Hilary Wainwright | ukwatch.net

New limbs for the left

Ellie Keen — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 17:14:10 +0000

New Labour is now reaping what it has itself sown: a cumulative weakening of the values of social solidarity, public service and altruism, which provide the invisible bedrock on which the electoral fortunes of the Labour Party ultimately depend.

From Peter Mandelson’s celebration of the ‘filthy rich’ and Tony Blair’s contempt for public sector workers, through to Gordon Brown’s present refusal properly to reward public servants and his insistence that ‘public service reform’ means contracting out these services to private business, self-seeking individualism has been valorised and public service ethics denigrated.

Brown’s overarching strategy has been to make Britain a fast-growing economy competing on the terms set by finance-led global capitalism and to stealthily engineer a trickle down to the deserving poor. As we know this has meant being soft on the super rich, while achieving a micro redistribution from the better off to low-income families.

This formula could more or less appear to work when the economy was buoyant. But as soon as this speculation-led growth began to falter New Labour’s uncritical attachment to the priorities of the City as the chosen instrument of economic expansion has become visibly paralysing.

As growth slows the government has less money to spend on tackling poverty or investing in services; and it dare not borrow more or tax the wealthy because to do so would torpedo its Thatcherite economic model. New Labour is consequently disarmed by the new Tory rhetoric of fairness, combined with a strong anti-statism, because it has neither a strategy for social justice nor a confident vision of the positive role of the state – and still less an overarching vision that brings them together.

And the two do go together. Seriously redistributive and green taxation is only politically possible if the state has real legitimacy – in other words, if there is a popular belief, grounded in experience, that the money paid in taxes is returned in responsive services that users feel are theirs.

The British state won this legitimacy throughout the post-war decades of reconstruction, building the welfare state and enjoying its first benefits. The result was a 20-year or so social democratic consensus legitimating taxation and redistribution. The delivery of these social benefits, however, was via an unreformed mandarin state, whose most powerful links with civil society were predominantly with business. These administrative hierarchies were imitated throughout the pubic sector. The result was a daily experiences of state institutions, from universities and the education system through to local government and even the health service, that was contradictory and frustrating – unresponsive to growing expectations and a new diversity of demand.

The social and political movements of the 1960s and 1970s were one response. Arguably one reason for the significance and lasting memory of Ken Livingstone’s GLC was that it was one the few politically successful experiments in translating the diffuse but creative radicalism of the 1970s into a popular political programme. It was cut short in its prime. We all know what happened then.

But perhaps now, after the May Day election debacle, the significance of what didn’t happen is coming home to roost for New Labour. The Labour Party didn’t grasp the importance of the GLC experiment, in all its messiness, in illustrating the possibility of transforming, opening up and democratising state institutions – and translating this onto the national level. This – and many similar experiences internationally – could have been the basis of a direct challenge to Thatcher’s privatisation and her reverse, Hood Robin, approach to redistribution. Indeed, Norman Tebbit saw the threat when he remarked of the GLC on the eve of its abolition: ‘This is modern socialism and we will kill it.’

The belief in values of social solidarity and in the possibility of bringing state institutions, international as well as national and local, under active democratic control – along with addressing the problem of corporate power – is still there and generating new kinds of political initiatives on the ground. How can they be strengthened and built on?

At times like this, when all the mainstream focus is on Westminster politics, the left (especially the English left) has to guard against attacks of ‘phantom limb syndrome’ – the pervasive assumption that the old labour movement levers of power connecting local activists with national politics are still effective or could become so. It’s a syndrome reflected in the endless debates about what to do about Gordon Brown, the calls on the party to do this or that, and so on. The truth is that New Labour (and the global economy) has all but destroyed these traditional levers, weak as they already were.

The left needs to attach new limbs by looking beyond its existing, inbred networks and engage in the variety of new (and often local) struggles and initiatives. These are organised through communities, geographical or otherwise, as well as (and more often than) workplaces. They relate to cultural symbols and identities more than narrowly political ones.

Many socialists are already working in this way to considerable local or issue-specific effect. There is a need to strengthen the exchange between them to give innovative content to the long-term political vision of a new kind of political force – and I consciously do not use the word ‘party’, for now.

Reaping What they have Sown

Ellie Keen — Mon, 05 May 2008 22:11:08 +0000

The collapse of Labour ’s vote in these local elections is about something more than New Labour ’s Daily Mail electoral tactics and the stay-at-home revolt of Labour’s traditional supporters. Though this continues to be a factor – reinforced by the 10 per cent tax ’mistake’. But there’s something deeper going on and it’s less easy to reverse. New Labour is now reaping what it has sown: a cumulative weakening in values of social solidarity, public service and altruism which provide the invisible bedrock on which the electoral fortunes of the Labour Party ultimately depend. New Labour has lived electorally off the legacy of earlier eras of Labour politics without renewing it and it’s a renewal that has been direly needed.

From Mandelson’s celebration of the ’filthy rich’ and Blair ’s contempt for public sector workers to Gordon Brown’s present refusal to properly reward public servants and the contracting out of services to private business means self-seeking individualism has been valorised and public service ethics denigrated. In his first few months as prime minister, Brown appeared to acknowledge the need to explicitly advocate social democratic value but it wasn’t reflected in significant policy shifts. And he now seems to have abandoned even this relatively superficial effort to shift Labour’s presentational tone.

