ich jetzt gleich am Anfang dazu. Die wird über die Chat-Funktion ablaufen, Sie können dort Ihre Fragen reinschreiben, auf Deutsch gegebenenfalls oder auf Englisch auch. Wenn Sie das auf Deutsch reinschreiben, werden wir das dann, werde ich das dann übersetzen und eben an Andy Kambas vermitteln, so that he can answer the questions that you were posing. Und auf diese Weise hoffen wir dann doch eine lebhafte und umfassende Diskussion zustande zu bringen. Es ist die dritte Veranstaltung in unserer Reihe Gegenbewegungen der Wirtschaft, die ihren Platz zu weisen, die sozusagen ihren Ausgangspunkt bei Karl Polanyi, einem österreich-ungarischen Sozialökonomen, der in der Zeit des Faschismus emigrieren musste, ihren Ausgang nimmt. Wir haben in der ersten Sitzung uns mit der Relevanz Karl Polanyi für das Verständnis gegenwärtiger Entwicklungen kapitalistischer Marktgesellschaften beschäftigt und wie eben hier Konzepte herausgenommen werden können, um gegenwärtige Auswirkungen dieser unregulierten Entwicklungen zu bearbeiten und zu bewältigen. Wir haben in der letzten Woche uns mit den problematischen Effekten einer unregulierten Globalisierung der Ökonomie beschäftigt, auch gerade mit Hinblick auf ökologische Probleme, auf die Klimakrise und wie diese eben durch eine Umgestaltung der Wirtschaft erarbeitet werden könnte und kommen in dieser Einheit jetzt zu der Frage, welche Rolle das öffentliche Eigentum, öffentliche Institutionen und eben auch der Staat in dieser Frage spielen kann in der gegenwärtigen Situation. Die Globalisierung der Ökonomie, der Konkurrenzdruck, mehrere Jahrzehnte neoliberaler Staatsumbau und Staatsabbau, Mehrer Jahrzehnte neoliberaler Staatsumbau und Staatsabbau, auch die Probleme des Wohlfahrtsstaates, der sozialen Sicherungssysteme, die gerade jetzt in der Pandemie wie im Brennglas wieder sichtbar geworden sind und auch das Wachstum autoritär-populistischer rechtsextremer Bewegungen und Parteien werfen eben diese Frage auf, welche Rolle kann in diesen Entwicklungen der Staat, das öffentliche Eigentum, können öffentliche Institutionen spielen und in welcher Art und Weise entwickeln sie sich oder müssen sie gestaltet werden. Das ist auf der einen Seite eben die Frage, wird es möglich sein, diese neue Rolle, veränderte Rolle des Staates, des öffentlichen Eigentums eben im Prozess einer Demokratisierung zu stärken oder wird Demokratie als ein Hindernis aufgefasst gegenüber ökonomischen Dynamiken und der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung und droht damit möglicherweise ein neuer Autoritarismus im 21. Jahrhundert, wofür es ja einige Hinweise gibt und vor dem Intellektuelle zum Beispiel wie Ralf Dahn schon sehr früh gewarnt haben. Andy Kampers hat sich mit diesen Fragen in vielen seiner Forschungen sehr ausführlich beschäftigt und den Vortrag Return of the Public will discuss these problems at length and will give us some insight into this. Den Kommentar zu dem Vortrag wird Alexandra Strickner von der Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien und Sprecherin von der KAKÖ Österreich dann machen. Ich werde zu ihr dann noch einiges sagen, bevor sie ihren Kommentar schreibt. Andy Kambas ist Professor für Regional Political Economy am Adam Smith Institute, der University of Glasgow. Er war Collaborating Researcher des UN-Forschungsinstituts für gesellschaftliche Entwicklung. Er hatte Gastprofessuren in Köln, Frankfurt und Berlin, gewann den Gunnar-Mürdal-Preis 2015 für evolutionäre politische Ökonomie, für sein Buch Reclaiming Public Ownership, Making Space for Economic Democracy, seine Forschungsgebiete daher, wenige überraschend, Wirtschaftsdemokratie, Staat und Regionalentwicklung, Remunizipalisierung, also die wieder wachsende Bedeutung von Städten, Gemeinden, regionalen politischen Einheiten, Öffentlichkeit und Gemeineigentum und die Beschäftigungs- und Arbeitsbeziehungen in diesem Bereich. Gegenwärtig gibt es auch einen großen EU-Vorschusskern, Global Remunicipalization and the Post-Neoliberal Turn, a comparative research project investigating remunicipalization and the post-neoliberal turn, a comparative research project investigating re-monicipalization in Germany, Argentina and the US. In 2020 we will then book the case for economic democracy for öffentlich. Andy will now give us his presentation for the next 45 minutes. I will hand the floor to Andy and ask for your talk and afterwards we will have the comments and then the questions. So Andy, the floor is yours. Thank you very much Roland and thanks very much for inviting me to speak here today. It's a shame I couldn't be with you in person in Vienna but hopefully I'll be there at some point in the future to maybe give another talk or at least have a coffee and a few beers and talk about some of the big issues that we might discuss today. It's become something of a cliche, I think, to suggest that a global political economy has reached a critical moment or a turning point, or in the context of what I'm going to say today a key conjuncture. We're faced with a growing number of crises, an ecological crisis in the shape of the climate emergency, a social crisis in the shape of the growing inequalities that we face at all levels across the world and also obviously in the context of the pandemic a growing public health crisis. We could also talk about other crises like continuing discussions about a democratic crisis, arguably we're still faced with a financial crisis which was never really resolved properly and has led to a decade of austerity in many parts of Europe and across the world. What I think these multiple and accelerating crises are exposing are the limits of the long durée of industrial growth-driven carbon-based capitalism that's been with us since the 18th century. On a shorter timescale, I also think, and very much to the core of what I'm going to talk about today, they are exposing the contradictions of the regime of global neoliberalism that's been with us since the 1980s. Now, without wanting to proclaim that we are now entering a post-neoliberal era, it's clear to me and I think to many observers that the key foundations of neoliberalism are increasingly being called into question. Three key pillars in particular, the marketization of everyday life, the associated emphasis upon the sovereign individual as consumer, and a rigid adherence to the sanctity of private property rights are all coming into question. So it's in this context really that I want to talk today about some of the work I've been doing around thinking about what comes after neoliberalism really or at least what might emerge from the crisis that neoliberalism is facing. What we see with the coronavirus pandemic is it is shining a very illuminating light on the inadequacies of neoliberal governance and in particular the preference for market based private and corporate solutions to almost almost any public policy problem which have dominated, if you like, policy making discourse and dialogue in the last 30 to 40 years. It's quite clear that the kind of private and corporate solutions that are being applied in many parts of the world to the pandemic and to a global health emergency are clearly short, very short and failing in terms of what's required when what we really need to deal with the pandemic is integrated planned public and collective action now there's a map being produced recently by the NGO Médecins Sans Frontières and this map follows up on a campaign that's been called for a temporary waiver of intellectual property rights around patents to do with vaccines to actually allow better production of vaccines around the world in the global battle against COVID. And what this map, if you look at what I put up on the screen here, what this map shows and it speaks volumes for is the way that powerful and richer nations and pharmaceutical companies, those in the global north in particular, indicated by the red crosses, are, if you like, opposing the suggestion by many countries in the global south that there should be a waiver. In other words that pharmaceutical companies should waive their patent rights to allow coronavirus vaccines to be produced globally around the world in every country. It's quite striking. If you look at the geography of the debate around this proposed measure, that most of the opposition is coming in the global north, where you see where the red crosses are in this map in the US and Europe and in Japan. Whereas, of course, most of the countries that are desperate for vaccines and are proposing this waiver are in the global south. Those who are proposing and supporting the measure are in the yellow and the green circles that we see on the map. And I think this was put very well, the dilemmas here were put very well in a recent editorial in the journal Nature, which I'll just quote at length here because it captures a lot of the essence of what my arguments and what the debate is about at the moment today. Patience, it says, were never designed for use during global emergencies such as wars or pandemics. They protect patients, that is, they protect their inventions from unfair competition for a limited time. The word, the key word here is competition. A pandemic is not a competition between companies, but a race between humanity and a virus. Instead of competing, countries and companies need to do all they can to cooperate to bring the pandemic to an end. That's the editorial in Nature, which is not exactly the most radical academic journal on the planet. But Nature, I think, captures quite well some of the tensions and dilemmas that we have at the moment around these issues. And I think what the pandemic has done is it's merely reinforced the sense that the neoliberal model, has done is it's merely reinforced the sense that the neoliberal model, rather than solving key public policy problems, it actually adds fuel to the fires of the multiple crises that we face, rather than resolving them. And instead, and this will be a large part of my argument today, we need a very different kind of political economy that reasserts collective interests and a sense of the