Origins

The term "Commanding Heights" goes back more then eighty years. In November of 1922, an ailing Vladimir Lenin addressed the Fourth Communist International in Petrograd in what was ultimately his penultimate public appearance. The year before, he had initiated what was known as the New Economic Policy and was being attacked by communist militants for compromising with capitalism and betraying the revolution. Lenin argued that this was far from the case and that the state would continue to control the "Commanding Heights," or the most important sectors of the economy.

During the interwar years, the Fabians and the British Labour Party quickly adopted the concept and it soon spread throughout the world. Of course, various interests adopted it to their own means in their own fashions. In the US, the government's control over the commanding heights was not so much through direct ownership, though that existed in places, but rather through regulatory enforcement. For most of the 20th Century, statist involvement in the economy's commanding heights was a given and accepted as general orthodoxy.

However, towards the end of the century, it was clear that a marked change of economic practice and been invoked and implemented. Government retreated and the market expanded. Catalyzed through the phenomenon of globalization, trade liberalization, the growth of capital markets, and increasing interdependence have been the hallmarks of this new age. But so too has been increasing economic inequality both between and among nations.

How do we manage the new dynamism and the new insecurity of this century's Commanding Heights? Are the confluence of economic and social forces so great as to challenge our collective ingenuity to effectively manage them? Can we solve the problems of the present and of the future? I believe it is possible.