Brown’s strategy (the economic foundations of New Labour) has been to make Britain a fast growing economy competing on the terms set by finance-led global capitalism and to stealthily engineer a trickle down to the deserving poor. As we all know by now, this has meant being soft on the super rich and a micro redistribution from the lower end of the top 10 per cent highest earners to low income families.

This formula could more or less appear to work when the economy was buoyant but as soon as this speculation-led growth began to falter New Labour ’s uncritical attachment to the priorities of the City was visibly paralysing. As growth slows the government has less money to spend on tackling poverty or investing in services and it dare not borrow more or tax the wealthy because this will torpedo the Thatcherite economic model they inherited and developed. They’ve been outflanked by the Governor of the Bank of England who last week made the kind of statement attacking city pay and incompetence that we should have been hearing from Labour’s front benches .

Even Mayor Johnson expostulates about the growing ’inequality between rich and poor’. (It will be interesting to see whether he sticks by his commitment to London Citizens to maintain Livingstone’s use of the GLA’s power as employer and purchaser to implement a living wage of £7.50 an hour).We are seeing a new Tory rhetoric of fairness combined with a strong anti-statism aimed at a caricature of Gordon Brown’s ‘top-down government’. The combination has an appeal which New Labour is finding difficult to answer because it has neither a strategy for social justice nor a confident vision of the positive role of the state.

The two go together. Seriously redistributive and now green taxation is only politically possible if the state has real legitimacy; if there’s a popular belief grounded in experience, that it responds to people’s needs and the money paid in taxes is returned in responsive services which users feel are theirs.

Back to the future

The British state won this legitimacy throughout the post-war decades of reconstruction, building the welfare state and enjoying its first benefits. The result was a 20-year or so social democratic consensus legitimating taxation and redistribution. The administration and delivery of these social benefits, however, was via an unreformed mandarin state whose administrative hierarchies were imitated throughout the pubic sector and whose most powerful links with civil society were predominantly with business . The result was a daily experiences of state institutions – from universities and the education system through to local government and even the health service – that was contradictory and frustrating. Unresponsive to growing expectations and a new diversity of demand.

The movements of the 1960s and 1970s were one response. Arguably one reason for the significance and lasting memory of Ken Livingstone’s GLC was that it was one of the few politically successful experiments in translating the diffuse but creative radicalism of the 1970s into a popular political programme. It was cut short in its prime. We all know what happened then. But perhaps now after 1 May the significance of what didn’t happen is coming home to roost for New Labour – and tragically for Londoners as a result of Ken’s political downsizing to rejoin the party he once loved.

What didn’t happen was the Labour Party grasping the importance of the GLC experiment – in all its messiness -and showing the possibility of transforming, opening and democratising state institutions, and translating this on to the national level. It could have been the basis of a direct challenge to Thatcher’s privatisation and Hood Robin approach to redistribution. Indeed Norman Tebbit saw the threat when he remarked of the GLC on the eve of its abolition: ’this is modern socialism and we will kill it.’ It’s no real comfort but there was in Livingstone’s extra 14 per cent support on 1 May, on top of Labour’s share national vote, a residue of that old potential to present a modern alternative.

Reactivate public service values

We on the radical but pragmatic left cannot now simply say ’I told you so.’ It’s mightily tempting. But we are in no position to come out of the wings with a perfectly formed alternative strategy and means of implementing it. But the belief in public service values are still there on the ground, as is much thinking and experimentation in renewing them. But they lie dormant, unnurtured, lacking champions and increasingly overgrown in the jungle of competitive, self-seeking values.

It’s not to late to reactivate them. Drawing together the scattered left, across party boundaries, we need to resist the persistent and pervasive intrusion of a narrow, desiccated commercial logic into every public space. And to resist by celebrating the values of cooperation, of human ingenuity meeting urgent sometimes desperate social needs, of the satisfaction of helping to resolve the problems of fellow citizens. These values are still daily enacted all over the place; in hospital intensive care units, in what’s left of youth services working innovatively with voluntary organisations, in councils that have blocked privatisation and developed means of genuine improvements and so on.

Everyone has their own personal stories of public services values being practiced, unsung, not only within the public sector but in voluntary organisations working long hours and in the face of almost impossible funding pressures. These values and the kind of practices keeping them alive against the odds need the mutual reinforcement of some kind of broad based national movement. Addressing this need is surely a condition for reviving the electoral fortunes of the Labour Party or indeed any party on the left.

Rethinking Political Parties

Ellie Keen — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 01:53:03 +0000

The need for radical social change is pressing and the desire for it widespread. Traditionally, political parties have been the means of giving shape, leadership and coherence to such desires. But in present circumstances they are simply not up to the task. There’s never been a golden age for parties of the left but there have been periods – the 1920s up till the late 1960s – when the majority of people desiring change in a broadly socialist direction would be members or supporters of mass socialist or communist parties.