common good against naked individual self-interest, whether it's that's on behalf of individual countries or it's on behalf of individual corporations or indeed the sovereign individual. So this is the context I think in which we see what I phrase here is a return of the public, the title of my lecture today. And my argument really today to sum it up in a nutshell, is that the question of the public, or what the great pragmatist philosopher John Dewey over a hundred years ago referred to as the problem of the public, is re-emerging as the key dilemma of our time. It's manifest in the growing calls across this political spectrum for the return of state intervention, for regulation and control of economy and society, and the recognition, perhaps, that individual freedoms will always run up against the boundaries of social and collective responsibility and obligation. More disturbingly, the somewhat ambiguous freedoms of neoliberal globalization are being replaced by a growing state authoritarianism in some parts of the world, a xenophobic anti-globalization and a more exclusionary and nationalistic form of public that is emerging in some places. This is counterposed by a kind of muddling through middle ground of political elites where a sticking class to business as usual discourse stumbles on. elites where a sticking class to business as usual discourse stumbles on. Tired, worn out, neoliberal tropes of competition and market thinking remain the order of the day unfortunately for far too many government departments and transnational organizations such as the European Commission or the IMF. More hopefully there is a third option emerging in demands for a more progressive and egalitarian public through the increased rhetoric of a global commons and calls for more more democratic participatory forms of collective ownership and indeed economy more generally and what I want to do today really is to explore these issues through engaging with a recent phenomenon that I think Roland mentioned in his introduction that I've been studying as part of a European Research Council grant that has become known as re-municipalization, which is a bit of a mouthful and I get my tongue twisted around it, but anyway we have to stick with it. This refers to a developing trend at the local level for city and regional governments around the world to take back formally privatized assets into public ownership. And in the rest of the talk today, I want to use this trend of re-municipalization, re-Kommunizierung, I think it's called in Germany, as a lens through which to consider the broader re-emergence of the public as a response to neoliberalism's many failings. To do this, I'm going to use what I call here a conjunctural framing. And this is heavily influenced by the work of Antonio Gramsci and the late Stuart Hall, a cultural theorist who was based at the Open context in which there is now a push back against neoliberalism and in particular against its core policy of privatization how this is occurring and where and why it is taking different forms in different places and i want to use that lens of re-municipalization to think about what this tells us about the many and many in divergent forms of public that are possible in the current moment. So first of all, what is re-municipalization? As an empirical phenomenon, it's the tendency since around the year 2000 for cities, towns and subnational regions to return essential public services that have been previously privatized back into local forms of public ownership. Now the graphics that I'm going to show you today come from a new database that we've created at the University of Glasgow in partnership with the NGO the Transnational Institute whose work I'm sure many of you will be aware of. They've done some fantastic work in cataloging in fighting privatization but also cataloging the reemergence, if you like, of public ownership at the local level over the last decade. of February 2021, there have been round about 1,451 cases of re-municipalization that have occurred in the period since 2000. Of these, as you'll see from the graphic that's been put up here on the slide, most of them, something like 974 out of the 1,400 or so, have been what we call re-munistralizations. In other words, they're deprivatizations. They're enterprises that have been brought back into the public sector, having been privatized at some point in the 1980s or 1990s. Another interesting trend, which I won't say too much about today, is the setting up of new public enterprises in areas where local authorities clearly recognize that the market is failing or that the private sector is not providing sufficient services. We see 477 new public enterprises have been cataloged around the world as set up in a diverse range of areas since 2000 as well. And you also see what we capture in our databases databases examples of renationalization which are quite significant. They're still relatively small in number compared to the the re-municipalizations that we're seeing but nevertheless another sign of this pushback trend against privatization and neoliberalism more generally. Now, as you'll see from the graph that I put up, this was a rapidly accelerating trend from the mid-2000s onwards, reaching a peak at around about 2016 and declining a little bit in subsequent years. Although it's worth saying that our analysis tends to be backward-looking a little bit since we're very reliant upon people reporting cases to us, then getting verified and then put in the database. So I would expect the trends to show some sort of increase on the levels that you can see here in the period since 2016, as we become more aware of cases that have emerged. I think what's particularly important to note, though, is that this is a global phenomenon. It's happening on all continents, although the epicenters are in Europe, notably France and Germany. But also we do see quite an interesting trend of deprivatization and new municipal enterprise in the US, which has over 230 cases, mainly in water, but also some very interesting developments in the US and in the telecoms sector. So this is a phenomenon that tends to be clustered, as you can see from the map, in the global north. But there have been some important emergent clusters in the global south, particularly in Latin America, where there's been a big pushback against Washington consensus-inspired privatizations in the 1990s in particular. But the main epicenters have been Germany, where it's very strong in the energy sector, and France in particular, where there's been a massive trend to reverse privatizations in the water sector. Now, if we look at it at a sectoral level, you can see that energy and water tend to dominate, but it is quite a broad phenomenon. It's taking place across different sectors. And in the last few years, we've seen quite a big pushback against privatization, particularly in health and education, but also in transport. As I've already mentioned, the very interesting development in the US is the growth of community or municipally owned broadband networks at the local level, which are basically replacing or making up for the failure of the private sector to really establish broadband at all. Okay, so it's a broad global trend. It's happening across sectors. It's concentrated in particular places. And I think I'll come on to talk about how it takes different forms and complexions in different places a bit later. Why is this all happening? Well, I think the key thing to be said here is that like all global phenomena, it's spatially very diverse in terms of the causal factors behind it. But I think we can talk about a few commonly shared problems and experiences that come out of the privatization experiment and and in particular a lot of the motivations behind remunicipalization are to do with the poor performance of uh of privatized services escalating costs and lack of promised infrastructure improvements. These are broadly shared experiences across the planet, although they do intersect, as I'll talk about in a moment, with particular local and national political economic trajectories as well. So in a sense, re-minicipalization as a local phenomenon captures a particularly critical element of neoliberal governance failure in relation to basic service provision in areas like water, energy and waste services. But it also reflects the failures of outsourcing in areas like education, transport, health and social care. These services are all critical to the social reproduction and basic needs of the human population. And their privatization as in many ways involve massive critical material failures at the local level, but can at the same time have important local political effects in terms of mobilizing citizens and alliances to achieve more radical ends. So they do have these consequences, I think for political mobilization, which I'll talk about more in depth as we go through the lecture. I'm going ahead of myself a bit with my slides here. Okay, so there's an ongoing debate about what all this means and what the implications are of reminicipalization. At one level, it can be viewed as a part of a Polanian movement of social and state re-regulation in the wake of the failings and contradictions of privatization and marketization. contradictions of privatization and marketization. However, as I'm sure most people, especially in this audience, will know, as history and Polanyi remind us, such a double movement of social re-regulation can be progressive, but it can also turn malign, conservative and regressive. And I think this is a key point that I want to make today in recognizing the open-ended nature of the political consequences of neoliberal failure. Indeed, there's considerable political diversity within the remunicipalization trend and process in terms of the actors that are participating with it, ranging from different shades of left, green, centrist, and even right-wing elements. It's interesting, for example, that Hungary under Orban has seen quite a few reministralizations and nationalizations in water and the