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The Marxist Left is crippled by its belief that there is such a thing as "capitalism".  It dominates their discourse, captures their imagination, conditions their syntax.  Marxists, and the rest of the collectivist Left, have long been tilting at "capitalism", a windmill of their own making. 

The only reality is the institution of private property, the "ownership" of land (real estate), of things (chattels, moveables) – and now of "shares" in artificial entities called "companies", legal constructs of private property law.  Every human society has generated some concept of private property, albeit of varying extent; certainly, all European societies, and those societies whose form is derived from "the expansion of Europe", have for hundreds of years predicated the rights of private property.  And in the 19th century (1856, to be precise) that body of law gave rise to the private ownership of "companies".  And 19th century political philosophers focused correctly on the disruptive effects of private property Property is Theft

The emergence of those institutions, now packaged by the collectivist Left as "capitalism", represents no more than the extension of the phenomenon of private property.  Private property is a seamless social and legal institution, running from the individual’s personal "ownership" of clothes and jewellery to the internecine conflicts of high capitalism.  And you cannot have one without the other.  Politically, there is no alternative to distinguishing, much more systematically, between its beneficial and harmful effects.  For private property is one of the key foundation-stones of any future civic order.

Traditional Labour has always been ambivalent about private property, an ambivalence derived from its association with Marxist origins.  Marx, in asserting the primacy of public property, left unresolved the key role of private property in consolidating the position of the individual in society. There was no room, in Marx, for the socialism of three-acres-and-a–cow. Early Labour thinkers like G D H Cole addressed the issue, and acknowledged the significance of small-scale personal property, even in a socialist commonwealth. But the underlying ambivalence has nevertheless persisted.

The time has come to eliminate that ambivalence, and to assert the central importance of private property to any equitable, functioning civic order.  The Labour Party, in any liberal socialist configuration, would acknowledge the central significance of private property. There would. for example, be no challenge to the principle of home ownership, or car ownership, or personal savings, or personal pensions.  In pressing forward for the more equitable distribution of wealth and power, Labour supporters should have no qualms about endorsing the institution of personal wealth, subject to taxation and to the prevention of harm to others.

• What is objectionable is not the institution of private property itself, but the abuse of the power which property rights confer. And it is on the countering of that abuse that the future Labour Party should focus.

This adoption of private property as a cornerstone of future civic order would reflect the "liberal" element in the new Party reasoning.  But it is entirely consistent, within the UK, with the pragmatic traditions of the Labour Party. The "socialist" element would lie in Labour's unremitting commitment to countering the abuse of private property power by way of Government intervention - in terms of worker protection, consumer protection, environmental protection.

• That is how a new liberal socialist Labour Party, I believe, should move ahead.