The situation now is that by far the majority of people actively pursuing goals of social justice, equality, deeper democracy, a social and environmentally sustainable economy and a demilitarised politics are politically active without being members of political parties. I am too.

Like many others, I’m not anti-party. If I lived in Italy, Norway or Germany, for instance, I’d probably join Rifondazione Comunista, the Socialist Left Party (SV) or Die Linke. But I would not see party activity – at any rate not in the forms that it conventionally takes – as my main focus.

Yet the sum of extra-party, movement-oriented activity does not somehow add up to political change, even if it were more adequately co-ordinated. We cannot point to ‘social movements’ to get us out of a tight spot. It should be clear by now that movements come and go and cannot be evoked as some self-evident answer to the problem of creating effective agencies of social change.

At their most effective, progressive social movements radicalise public consciousness. Generally, however, they are unable to give these shifts in consciousness a wider political coherence. This means that the desire for change that such movements stimulate can be politically ambivalent, tapped by the right if these hopes don’t get political expression and coherent alternatives from the left.

Perhaps we need to experiment with hybrid forms of ‘movement party’ organisation, especially in a context in which the nation state, the traditional focus of political parties, can only be one of many focuses of political struggle. It is clear from experience, however, that so-called movement parties provide no simple answer. We’ve watched in dismay the movement dynamic behind parties such as the German Greens, and more significantly the Brazilian Workers Party nationally, being subordinated to the conservative pressures of conventional electoral politics, state institutions and the financial markets.

The unconscious foundations of political behaviour

This frustration prompts me to stand back and investigate some of the basic concepts involved in our thinking about change. Consider, for example, concepts of knowledge and its social organisation, of power and its plural sources, of representation and alternative models and, more fundamentally, of agency – how do we now interpret for our own times Marx’s famous remark about men making history but not in conditions of their own choosing ?

Just as the unconscious mind can determine a person’s behaviour, so with institutions : their behaviour can be shaped by unacknowledged assumptions rooted in their history. And just as individuals wanting to break from damaging patterns of behaviour try to subject those unconscious processes to critical analysis, so with organisations : the capacity consciously to innovate requires the identification of assumptions that underlie habitual political responses and their subjection to conscious debate.

Take three examples that have driven me to try to unearth assumptions underlying political behaviour.

First, there is the inability at many levels of the Labour Party (and not just among privatising evangelists) to recognise that public service workers and users could be driving forces for genuinely radical changes to our public services. I’ve often found that underlying this blindness are unexamined assumptions about the nature of knowledge that are in essence highly restrictive, elitist and mechanical.

The second example comes from the radical left. Consider the recurrent failure of what could be positive attempts by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) to initiate a broadly based political alternative to New Labour – first with the Socialist Alliance and then Respect. A fatal factor here is the SWP’s implicit concept of leadership and power, which seems blind – wilfully or otherwise – to the existence, relevance and potential power of a wide diversity of initiatives and traditions with common or overlapping political values, but autonomous from the SWP.

A third example has been part of my own unconscious in the past : an equation of ‘parliamentary socialism’ – the tragic fate of socialism in the Labour Party – and electoral politics. Here our unconscious has been influenced by an electoral system that has all but excluded the radical left and the Greens from political representation. The result has been very superficial thinking about what representation is for and a tendency to engage in electoral politics either with gritted teeth as something to be done every so often to gain a propaganda platform, or to be completely intoxicated by the experience of engagement with the public after years in the political ghetto, and to lose one’s critical faculties. Both responses have lost all historical sense of the struggles for the franchise and the possibilities for building on these victories with a new model of representation, opening up state institutions to the pressures of movements and conflicts outside the political class.

To begin such a tentative exploration of the political unconscious I draw on what I have learnt from the theory and practice of social and trade union movements over the past 30 years. I should explain at the outset my use of the concept of ‘transformation’ as it has only recently become part of English political debate. It is useful because it refers to forms of change that transform the basic structure of society or the institution under discussion ; it also leaves open the means of change, avoiding the problems of the polarisation between reform and revolution.

Rethinking power

The political thinking influenced by grass-roots movements distinguishes between two radically distinct meanings of power : power as transformative capacity and power as domination, as involving an asymmetry between those with power and those over whom power is exercised.

Historically the major parties of the left have tended to be built around a benevolent version of the second understanding of power : that is, around winning the power to govern and using it paternalistically to meet the needs of the people. This has shaped the nature of politics, concentrating it around legislation and state action. It has underpinned the position and self-conception of the political party as having a monopoly over political change. This in turn has meant that parties have tended to see the political role of movements as subordinate – a matter of lobbying, support and mobilising pressure behind legislative, parliamentary action spearheaded by the party.

The assertion of power as transformative capacity, first by the student, feminist, radical trade union and community movements of the late 1960-70s, and more recently by the global justice movement, broke with this narrow definition of politics. It led to a far wider understanding of the scope of politics, that is of efforts to end injustice and to realise the dignity and potential of all ; a scope way beyond the traditional focus on state, government and legislation, pervading all the relationships and institutions of our daily lives. The other side of this opening and deepening of the definition of politics has been an effective challenge to the party’s monopoly of the leadership of social change.