energy sector and even in the private pension sector I think. So this isn't necessarily an automatically progressive phenomenon that we're looking at. It's also critical that we're not naive about the possibilities of reministralization from a progressive or democratic perspective. Many of the enterprises that are returned to public ownership do not in practice depart from new public management principles. And indeed, they fit often with an increased tendency for local governments to create arm's length companies that operate on a narrow commercial basis without much semblance of democratic control. There's also important continuing obstacles faced by proponents of local public ownership, not least dominant neoliberal ideologies at higher levels like the World Bank, IMF, and the European Union, which interestingly fail even to recognize that this phenomenon exists, let alone provide policy support for it. And many reminiscences often face hostility from their own national governments. So I think there's some important blockages that provide policy support for it. And many remunicipalizations often face hostility from their own national governments. So I think there's some important blockages that are there as well. So to give it, given all these considerations, it's important that we situate remunicipalization spatially and temporarily in its different context to understand its potential to contribute to a more progressive democratic project of the public. And I think there's two key questions here that we can ask ourselves. How is reminicipalization connected to broader ongoing politics and struggles for social justice and the commons against private enclosure and appropriation of resources? And to what extent can reminicipalization processes help build progressive, broader alliances where they can become spaces of encounter for different tendencies, different constituencies to come together in new coalitions and formations? Taking the first of these questions, while some of the remunicipalizations that have taken place to date do have radical motivations, such as economic democracy, worker control control or zero carbon goals, in the case of many German energy re-minstabilizations. Few actors that are involved in them would explicitly regard themselves as anti-capitalist or perhaps not even anti-neoliberal per se. Nevertheless, I think the point I would make here is that the very act of reclaiming public ownership from private control is an implicit challenge to capitalism and the logic of exchange value, a recognition of its contradictions in relation to meeting basic social needs. This is the essential contradiction which I think Marx identified long ago in his volume two of Capital between the kind of the accumulation aspects of capital and the social reproduction side of capital. So in a way, what these tendencies do is bring together that basic contradiction at the heart of capitalism. I think with regard to the second question, reminicipalization episodes are important because they are disruptive of existing forms of neoliberal governance. In the process, they are potentially generative infusing new coalitions that go beyond the usual suspects like the people probably in this room of left and green activism. They bring on board hitherto unpoliticized, if I may just use that term here, unpoliticized citizens that are frustrated by the deprivations of privatized public services and the decline in the quality of those services in their own local neighborhoods. So I think this is a politics that can have important generative characters in bringing kind of new actors into broader coalitions around a basic politics of social reproduction that can actually forge new politicized collective identities. And I think that's a very important thing to remember about these struggles and these movements. Now for me, a particularly useful way of thinking about the political possibilities of re-municipalization and the current broader crisis is to take what I refer to at the moment as a conjunctural framing using the work of Gramsci and Hall. In its most basic Gramscian sense, a conjunctural approach pays attention to the specificities or the particularities of the particular historical moment that you're living through. And it doesn't mechanically read off political changes from underlying economic processes. Building on Hall's work, conjunctural thinking is particularly useful for theorizing about dynamic political and economic relations in times of crisis and transition, the relations between immediate events and longer-term currents. Stuart Hall, for those of you who know his work, he famously critically analyzed the rise of Thatcherism in the UK and did it through his conjunctural approach. As a political project of Thatcherism in the UK and did it through his conjunctural approach. As a political project, Thatcherism was very successful in fusing together a shifting constellation of economic and social forces in response to the crisis of the Keynesian welfare state in the UK in the 1970s. Thatcher, in a section of the British political elite and business elite, constructed an effective alliance of social classes to overturn post-war social democracy in the UK, defeating the UK's labour movement and launching the neoliberal revolution. Thus, to some extent, resolving or perhaps only postponing, if we think about what's happened recently with Brexit, longer-term crisis tendencies in British political economy. But what a conjunctural approach does usefully for us here is it draws attention to the shift, what Hall talks about is the shifting terrain of the conjuncture, the shifting terrain of political economy when you're going through moments of crisis and potential transition. This isn't just in terms of how immediate events and moments interact with longer-term processes, but also the sense in which, through conjunctures, the terrain of political economy itself changes, with critical implications both theoretically and politically. Gramsci famously says that the forces of opposition must organize against the status quo and the established order, fashioning a politics that intimately understands and is able to take advantage of the specificities of the particular historical moment or the conjuncture that we're living through. And to me anyway, politically, it seems that too often the left during crisis periods is busy fighting either the last war or frequently multiple civil wars among its own ranks whilst the right and the forces of capital or business untroubled by ideological purity reassemble um and a very deft reassembling and developing new new adaptations and political strategies coming to terms with what Gramsci terms ever-changing combinations in a particular moment is crucial. And there's a great phrase from Stuart Hall here where he says, but when a conjuncture unrolls, there's no going back. History shifts gears. The terrain changes. You're in a new moment. You have to attend violently to the discipline of the conjuncture. I wish the Labour Party had read their hall in the events before the 2019 election, if I can be very parochial about the UK for a minute. So, if we go back to considering re-minicipalization conjuncturally and attending violently to it, this means recognizing it as a particular moment in the broader mutation of neoliberalism. Given its scale and reach as a process, it is a global shared set of commonalities, but it must also be located within particular spatial and social political contexts and historical trajectories. In this sense, it can take diverse forms geographically and politically as it intersects with other determinations, other processes and experiences that are ongoing in particular places. And to illustrate briefly what I mean here, and I can point people towards a longer paper where I take up some of these ideas in a bit more depth. To illustrate what I mean here, I want to look at how re-municipalization has emerged in two particular country case studies that we've been looking at, particular national settings. These are Argentina and Germany, as you'll see from the table. And if we talk about Argentina, first of all, Argentina was actually the scene of some of the earliest pushback against neoliberalism and the emergence of reministralizations. Notably in the water sector where there were eight cases of reministralization at the city or provincial level between 2002 and 2010, including in the capital Buenos Aires. There were subsequent further reministralizations in the gas sector, and also alongside this, there were a series of nationalizations in the Postal Service, the National Airline, the pension and welfare funds that had been privatized in the 1990s, and also the rail industry following a tragic train crash in which 51 people died, I think in 2013. Now, taken in total, I think it's worth saying that these deprivatizations, these remunicipalizations and nationalizations in Argentina have been largely top-down affairs, overseen by national or provincial state authorities with little local political agency or collective mobilization at the grassroots behind them although although it's worth saying that they were a response to uh the mobilization against neoliberalism and privatization as part of the argentinian economic and legal crisis in the early 2000s but but in many ways all these reministralizations that took place were broadly a response to the kind of failings of privatization that I've talked about earlier. Poor service delivery, increased costs, lack of infrastructure, and very often Western multinationals failing to deliver on the terms in which they've been contracted. But I think what's particularly interesting for us here politically is that it was some of the same political forces that had supported privatization in the 1990s that ended up opposing them, resisting them, and switching to support reminiscenization. What we saw in particular is that mass privatization under the Peronists and the Peronist government of Carlos Menem during the 1990s was reversed by his successors, and I accept that Peronism is