Five decades later, we seem to be leaving behind the Washington Consensus. The climate crisis and, above all, the rise of China have reinvented the interest in leadership and the active participation that the country should have in the economy. The former austerity managers, such as Mario Draghi, are now calling for daring industrial policies. In this sense, the work of an author has had a great influence, also in the Basque Country: Mariana Mazzucato and her “entrepreneurial state”.

What Mazzucato proposes is not new, but a renewed version of the Asian developmentalist state. It proposes an agenda focused on industrialisation and innovation, with objectives such as the ecological transition and the reduction of inequality, based on the long-term partnership between the State, the private sector and civil society. It proposes to combat climate change through public investment and various mechanisms for conditioning private investment, and against inequality through pre-distribution mechanisms. In other words, instead of distributing wealth now, create more and more wealth to distribute progressively.

From the most left-wing point of view, he has been accused of being a strong advocate of capitalism, a determined Keynesian, which, as he himself has stated, wants to save capitalism from itself. But does this criticism make sense? The public leadership of the economy, the democratisation of investment and long-term planning are undoubtedly the fundamental pillars for the construction of an eco-socialist alternative within socio-economic objectives.

However, what appears to be a long-term nuance is also one of the main short-term limits of the proposal. Mazzucato does not take into account that capitalism is a society of antagonistic classes, does not take into account power relations, and that the growing contradiction between the value of use and the value of exchange, in view of the times of scarcity that are coming, will make consensus between the private sector and the general interest impossible. What difference is an acceptable difference? State participation in the economy will be determined by competition between classes, not by innovation.

The current urgency has led progressism to embrace its proposals, on the basis of a possible realism, a realism that consists in recognizing the inelusion of capitalism, but does not recognize its rules of play. Mazzucato states in his latest book Mission economy that “there is no market behavior that cannot be avoided”. OK, if that market is not capitalist.