This understanding of power as transformative capacity is related to a distinct understanding of social change, implicit in the practice of the movements. Crucial here is the way that we started from our own circumstances and took personal responsibility for change by refusing to reproduce relations of oppression and exploitation – in our own lives and in our implicit complicity with it elsewhere, especially in the global South – and by struggling to create spaces for transformation and to at least illustrate alternative values.

This understanding was evident vividly in the women’s liberation movement, which directed its energies towards mobilising whatever resources it could to bring about change in the present, both in personal relationships and, closely connected, in the social and cultural environment that had reinforced women’s subordination. It made demands on the state for support but on the basis of its own alternatives and self-organisation. Similarly in the workplace, for a brief but inspirational period in the 1970s, the shopfloor organisations that had developed since the 1950s became the basis for real shifts in the balance of power in the management of factories and for alternative plans for industrial policy and reorganisation.

I’ve highlighted the radical dynamic of this approach to power. It can also stop at the level of personal change without making the wider connections that require a collective exercise of transformative power. This is clearly a central issue in addressing the causes of climate change.

As we know, the Labour Party did not take up these opportunities for radical social change at a national level. Local attempts to experiment with this new politics in the 1980s, most notably with the Greater London Council, were also swept aside. But this was not simply a matter of political ill will or reasoned disagreement ; it was the result of a complete incomprehension of a fundamentally different understanding of politics. The assumption that underpinned traditional parties of the left was that the state, government or party – the social subject – acted on the rest of society – the social object. This traditional but still influential model took insufficient account of the way in which change is coming from within society, the way in which those who were previously considered the objects of change are themselves actors for change, including self-change.

Structure and agency

I emphasise this because it is this political philosophy that underlies the inability of social democratic parties – and the Euro-communist parties, which essentially adopted their methods – to follow through whatever reforms they made in the early post-war period and turn them into a dynamic of social transformation. And the legacy of this traditional and flawed understanding of politics lingers on in the parties of the green and radical left.

A useful framework for deepening our critique and highlighting the importance of the new methodologies implicit in many of the social movements of recent years is provided by critical realism. This is a philosophical school that was itself a product of the political and cultural struggles of the 1960s and 1970s and provides a necessary alternative to both the limitations of structuralism and the dead ends of postmodernism.

The critical realist Roy Bhaskar makes a useful distinction between four planes of social being : human interaction with nature ; enduring social structures ; social interaction and relationships between individuals ; and the complexity of the personality. The dominant and governing traditions of socialism have focused on issues of social structure, often to the exclusion of the other three. Particularly relevant to the argument of this essay is their conflation of interaction and relationship between individuals with structure (there is not space here to deal with the political implications of the other two levels).

The traditions of socialism that have been the basis for powerful political parties have tended to treat human beings as the product of social structures to an extent that left little room for the potentialities – and pitfalls – of human agency. It was as if the complex and dynamic character of Marx’s thesis that we make our own history but not under conditions of our own choosing had been forgotten. The tendency was to assume that structural change – nationalisation of the leading companies, setting up the NHS and so on – was not only necessary but sufficient to bring about social transformation. This also meant treating structures as rigid constraints on what was possible and produced a conservatism that has become overwhelming in the face of corporate globalisation.

But if we distinguish between social structures and relations between individuals, we create a space for agency and the nature of constraints becomes more complex and more historically variable. At any moment in time, structures pre-exist individuals. They create constraints on our capacity for action. They also provide the means, the conditions, of our agency. We cannot act without them. On the other hand, structures cannot endure without the actions of the human beings who use them.

Thus, although we do not at any one time produce structures, we continually face choices about whether to reproduce or to transform them. In other words we can’t wake up in the morning and decide exactly what to do or what kind of society to create. But neither are we without the capacity to act as knowing subjects able to act on and alter the structures of which we are part. Dominant socialist traditions have tended to elide structure and agency ; indeed one reason for the feeble acquiescence of social democratic parties historically to the hostile pressure from both state and big business has been the fact that they never saw their members and supporters as knowing, creative agents of change with society, only as voters and supporters.

Changed understandings of knowledge

Closely associated with an understanding of transformative power are the distinctive understandings of knowledge influenced by movement-based politics. In good part as a result of this politics and – not unrelated – developments in the philosophy of science, we are increasingly aware of the plural sources of knowledge : as tacit, practical and experiential as well as scientific. We are working increasingly with complexity, ambivalence and uncertainty.

This does not imply a postmodern, relativistic notion that anything goes, that there are no independent grounds for judging arguments. On the contrary, it implies that supposedly ‘postmodern’ concepts like ‘deconstruction’ and a recognition of the many perspectives from which a single phenomenon can be understood must be reclaimed as tools for analysing and changing a complex real world.

These new understandings of knowledge point towards an emphasis on the horizontal sharing and exchange of knowledge and collaborative attempts to build connected alternatives and shared memories. They stress the gaining of knowledge as a process of discovery and therefore see political action, the exercise of transformative power, as itself a source of knowledge, revealing unpredicted problems or opportunities. This implies a self-consciousness of the sense in which actions are also experiments and therefore the need for spaces and times for open reflection on, argument over and synthesis of different experiences.