a very broad movement, but nevertheless his successors from the same party, the Kirchners, in the 2000s in the wake of the economic crisis. And I think what was very interesting for us here, conceptually but also politically, is the way that the national political elites, if you like, in Argentina, were able to reposition themselves politically is the way that the the national political elites if you like in argentina were able to reposition them reposition themselves within the broader broader economic discourses and within the ongoing crisis um that argentina was suffering in the early 2000s from being the poster child of neoliberal globalization for many other countries in the global south in the in the 1990s to emulate the the Peronists became the kind of advocates of a kind of economic nationalism and the leaders in some way of the pink tide in Latin America in the 2000s. And I think what we can say is that the state-led re-manipulations that we see taking place in Argentina can be seen as a successful transition politics by the Peronists to adapt to a localized conjuncture of neoliberal crisis. Kirchnerism as an adaptation to the changing neoliberal moment across Latin America and in particular a departure from the deregulated market-driven governance towards much greater state intervention, social welfare policies, some moderate encouragement of more local autonomy and resources for social movements. So it was a very deft attempt by the Peronists really to change their stripes if you like as broader global and international economic conditions change. I think we can see this in Hall and Gramsci's terms as a political strategy that was attentive to the shifting terrain and changing political moment of post-crisis Argentinian political economy although ultimately one with its own tensions and contradictions as subsequent events notably renewed economic problems and the return of a more right-wing neoliberal inclined government in 2015 demonstrated. Now Germany is a very different kettle of fish, as we would say in the UK. It's notable, first of all, for being the global epicenter of the pushback against privatization and reminicipalization. With the largest national cluster of reminicipalizations, almost 30% of all global cases have happened in Germany, mainly in the energy sector, but also in waste, water services, local government, telecommunications, and even housing. And I think if we think about this conjuncturally, and we try to locate neoliberalism in Germany within broader historical trends in the country, we can say that German privatization was never quite encased in the full-throttled version of neoliberalism that we were, we've suffered under, if you like, in Thatcher's Britain. While the country's political elites in the 1990s did indeed introduce their own wave of privatizations in telecom, water, energy, and postal services, there's been a willing, and there was a willing embrace to in Germany, I think, of the European single market project. It's fair to say I think the process of neoliberalism in Germany was always a much more partial affair than elsewhere. We didn't see, for example, the Anglo-American demonization of the state and the public sector quite in the same way in Germany, despite the influence of similar new public management imperatives across the German state sector. The state at the local and national level as well still has certain social obligations under the German constitution to the individual which cannot be fully outsourced to the market. A key institution there which I talked about in more length in other writings is the Das Einzelsorger. I hope I've got the pronunciation right there. Now another thing to say I think is that in Germany the country's decentralized and federal political system with its more complicated net what we might call a nested institutional scaffolding has made it less open to complete capture by the neoliberal project than in more centralized states. Given Stuart Hall's admonition that neoliberalism is not and can never be a fully completed hegemonic project, its complicated and partial German hybrid form has provided particularly fertile terrain for a counter-hegemonic, pro-public, re-municipalization politics to emerge. What we've seen in Germany over the last two decades is that as private concessions and franchises have expired or come to the end of their period or come up for renewal, especially during the early 2010s, many local politicians have taken the opportunity in the face of the same poor performance of privatized solutions experience elsewhere of taking assets back into public ownership. elsewhere of taking assets back into public ownership. As with the Argentinian experience, it's often the same political actors, particularly from Christian Democrat and social democratic parties in the German context, it's the same political actors very often who privatize assets in the first place who now oversee their return to the public sector in many places. So what we see here is that privatization's failings have led local state elites across the political spectrum to quietly abandon privatization as a policy option, particularly given their continuing constitutional responsibilities to provide adequate and affordable essential public services. Remunicipalized services like electricity and water can also provide vital revenues that can cross subsidize other elements of the local municipal sector, notably transport and leisure services. And I think what's very interesting is that it's partly the period of austerity that many of us have been living under, which in a way is also a neoliberal policy tool that's actually forced a lot of authorities to take, not in Germany, but also in the UK, to take public assets back into public control. Now, this quieter politics of remuneratization almost going along under the surface has run alongside a much noisier set of political mobilizations of alternative and grassroots citizen movements, in part supported by de Gruner and de Linke parties, but having their own autonomy and generative elements in developing broader coalitions against neoliberalism and privatization. What we've seen in Germany, I think, is the strong legacy of older environmental, anti-nuclear and autonomous left social movements in the 60s have fused with newer generations of anti-capitalism and climate change movements from the 1990s onwards to produce a continuing tradition of dynamic and diverse social movements across the country that have, if you like, been activated in the battle against privatization and neoliberalism. And these movements have coalesced to demand new pro-public solutions to critical public policy issues, particularly the climate emergency and the politics of the energy vendor. So although the campaigns for remunicipalization in Berlin and Hamburg are probably the ones that people will have heard of and have received the most attention, there are numerous smaller coalitions and mobilizations that have occurred elsewhere across Germany, in small towns, in traditionally conservative areas, where we see the same sort of growth of a really interesting grassroots politics around a pro-public vision. And these actually include some very interesting examples of attempts to create new and more participatory forms of public and collective ownership. One well-known example, which you'll see here on the slide, is the Hessian town of Wolfhagen, which became so famous that the Guardian even did a special commentary feature on it, and Aditya Chakrabarti, who's one of the well-known left journalists, actually traveled to Wolfhagen. He rang me up on a train somewhere in the middle of Hessen to say how excited he was to be traveling to this place. And he produced this quite interesting long article, long read article on Wolfhagen, having come back from there. And there's also a podcast there, which I think I feature in at some point, which you can go to on the Guardian website. But Wolfhagen is very interesting for us here, because it's a good example of a kind of David versus Goliath local community versus big private energy utility battle. In this case, it was a largely citizen-led campaign to take back control of the local energy grid from the utility private firm E.ON, with the aim, very much a green environmental aim, of decarbonizing the energy system and producing its own renewable energy supplies, which it's largely achieved since the re-municipalization happened. But the other interesting thing here is that the new municipal energy company that was set up is an interesting hybrid, interesting innovation, if you like, in democratic governance. It's a hybrid form, part owned by the town's council, but also 25% of the enterprise is owned by a residence cooperative. Another very interesting tendency that we've picked up in Germany through our recent research for the European Research Council grant has been the revival of local public ownership in East Germany, where privatization was of course more widespread than elsewhere following the collapse of communism. Not just are we seeing a revival of local public ownership through local authorities deprivatizing formerly privatized activities. But the other interesting thing for me here is the kind of discourse that's emerging around re-mantipulation, where new political discourses are being framed around community wealth building and the importance of a socially provisioning economy, local economy, in opposition to the marketization discourse, of course, that's dominated many parts of East Germany since unification. course that's dominated many parts of East Germany since unification. Okay and I think it's in these kind of examples that we perhaps see the seeds of new and more democratic forms of public that could be transformative if they're scaled upwards to other places and other levels of governance. So to conclude, to begin to bring all this together, the global reminiscence relation trend that I've described here can be seen for me as a key element in a broader shift away from the excesses of a neoliberal regime. Neoliberalism