This recognition of the importance of experiential and practical knowledge deepens the nature of debate. It implies debate driven not so much by the struggle for positions of power as by a search for truth about the complexity of social change, a production of collaborative knowledge that itself becomes a source of power.

The Social Forum process internationally is perhaps the most important and appropriately transnational experiment so far in finding ways of sharing ideas rooted in both experience and different political traditions. Like any experiment it is messy and uneven but contains crucial lessons from which any rethinking of the party and the development of political programmes must learn.

New models of political representation : Latin America

Where do these notes on rethinking power, knowledge, agency and structure lead in terms of rethinking political parties ? Here all that I can do is to note some pointers and ask some questions.

A first implication of the analysis of power as transformative capacity is that action in and around political institutions is but one – albeit crucial – sphere of action and struggle for fundamental change. But are there any implications for the direction and content of such action ?

In general terms one can say that the goal must move from winning the power to govern for the people paternalistically to being a struggle in collaboration with organised citizens to change political institutions from sources of domination to resources for transformation. What does this mean in practice ?

It is an approach best illustrated by experiments in Latin America : Workers Party-controlled local authorities in Brazil, the MAS government in Bolivia and the Bolivarian process in Venezuela, where parties (or, in the latter case, a leader) winning elections have then used their democratic legitimacy to attempt to reach out beyond parliamentary institutions and strengthen popular control over the state institutions, trying to turn them into public resources for change controlled by a combination of participatory democracy and elected politicians.

These experiences are answering the question of what political representation is for with a new model of representation. This is one that, after the struggles against dictatorship or extreme forms of corruption and oligarchic rule, takes elections and representative democracy seriously, not as a sufficient definition of democracy but rather as one part of a strategy for more radical democratic – including economic – transformation.

A key element in making this possible has been the existence in most parts of Latin America of strong and for the most part highly politically conscious forms of popular democracy or non-state sources of democratic power – in neighbourhood organisations, movements of the landless and indigenous people, and radical trade union organisations. (This is one reason why the commercial media have much less effective political influence in these countries than in the global North, in spite of their best and most insidious efforts to influence hearts and minds.)

In these circumstances the distinctive contribution of radical left political parties, at their most innovative, has been to open up the institutions, to redistribute power, to facilitate a sharing of power with organised citizens, and to stimulate and support new institutions of public participation in control over state power. They have sought to straddle the political institutions on the one hand and the conflicts and emergent sources of power in society on the other. The logic is to work both in and against the institutions and with autonomous movements and social conflicts to open up and democratise the institutions. Encouraging non-state sources of democratic power has been a necessary part of this process.

Non-state sources of democratic power

This idea of non-state sources of democratic power is crucial to rethinking the party. The key point is this : while radical mass movements, from those of the 1970s to the recent anti-war movement, have not been sustained, there is widespread evidence of efforts to create lasting sources of democratic power autonomous from the state – movements with sustained institutions that have a democratic legitimacy in the face of discredited established political institutions.

Again, some of the most developed examples are from Latin America, such as the landless movement (MST) in Brazil. Other examples include transnational networks like the ‘Hemispheric Social Alliance’ that provide a force for accountability on global institutions and corporations that have escaped the conventional mechanisms of parliamentary accountability.

These organisations are more than ephemeral campaigns. They are trying to create different kinds of relationships here and now, based on principles of participatory democracy, and at the same time building democratic power to challenge and transform institutions driven by private profit or bureaucratic self-interest.

We have to ponder critically how relevant the Latin American experience is for Europe. One problem we face in the North is the way parliamentary democracy and a symbiotically related media has developed an immense capacity simultaneously to incorporate and marginalise all such extra-parliamentary efforts at radical democracy. But as national and local state institutions lose their legitimacy, some are breaking through. The strengthening of these grassroots-based forms of democratic power, including their connection and exchange of ideas and organisational lessons with each other, is essential to the idea of a new, transformative model of political representation along the lines exemplified in Latin America. This political organising at the base is a priority on which many of us could agree whether we are members of a party or not.

Another lesson we can learn from a critical understanding of Latin American experiences – and some European ones too – is how electoral activity can be an extension of movement politics. It faces all kinds of pitfalls but also imposes disciplines and provides the stimuli of translating transformative politics into practical and widely accessible alternatives. The conditions may not be of our choosing but through a collaborative and engaged rethinking, inspired by a wide range of historical and present day experiences, we can indeed still make history.

Hilary Wainwright’s essay was first presented at a Transform ! Italia seminar in Rome. You can join the debate at the Red Pepper forum

The commons, the state and transformative politics

JamieSW — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 17:31:51 +0000

The resistance to the G8 in Rostok in June this year had a particularly varied and energetic character. A massive international demonstration converging from all quarters of the town. Camps, communal kitchens and alternative forums. Clowns and samba bands. Confrontations with the police. A disciplined and imaginative non-violent disruption of the summit, which even the Financial Times judged to have been successful.

Among those taking part were a group of around thirty activist intellectuals from Europe, Latin America and North America who met Berlin in the spacious rooms of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation near some well-graffiti’d stumps of the Wall. It was the fourth seminar of the ‘Networked Politics’ series, an international inquiry into ‘rethinking political organisation in an era of movements and networks’.

We had come together and formulated our common search mainly through the European and World Social Forums. A distinctive focus has been the influences of developments in information technology on different levels of transformative politics, practical and conceptual. In some ways these developments deepen the pre-web ways in which many of us were both rethinking political organisation (inspired by the non-hierarchical, networked practices of the women’s movement) and reformulating common ownership (inspired by the creative trade unionism of groups like the shop stewards at Lucas Aerospace with their ‘alternative plan for socially useful production’). At the same time, the impact of information technology is stimulating entirely new trains of thought.

The discussions in Berlin included an exploration of the implications of internet technology for the three major issues of our inquiry: the commons and the public; labour and social movements; political representation and democracy.

The commons and the public

Arturo di Corinto, a sharp and ebullient Italian media activist, writer and film-maker, set out a bold vision of free software as a common resource: ‘Thanks to its characteristics, the free software is a distributed property that is capable of evolving into a common good’, he declared.

The characteristics of free software, he went on to argue, give it the character of a virtual commons: freely accessible, non-exclusive, something which everyone can make use of, even if they have not participated directly in its creation; bringing together producers and users; its quality is enhanced by its use; the community of open soft developers is based on certain rules of self-organisation, leading to the emergence of a complex system.

He was interrogated by Glenn Jenkins, a puckish character whose insights have been honed by prolonged struggle on a neglected estate on the periphery of Luton to turn disused land and buildings into commons, and in turn use them as a base from which to reassert common control over local services. Glenn’s arguments and experiences raise questions of how the commons relates to the state, notably state services and resources. The Exodus Collective squatted empty buildings and eventually won their demands for public money – unemployment and housing benefits – to go towards sustaining their co-operatively managed housing rather than into the pockets of private landlords. They went on to work with an alliance of community groups in setting up the Marsh Farm Community Trust to invest £50 million New Deal for Community money over ten years to regenerate an estate all but abandoned by government and local authority alike.

As he told his story, the question became: can state services ever be transformed into a commons? The idea of the commons refers to how shared resources are managed, implying open access, collaborate self-management by those who use a resource and those who provide it. A state service can be very inaccessible and its forms of management exceedingly distant and alienated from both users and providers. Many of those who first thought up the idea of the welfare state imagined they were creating common goods. But the framework of representative democracy has been too far removed from those who used and provided the services day to day. As Glenn and other residents of Marsh Farm found fifty years after their public estate was built, a state resource was not in reality a common resource; its ‘public’ facilities managed by the public officials in the name of the people but several steps removed from the actual community whose interests state resources should have served.

Can ideas, both inspirational metaphors and actual experiences, from the free software movement provide any guide for turning public services into commons? A teasing repartee developed between Arturo and Glenn. But behind it was a serious issue of what the points of convergence and connection there might be between the virtual commons and the material commons.

One connecting theme concerns the social and individual use and development of knowledge. And this is important for the question of state services becoming commons because the organisation of knowledge is fundamental to the possibilities of genuine democratic control. The virtual commons is based on the open, shared and collaborative – as well as individually creative – development of knowledge, valuing the knowledge of producer and user and working with processes by which they can interact. This could provide a basis for remaking the ‘public’ as a commons that promises a more sustainable alternative to the encroachments of the private than does any defence of the public in its original form.

Historically, the organisation of knowledge in ‘public’ spheres – public services, public administration, public industry – has been based on a hierarchical, bureaucratic and individualistic approach to knowledge, separating the producer or provider from the user, protecting rigid boundaries between different kinds of knowledge, working with a strongly proprietorial approach in terms of institutional ownership. (The predominant approach to knowledge of the private corporations which are increasingly taking over the public has loosened up internally, with more interactive, informal forms of management, more horizontal flows within the company but the imperatives of commerce and profit make them have secretive and exclusive about access to, the development of, knowledge). The notion of a public good that isn’t in some sense a common good is becoming less and less sustainable.

Remaking public services

In the Northern hemisphere today there are not now many live sources of inspiration for a vision of the commons, for creative collaboration between users and producers underpinning a genuinely common ownership of the service or natural or built resource. (In the South, of course there is, in the indigenous approach to land and natural resources, and the deep and widespread legacy of those traditions evident in strong social movements like the landless workers’ Movimento Sem Terra in Brazil which not only struggle for land reform but through occupations and co-operative agriculture create new economic commons.) In the North the virtual commons provides a powerful for rethinking the public (or conceptualising the rethinking that is in practice taking place) as the commons.

The idea of development through mutual use is especially suggestive. To apply this to public services like education, health and so on highlights the way that the effectiveness and innovative capacity of these knowledge-based services depends on a collaboration between users and producers/providers, thereby treating users and public sector workers (not just the managers or experts) as knowledgeable collaborators in a developmental process.