is certainly faltering and it's mutating, but in many ways in the past, it's been too early to predict the end of neoliberalism. It always seems to fail forward, as Jamie Peck and his colleagues have said. Although perhaps this time is different, given what Althusser would refer to as the multiple determinations that are at the heart of our current crisis. We are in a critical conjunctural moment, in Gramsci's terms, where the terrain of political economy is shifting globally, nationally and locally, I believe, decisively away from a private-centered marketized discourse to a political economy to something that is different but as yet difficult to identify. What might be emerging here is a movement from a regime of free market governance centered around an individualistic discourse to one demanding more state regulation and collective ideologies. A conjunctural analysis allows us to see this, however, as a fluid and dynamic political moment. This is a terrain of contestation and one which can lead to very diverse configurations and political alliances. A key part of my argument here is that the crisis is seeing a resurgence of the public as a key political and ideological signifier. The public, in this sense, can become a key frontier and terrain for left and progressive forces to mobilize. But of course, more negatively, the crisis is one of political and democratic legitimacy, fueling the rise of populisms and extreme nationalisms in response to the uneven effects of globalization and a sense of alienation from the political economic mainstream. You've only got to look at the rhetoric of Marine Le Pen in France with her attacks on unregulated globalization, her invocation of the people versus the elites, and the cause for economic patriotism to see where a very different kind of public could be headed. So there are these exclusionary visions of the public and collectivist politics that I think are tied to much more narrow, territorially-based, and racially or racialized imagined communities in the sense of Benedict Anderson's famous phrase. The outcome of struggles over this emergent terrain will vary hugely between places, as examples of Argentina and Germany suggest, with divergent possibilities for democratic mobilization and building more progressive alliances. It will be contingent on variations in the balance of forces, the pre-existing conditions, and the nature of political agency and mobilizations in particular places. In this sense, the open-ended nature of a crisis, such as the one we're facing, or the multiple crises that we're facing, I think, can lead to transformation in underlying social relations. But they can also lead to what Gramsci and others would have understood as a more passive revolution, which I think resonates with Marx and his study of the emergence of Louis Napoleon in the 19th century. study of the emergence of Louis Napoleon in the 19th century, where in the words of Stuart Hall and Doreen Massey, none of the social forces are able to enforce their political will and things go stumbling along in an unresolved way. To be sure then, there's nothing inherently progressive about re-municipalization or the return of the public. Both Argentina and Germany demonstrate the potential for centrist elites at local and national levels to basically adapt pragmatically to a changing terrain of governance. So I think to forestall this on the left, what we need to do is reanimate a sense of the democratic public that can transform state spaces while articulating more radical participatory and egalitarian visions of economy and society. But I think to do this, we also need to make sure that we're connecting with the everyday but diverse local politics of social reproduction. Those things that animate those kind of unpoliticized citizens, if we can use that term, that can be used to build broader coalitions. It's only if we can do that, it seems to me, that things like this re-minicipalization trend can be more fully activated to contribute to the more transformative and democratic left project that we all need. Thanks very much. So thank you very much, Andy, for the presentation, a very interesting presentation and for your discipline sticking to the time. For those of you who came late, we will now continue with Alexandra Strixner and her comments. And before I say a few words about Alexandra, for the discussion later, just to inform you, there will be a possibility to pose questions to the speakers via the chat function. So then we will either translate the question when it's determined or read it to the speakers and to ask them for their answers. Technically, that's easier. Alexander Strickner is a co-founder of Attack Österreich. Das ist einfacher. Sie arbeitet an der Wirtschaftsuniversität in Wien am Institut für Multi-Level Governance and Development, hat in den letzten Jahren beispielsweise sehr viel zur Alltagsökonomie profitiert. Yes, that's my short presentation for Alexandra. Please, the floor is yours for your comments to Andys presentation. Thank you Roland and thank you Andy for your presentation. When I was preparing for it and reading through the document you sent me I thought it was very interesting to reflect on this process of re-municipalization because I myself have been following and be engaged in the issue of public services and the struggle for public services for almost 20 years now one of the first campaigns that attack Austria did along with many others was the one against the general agreement on trade and services which at that time was in particular something where we framed it and worked with local authorities to expose the threat that comes with it and also to basically mobilize the resistance against it and we managed globally that this Doha round in which the expansion was mentioned or intended was not coming and it's not yet finished. So in that sense I thought it was very interesting to learn, to look at the whole remunicipalization process that afterwards came as you were showing with this more critical eye that it is not necessarily progressive to these municipal remunicipalization processes. I want to first have a look from an Austrian perspective on it because I have been also attending the Futurist Public Conference of the Transnational Institute that you mentioned that has been doing and is doing very important work. And coming from an Austrian perspective, the whole remuneracy polarization agenda is of course one that we do not have so much happening in our country, because Austria is one of the few countries in which very few, if any, of the public services, particularly at the local level, have been privatized. And in that sense, in the Austrian context, we are not so much facing remunicipalization as such because if you take the city of Vienna everything has remained so far in the public but of course there is still trends in it that you have mentioned that are still issues like there is a whole new public management uh approach to to run public services there is also hidden privatizations that are not so perceived um it's it's not that that uh yeah certain areas have been sold off or concessions have been given so it is happening um and um and there is in particular i think the key issue that you mentioned as a key element for the remunicipalization, if it is to become a progressive return of the public. And that is to look on the whole governance of public services. And I think that is one of the key challenges we would face in Austria, because in many places, the key approaches of those who are governing cities or local communities is to say, we can do this, we run it well, but there is not really an approach to run it in a democratic way, to be open to governance innovation. It is rather perceived as a threat and I think that is one of the key challenges. And interestingly, because I have been in public debates recently in Austria about the question of public services, there is an interesting broad consensus if you talk about Daseinsvorsorge, the term you mentioned, where all would say from the left to the conservatives that this should be in the hands of the public. But there is a resistance to or be open to transforming it in terms of the democratic governance. And that also, I think, is one key problem because as long as it is not in democratic governance where citizens and workers are much more included, the threat of being privatized is always there and it cannot become as much and it cannot become as much a part of a progressive solution as you have said. From an activist perspective, I think to look at these remunicipalizations that you have been talking about with this different lens, I think it's really important and to see also the different shades, because I think many activists would more look at it per se from a progressive perspective or think it is progressive because as long as it is coming back into the public that is per se good and I think there is an element in it that per se it's better than to be organized in the market but then of course there is all these other elements that you have mentioned that come in so in that sense having these uh analyses uh that you do that you are doing uh for for movements i think it's really key and i think um while i know for the u.s spaces and places and and uh um where where more of this analysis is also shared so that you can look into it like the Community Wealth website or the Democracy Collaborative. I think there is a real lack for such more access and dialogue with people that do more research on it and look from an academic perspective on it in Europe, for instance, or another region, so that there can be more learning happening. And in that respect, I would say, you have said that there is not many or there's many of these real municipalizations that are not working in a new way. So it's just taking back from a national elite perspective or local elite perspective of these public services. But I think there is, as you mentioned, very interesting new perspectives like Wolfhagen, but also others. And I think it would be really