This points therefore to the need for new more directly participative and power-sharing forms of organisation through which such collaboration can be achieved. This assumes that the service user potentially has the creative capacity to recognise a problem and help in the process of identifying a solution through a collaborative process. (This is in stark contrast to the traditional idea of ‘the delivery’ of public services to a more or less passive public). Here, free and open software is not just an inspirational metaphor but also a material tool for facilitating this kind of collaboration between individual users and public sector workers, shifting the balance of power from centralised public service management towards the user and the skilled service provider. It is also a tool for shifting co-ordination between different parts of a public service, moving us from a hierarchical to a co-operative model. This in turn will allow for greater autonomy in the local provision of local services under active local control while at the same time collaborating and co-ordinating across a wider territory.

Both these new possibilities opened up by free software can only be realised here in the UK, if two elementary moves are made towards renewing public services as material commons. A first condition is that public service workers have the dignity, time, the training and the rights of co-management to be able to collaborate meaningfully with service users; the second is a remaking of local government, so that, having become little more than a plethora of partnerships dependent on national funding streams and on complying with nationally imposed targets, it is transformed into a democratically elected body with strategic powers and a budget of its own that can be the subject of participatory power-sharing with local citizens. The first condition involves a rethinking and reasserting of labour as social, co-operative process and itself potentially a commons. (In the present capitalist economy, including the state sector, it could be called a ‘hidden commons’ whereby the co-operative nature of labour is distorted by pressures to maximise profit – or in the state sector by the legacy of hierarchical, military forms of administration). The second requires reflection on the kind of political institutions and forms of democracy that create the conditions for democratic self-management and common access to public resources to flourish.

Rediscovering social creativity

Marco Berlinguer of Transform! Italia coordinates the Lavoro in Movimento project which links social movements and the different parts of the Italian General Confederation of Labour (CGIL). He argued forcefully that to recreate politics we need to rediscover labour. How far and in what way can labour help to give a radical and sustainable coherence to the diverse sources of resistance to globalisation?

An important response came from Carlo Formenti, a constantly inquiring person who once worked as a trade unionist in engineering in Northern Italy and is now a professor of new media theory in Lecce. He argued that modern-day capitalism is only capable of reproducing its rule by taking language, communications, emotions and feelings and ‘putting them to work.’ He gave the example of the web ‘communities’ like MySpace and YouTube that are initiated or taken over by corporations. People engage in these ‘communities’ innocently, playfully, with little sense of them as commercial activities. Yet, in reality this growing expression of sociality is being used to map and profile markets, turning these ‘communities’ into lucrative targeted marketed places – the very opposite of innocent social interaction. It’s an example of the way that the commons we create freely in our daily sociality are invaded, ‘enclosed’ by the corporate, uncontrollable market. (I qualify the concept of ‘the market‘ to be clear about the problem: the threat to the commons is not ‘the market’ in some general and abstract sense but the oligopolistic, corporate-driven character of contemporary capitalism).

Formenti took me back to Marx’s original understanding of labour in terms of social creativity, the creative capacity of the human as a social being. This social nature of labour’s productivity leads to an understanding of labour as itself part of the commons. This in turn underpins the original arguments for common ownership of the means of production. But our discussion went beyond an account of the expropriation of this social creativity directly in production and considered many further ways in which capitalist production utilises and constricts social creativity in the process of ensuring capital accumulation and domination. What Formenti is pointing to is the distinct form of commercialisation, and consequent suppression of creative capacity, characteristic of contemporary capitalism. This wider understanding of labour, pointing beyond the direct capitalist-waged worker relation, surely provides a potential for rethinking the role of labour – social creativity – both in connecting different forms of resistance, and in long-term our vision of the democratic self-management of the commons.

This broader understanding of capitalist suppression of social creativity (which includes of course sociality, autonomy, reflexivity and all the elements and conditions for exercising such human potential) has always been an important theme in the women’s movement. As the Canadian writer and rabble rouser Judy Rebick pointed out, feminists have long argued that under capitalism, housework and care for children and partners became ‘domestic labour’, the reproduction of labour-power, carried out under an oppressive division of labour in which creative relations of love and solidarity are distorted by the constraining context and pressures of gender domination and wage-labour. An issue for detailed thinking about the organisation of the commons therefore concerns how to organise common facilities for childcare and other forms of domestic labour in ways that enable people’s personal relations, including with children, to flourish.

Similarly, the privatisation of public services has entailed the appropriation of labour though bureaucratisation and distortion by the wider pressures of the capitalist market. Public provision had important ethical foundations of creativity in the service of the public good. In some ways the strong persistence of a public service ethic is a continued but unrealised belief in common goods and the original idea among those providing these goods that such was the common purpose animating the welfare state.

The contradictions of contemporary capitalism

The ambivalent effect of web technology is that, on the one hand, it has been a pervasive means of commodifying people’s free relations, behind their backs as it were; but on the other hand there is a reverse process. Through a variety of methods (peer-to-peer downloading, websites sharing/exchanging labour or services in kind, the spreading, promoting and lubricating of the social economy), the web is also a massively powerful means of lessening dependence on the capitalist market, spreading on an unprecedented scale the idea and example of common goods and free knowledge and culture into spheres that were previously thoroughly commodified. The same technology that is facilitating relentless efforts to stimulate new markets and realise profits from the huge leaps in productivity, and with it huge leaps in stress and work intensification, is also enabling those who are victims of the stresses of intensified production to see and test for themselves the possibilities of breaking out of the economic relations that are producing rampant commercialism and overwork.