important to put them out much more. There is, for instance, in Chile, the case where the services, the cleaning services in the city was taken back and it was not even taken back in the sense it became, again, a public company. They did it with working with the workers and helped them to organize a workers cooperative. So I think there's a lot of interesting experiences and probably if we want this approach to become more taken up and to be more a trend, it's probably also something we need to look into how we can more diffuse also the knowledge about these progressive new approaches where there is democratization happening, there is innovation happening in terms of the governance of these re-municipalizations and then I wanted to touch upon a few other challenges I think what you have been saying that there are still obstacles that all these processes are facing I would very much agree with you on that and I would say it's not only that there is the obstacles continue to be there, like in the case of the EU, the various liberalization rules, for instance, in the energy sector or in the public railway sector or in others, railway sector or in others or the WTO of course all the trade agreements are a real big problem for that I think it also is expanding and I think that is where it's the big challenge of in particularly those groups that are engaged in re-municipalization or in the handling of it or in the fight for it, while at the same time keeping an eye on that and being also observing what is happening at that level. So I'm still continuing and following the whole trade agenda. Next week we will have, for the first time at the European level, a webinar in which we're going to look at the whole dimension of negotiations that are happening around e-commerce. So all the big tech companies, they're pushing for trade rules to govern that field and there is a lot of threats in there for how public services and remunicipalization can happen because it is about tax evasion and possibilities. It's about of course the data, the access to the data question. So there's a lot of attacks that at the local level they are even not perceived yet and this is something that is a huge challenge for these processes to be looking at that and to also engage in the struggle and the fight to keep the space or even further get rid also of certain of these regulations if we really want to move ahead in a much broader way. So in that sense I think these obstacles they're there they continue to be there and there's new ones coming in particularly now as digitalization is also one of the key issues that is pushed very hard. And there we also see, for instance, in the field of housing, how complicated for local levels it is becoming to also be able to make rules and regulations that can be implemented. Because these are actors that work globally and so your space of action is becoming much more difficult. The other thing that is a big question mark and I think a big challenge for all of us in particular in Europe, what will happen after the pandemic has ended and what will happen after the pandemic has ended and now all these debts that have been made in a very easy way to save many people but also many companies what will happen with that? We know 10 years ago when we had the financial and economic crisis, how quickly this was turning into a public debt crisis. And then with all these different elements of austerity that have been imposed, and I think for Europe at least, this is a real threat to look out to and to have an eye on. And for the movements and all those who are engaged in this process to make sure that this is not happening again. Because this time it might be a much bigger attack if austerity would come back. And then I would like to conclude with a few remarks that go more into how you ended in relation to the possibilities that is opening if one can read correctly the conjuncture and start to look into how we can organise to make this a response to various crises and use also the moment to expand public services, to expand the process of re-municipalization, but also in a way where it is also about changing the governance, about advancing a more democratic economy. In that respect, I think there is the current moment, definitely one that we could use in Austria, for instance, with the groups that I work with that are engaged around public services. So in our case, it's not about re-municipalization, but rather keeping them, expanding them, and then also to try and democratize them. One of the possibilities and moments we see is to really start to have a discussion about how expanding the public sector is a solution to the crisis, because we now need to create a lot of jobs. And the creation of these jobs needs to be in the framework of respecting the climate crisis and the challenges we face. So expanding health sector, health services, expanding education, expanding public transport, all this would help to address both dimensions of the challenges to create jobs and to have a response to the climate crisis. And there is also one element, I think, a key element in terms of alliance building, to build a strong alliance with the climate justice movement. And particularly also this younger generation of movement, the Fridays for Future movement. I think there is a lack of understanding in some fields at least about the relevance and the importance of of having and expanding collectively organized services and infrastructures to deal with the climate crisis and I think there is a huge potential in it. The same is also, I think, with the emerging movement and actors around the whole care issue. And I think here the health crisis comes in as a driver because now women who are particularly in the health sector or in many public services, the workers, particularly in the health sector or in many public services the workers but they are also the ones that are mostly affected by the pandemic in terms of being overburdened with being at home, being teachers, doing the housework. So I think there is another potential connection in terms of building this broader alliance to get sort of like a broader set of actors that can get more strength and bring that in a direction. And the third element I think that is also probably interesting is in the relation to the climate crisis is also to expose and expand and show the link of how economy towards a socio-ecological economy. For instance, there is already public buyers as several cities that are regrouping themselves together because they want to change their whole regrouping themselves together because they want to change their whole cars that they're using for cleaning the city and for taking the garbage and they want to change this whole set of cars with electric cars so I think there is also this is a potential area to build the connections and to strengthen that. And in the end I think yeah it's probably also with all those that are open and they're pushing for democratization of of our societies that are pushing for experimentation for instance with climate with citizen citizen councils like in austria there is now a move there's also in france there was a move in different places you have these groups i think that could be another area or linkage to sort of like build connections with these groups that come from the democratization area to see also how can these kind of experimentations happen on the ground, how they could be a group that strengthens that. And I think I leave it at at that I think there is a huge potential but I would agree with you Andrew what you say the question is are the different actors the movements the trade unions also the local the local administrations academics, are we having the capacity to build these links and to use the conjunct the moment to also voice and advocate for that and build of course then the strategies and there is also the potential that as you said it is going to fly because the other side is more quick in regrouping and organizing and even making the rules and regulations that restrict this process tighter and more difficult. So it's an open space and I hope we will be able to use it and to make a step forward. Thank you. Thank you very much, Alexandra. I would now give Andy a possibility for a quick answer to the remarks and would like to ask the audience to write your questions into the chat. There are already two questions and one remark, so now you should have time to add further questions so that we can move to a wider debate but Andy first your reactions to Alexandra yeah I think we agree with a lot with each other a lot so maybe that makes it a slightly more boring debate but but I was very interested to hear what you said about Austria and I mean Austria is from the UK perspective, we always hold up Austria and Germany as these wonderful places where social democracy still exists in some shape or form anyway. But I know that's a very simplistic perspective. But I think you're right about, although you haven't had the wave of privatizations that we've had here, there is this kind of insidious new public management school. There is privatization by the back door where the constitution doesn't allow full privatization. You know, there are kind of neoliberal actors locally that can find ways of bringing money and profiteering into public services. And I think we've got to guard against that. But I was quite heartened by what you were saying about this debate in Austria about, OK, we have these public enterprises and they might be very effective and very efficient, but they're not democratic. And I think one of the things we have to get beyond is the older model of state public ownership, which was very hierarchical, it was very armless length from the people. It was more effective in running public services than the privatization enthusiasts would like to admit. But, you know, I think a lot of these old ways of running public services and even the newer ways, they're still on a commercial basis. They're not really perhaps driven by social and ecological values as much as we would like. And I actually think that those things go alongside democratisation. I think if you genuinely democratise public services, and I think we were starting to have a very interesting debate in the UK. Many of us were contributing to the Labour Party's democratic ownership plans in the UK many of us were contributing to the Labour Party's uh uh democratic ownership plans in the last few years um and I think we're beginning to have interesting debates about well actually if you bring in a diverse range of voices and you genuinely democratize public services you're also bringing new forms of knowledge if you if you bring on board workers and consumers and citizens groups into you know multi-stakeholder democratic boards, then you also bring knowledge and expertise of the different kinds of knowledge together to run public enterprises. And I think that in itself, for me, can lead to different sets of values and also more effectiveness, actually, in the running of public services. So I think those things can go together. So I'm very heartened to hear you talk about those debates that are happening in Austria. I also think you're right that there is a real moment here. There is a really good political moment to try to talk positively about the public sector. I think one of the few good things that's come out of the pandemic crisis in the UK is almost a celebration of the public sector and the health. In a way, we haven't had in the UK probably since before Thatcher, I would say. to a conference was that he had the scars of the public sector trade unions and workers on his back. He was making, he was very keen to go with that Thatcherite rhetoric of public sector bag, private sector good. And so I think it's been a really good moment to remind people who don't necessarily normally think about politics of just how important the public services are in the UK, the health sector and the social care sector. So I think there is a critical moment here. And I think somebody's asked in the chat there, Michael, I think about the new wave of privatization that might come in and what would be the new frontiers of municipalization. I think these things go together a little bit because I think if you look at the UK as an example, Boris Johnson and his government, they make a lot of rhetoric and develop a narrative about the importance of the National Health Service. At the same time, through the back door, a lot of what they're doing is giving private contracts out and inviting American firms and firms from all over the world to come into the British National Health Service, which is always seen as the kind of crown jewels of the British public sector. So on the one hand, you can get a celebration and a hyping of the public. But on the other hand, there is this ongoing insidious backdoor privatization still at work. But I think the other thing I'd say here, which I think ties into what you were saying, is there's a real opportunity, and we see this in the UK, there's been a big debate about the social care sector because of the number of people that have died through the pandemic in old people's residential homes, most of which in the UK are either privatized or they're run by local governments, local authorities, but in very poor conditions because of austerity. So there's been a massive debate about the way we treat old people and the way we treat people in care in the UK. And actually, very interesting discourse that we should be taking this away from the market altogether. And i think i think that discourse has begun to go beyond the usual suspects it's it's become a common common uh sense discourse in the way in the uk to say we have to do something about this situation of the care sector now whether the whether the the progressive forces can mobilize effectively um around the world then to say well social care health these are sectors that shouldn't have anything to do with market forms whether we can then pass rules and legislation in effect that that begin to extend the reach of the public sector um into these new areas that that's an open question but i think these are the things that the kind of debates and arguments we need to have and i think i come back to my point about the and i know i know there's no such thing as an unpoliticized citizen. Every citizen has their politics, whether they like to admit to it or not. But I think there's a real point here about the way that, you know, perhaps we would call them the members of the public, the vast majority of the public who probably don't pay much attention to politics in their everyday lives. politics in their everyday lives, I think the pandemic has really reinforced on them the importance of the collective nature of the way they live and the way we exist and our common dependencies in a way. I think the left has to really make some political capital of that to draw in broader groups of citizens beyond the usual suspects into alliances for public services and public ownership at a local level, but also at a national level. So I think that would be my initial responses to what you've said. I'm just checking through, I mean you said many, many interesting things there, I'm not sure I can answer them all. just checking through. I mean, you said many, many interesting things there. I'm not sure I can answer them all. But I also think there's a link here, as you said, with perhaps tying in some of the good sort of positive common sense that's coming out of the pandemic about collective public ownership and values with this sort of transition to a green economy. It's a question to ask bigger questions about the nature of the economy, to say, to say well actually where are the new jobs going to come in a post-carbon economy, for me it's not just about transitioning energy workers away from coal and oil towards renewable energy, that's important, but it's also about really thinking about those sectors of the economy that actually do provide jobs and maybe rethinking the relationship between the private and public sectors, between social care and the socialized economy versus the marketized economy. And maybe it's a chance to push a kind of more of a socialized vision of the economy out there more broadly at the moment. Thank you, Andy. As you already brought in Michael de Florian's question, I will start with this one. I have not forgotten the one with Paul Palkowitz, but you also already brought in the one. And you answered it in relation to the UK. So the question is, do you see the threat of a new wave of privatisation following the debate on how to pay back the public debt that was accumulated in the battle against COVID? Do you see any new frontiers of municipalization beyond those you already mentioned? So from your research on a global scale, would you see what you're saying in relation to this question? So you're mentioning it already in relation to the UK, but do you have some insights you might share with us from a more general or global perspective? Yeah well I think if I take the first the second part of the question first about the new areas of municipalization I think social care actually you know the health sector areas particularly in the global south where there hasn't been public provision I think Chile is a really interesting example there's been a growth in pharmacies and local healthcare there. We also see a lot of, in the UK, a lot of activities that were from local government services that were outsourced under Thatcher and conservative governments actually have been brought back in-house. So a lot of local services, kindergartens, these kinds of things, you see a growth in those kind of educational services coming back into the public sector or in some cases being new public enterprises being set up locally. I think what's interesting if you go to Germany, some of the new re-manicipalizations in the energy sector, the revenues from those are then being used to set up new publicly owned kindergartens, for example. So that's quite an interesting tendency we see with these, with the kind of newer forms of public ownership that are emerging. But of course, it's not, it's not, it's not a kind of one way street. I mean, I mean, privatization continues. Alexandra says, you know, we still have it it we still have a global economy where the rules and laws and the regulations around trade and markets are still being written on behalf of private big private corporations so there's still you know you look at the single market project that's not finished you look at the you know germany has actually seen its its rail sector opened up to private operators in the last few years so the you know there's a kind of um the kind, I suppose there's a sort of dialectic there between the ongoing tendencies towards privatization and continuing attempts to find new areas to privatize and the kind of pushback that's happening to take failing services back into public ownership. So I think we might see, you know, private enterprises and firms look at other sectors to enter. And in the UK, it would be the health sector that now seems to be the one sector where private capital is very interested in investing. I think we've got to remember that the reason why public services are very popular for privatization and for capitalists is because there is a certain level of guaranteed demand. These are necessary essential services that will always produce revenues you know so that's why you know water and energy and so on are you know are very very attractive so I think I think it's a kind of movable feast I don't think we're going to see this massive push back towards uh public ownership which then reverses all privatizations. I think you'll see the privatization dimensions move around between sectors as and when they were. Whether we see a new round of austerity, I think that'll be different between different places. And I think the UK, I can quite easily imagine a new round of cuts and austerity because we have a financial ministry that doesn't like spending money and we've had 10 years of austerity and if you look at the financial plans for the next few years, there certainly seems to be more austerity coming for local government. I think austerity might be more selective this time around across the globe. It might be that there are some sectors like healthcare that don't suffer austerity in quite the same way as others because they've been seen the common good or the common sense now is that these are essential services. So you might actually see public investment, more investment back into certain key sectors. But I would imagine if you know, if you get centre-right politicians of a certain stripe coming into government, you'll see austerity and you'll see a big talk about how we pay down the debt being used, if you like, to really cut back in those public services that have less attention. So it would be local authority services in the UK, for example. The one interesting thing I think that's happened, though, is that, again, in the UK for example the one interesting thing I think that's happened though is that is in the again in the UK in the US this I mean this goes beyond the scope of the talk today but I think we are seeing a slight more positive attitude about public spending and debt generally and I think that this ties in with some of the arguments that modern monetary theorists have been making about. And if you look at the Biden administration, I think, I mean, I wouldn't be the biggest supporter of Joe Biden, but what his administration has done in the first two or three months has quite incredibly, I think, shifted the whole discourse around government debt and even taxation in the US. So I think those are positive things that are happening at the moment. Whether they're happening in Europe, I'm not sure. I think Europe has a whole set of issues that uh that frustrate um a kind of good a good center a good left of center kind of public kensian type response at the moment so i i'm you know i'm i you might see it in individual countries but i think the you the kind of the kind of neoliberal capture of the euro as an institution i think is is quite critical here and the way that the European Central Bank works and the lack of sovereignty of national states with their own finances is a real problem for the EU. In a way actually it's not for the UK or the US which still have their own currencies. Okay thank you. There's a second question which I'm now going to translate by There's a second question which I'm now going to translate the Palkowitz. Are there tendencies to define the creation of money or the provision of money as public tasks? Is democratization of the economy possible without direct finance of public tasks via central bank? No. But I refer back to my last point about the debates about modern monetary theory. I think unless we have, I mean, again, I refer back to the work we were doing with the Labour Party in the UK before the last general election. You know, public banking is critical here. There's a guy called Thomas Moir from Canada who's written some really good stuff on public banking, so I recommend his work. I think public banking and finance is critical here. But again, I think in the UK the mood has shifted there. Even the Conservatives are talking about setting up a national public infrastructure bank, interestingly, um i don't i'm not uh holding my breath that this will be very progressive but uh it shows perhaps the sign of the changing times okay thank you uh at the moment i don't have any further questions so i would propose it's already half past eight anyway so that you might come to an end i would ask alexander to have some um concluding remarks and your thoughts on the questions and the debate now and then I would give the floor again to Andy so that he can come to an end for today. Alexandra? Yeah perhaps just one one addition or one insight more probably to what has been said already on the issue of the potential threat of austerity. I think the pandemic, and I think that's also, again, something that probably functions differently from country to country. And that's why I think the point you made also to really look into the country levels and how the processes go and what are the realities is important because it's only then we can understand what are the specificities. But in the case of Austria, there is some local taxes that cities or local governments are cities or local governments are taking directly, very few. But one is related to tourism, for instance. So tourists coming, there is a certain small amount per day that is charged. And then a few others. And that, of course, is also an important generation of revenue for the cities and local levels which they use to fund public infrastructures and services. And in the case of Austria, we can see in particularly smaller places, not perhaps bigger cities, they have a bit more possibilities or it's easier to handle in the first step. But there is immediately a lack of funding that creates very quickly a pressure. And then the question is, how is your relation with the federal government, to which extent there is the pressure and the power that they give you money to compensate so that you're not running immediately into a problem and then we still do not have yet an austerity debate in terms of paying back the public debt. So in that sense I think it's something to look into. And otherwise, I think I want to conclude that, yeah, it will be really interesting to continue a more intense dialogue about these experiences and to once more emphasize to particularly take the positive experiences that should help us guide and see how we can more diffuse that because I think that is what we need and that is also what I think can inspire the groups that are starting to think about getting more organized in that direction. So in that sense thank you for the work you're doing and I hope to read more and I hope that at some stage we perhaps also get a center where we can collect a bit more of these concrete examples so that it's not about researching all the time on different websites to get some good examples. Thank you. Thank you, Alexandra, for your remarks. Andy, some final concluding remarks before we come to an end? Thanks for the questions and thanks to Alexandra. I think we share a lot of the same views and points here. I think the importance of academics building a kind of counter-hegemonic community is still really important here. And I think politically, if you look around, the left always has its fractions and its divides, you know, and the Greens, those that are on the left anyway. But I think for me, this kind of pro-public potential is enormous here. I think if I can finish on a note of hope, I think the kind of neoliberal, you know, the whole private marketized discourse, I think even the neoliberals themselves don't, the key neoliberal thinkers don't believe in this anymore. They know it's not failing. They're now thinking about, okay, how do we use the state or how do we turn the state? There are some really important developments. There are shifts towards the Green Deal, there's acknowledgement of an energy transition. But I think the danger is that we could see a very elite form of adaptation to the crisis of neoliberalism, the problems of privatisation. We could see a kind of back to the kind of centrist technocratic elite having their own form of of adaptation to the crises that we face you know so with the green with the green you know the green deal i mean if you look at the european um commission's idea of a green deal it's about creating good effective markets and and um you know i mean they do begin to talk about you know green energy communities But when you look at what those energy communities are, it's often providing opportunities for small business rather than all business to compete. So I think there is a kind of there is a real need to shift the mindset of these kind of, you know, these kind of mobilizing politics in the left and progressive forces to say, well, yes, we need to. This is a chance to really completely rethink the way we do the economy and society and rethink the relations between private and public market market values versus ecological and social values. And I think that's where for me, that's there's a real hopeful terrain of struggle there, because to finish on, I think we also we don't know any we want activists and academics and think tanks to come together around pro-public movement, but we really need to engage with those ordinary citizens who aren't necessarily interested in politics, but they've been reminded of the importance of the public and how we're all in this together. how we're all in this together. You know, the pandemic shows that we only, you know, we'll only tackle a pandemic when everybody is vaccinated or everybody, you know, everybody's involved. You can't do it in one country on your own. And I think that that kind of awareness of our collective shared kind of humanity is a really important important opportunity really to push for more public democratic forms of um economy and and government okay so thank you andy thank you alexander um for your uh talk and for your uh for the discussion i thank you andy um andy andlikum. It's always good to have an optimistic conclusion and I think it fits quite well because there's not only public research about the public in relation to public services but we couldn't do this kind of debate without a public education institution like the Volkshochschule which is a place where the wider audience can come together and scientists and other people have exchange, hopefully a useful exchange for everyone. Und daher verabschiede ich mich auch von dem Publikum nochmal. Ich möchte Sie auch darauf hinweisen, dass das natürlich jetzt nicht die letzte Veranstaltung der Veranstaltungsreihe war, sondern diese nächste Woche wieder pandemiebedingt über Zoom fortgesetzt wird. Und zwar mit Ulrike Knobloch, Professorin für Ökonomie im Gender in Fächer, die zur Ökonomie des Versorgens am 27. April um 19 Uhr diese Reihe fortsetzen wird. Und wir freuen uns auf Ihren erneuten Besuch. Dankeschön und schönen Abend.