The full realisation of these possibilities will require all sorts of structural changes including, no doubt, a basic income for all – a condition perhaps for an economy of the commons? But the point here is that a new potential exists for connecting resistance and alternatives around issues of culture, consumption and daily life with organisation around the dignity and control of work. Where does this lead? We can’t be sure, but it points at least to an underlying connection between struggles around varieties of labour to spreading or creating the conditions for autonomous social creativity – the emerging social economy, promoting free software and resisting the commercialisation of the web.

This emphasis on a shared but necessarily networked struggle for the conditions of social creativity also marks the break – which has been implicit since 1968 – from a traditional socialist focus on questions of structure to addressing questions of social interaction, the development of the individual personality, and sustainable relations with nature, all of which bring us back to the question of the commons. It seems to me that the revival of interest in the idea of the commons is actually about an urge to return to the original aspiration of socialism, with a new language and under new conditions – the new awareness of the social character of knowledge, the urgent sense of a common environment under threat, the de-socialisation of significant labour processes. But that original aspiration remains relevant: the common, associative management of the ‘common treasury of the world’, and the common ownership and control of the means and processes of production. As well as being a search for what this means in an age of globalisations, the revival of the idea of the commons is also a reaction against the ways in which, during the twentieth century especially, state and party institutions have mediated, appropriated and substituted themselves for the complexity and dynamism of these ideals, beyond all recognition.

Whether ‘the commons’ is counter-posed to the state or used as a language for transforming the state depends to a degree on different national experiences. Rather than thinking of the commons as a delimited sphere, between market and state, I would view it as a goal of transformation for the organisation of both all social resources, including labour, that can always be pre-figured in and against the actually existing institutions of market and state. This leads naturally to the issue of political representation, which of course needs space of its own and is only beginning to be explored in the context of the question of the commons.

Democracy beyond representation

Our discussions on political representation have been searching for a new model of engagement with the state. Our starting point has been the nature of the autonomy of social movements from political parties and institutions. Given the history of the ideal of the commons in the hands of the state, the question of autonomy, and then of what kind of relationship to build on the basis of autonomy, is central.

I want to suggest that the distinctive contribution of left political parties, or their representatives in political institutions, should be to open up the institutions, to redistribute power outside them so that it can be shared and support new institutions and new relationships of control over state power. Their distinctive position is thus one of straddling the political institutions on the one hand and the conflicts and emergent sources of power in society on the other. The aim must be to both open up and democratise the institutions and, as a necessary part of this process, to encourage and support emerging institutions based on deeper forms of democracy and the principles and practices of the commons. A classic example would be the power-sharing of participatory budgeting in municipalities in Brazil and now in parts of Europe, and its relation to the growing social economy in both continents. But there are many other examples.

What are the conditions and presuppositions of such an understanding of political representation? I will just mention one here: it concerns the emergence of non-state sources of democratic power. It’s a concept that needs further debate on another occasion but the point is this: while radical mass movements have not been sustained 1970s-style or Seattle-style or anti-war-February-15th-style, but what is striking is a need to create lasting sources of sources of democratic power autonomous from the state: democratic institutions that go beyond, but are often an outcome of, movements.

I’m thinking here in the UK of developments like London Citizens; or union branches like those fighting for alternatives to privatisation taking on a responsibility for the public interest that has been vacated by elected politicians; community organisations which similarly take on a public responsibility to propose solutions for estates and neighbourhoods abandoned by the political class; asylum seeker and refugee organisations that go well beyond campaigning to provide an infrastructure of support and defence; the global networks like ‘Our World is Not for Sale’ that provide a force for accountability on global institutions and corporation that have escaped the conventional mechanisms of parliamentary accountability. It’s probably a world-wide phenomenon taking many different forms; certainly I’ve observed it in parts of Latin America and Europe and even in the UK. And this is what convinces me of its distinctive, emergent character – if something innovative happens across so many places, there must be something going on.

We are not talking here about relying only on direct democracy and popular power – these struggles need and want support from within the institutions, hence an opening and democratisation of existing political institutions. But we are talking about phenomena that are more than movements and ephemeral campaigns. They are trying to create different kinds of relationships here and now, based on principles of the commons, and at the same time building democratic power to challenge and transform institutions driven by private profit or bureaucratic self-interest. Any rethinking of public administrations, political economy or political organisation must make these actual experiments in co-operation and democratic power one of its starting points.

Discussion papers and further details of the Networked Politics project can be found at www.networked-politics.info. See also www.tni.org and www.transformitalia.it. This article also appears in Renewal: A Journal of Social Democracy

Any Respect Left?

Ellie Keen — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 00:16:12 +0000

The gap to the left of Labour grows ever wider, but once again the left has failed even to lay down even a solid foundation stone towards filling it. Witness the implosion of Respect, with two rival meetings this Saturday.

Can anything be learned for the future or is this simply a moment of despair?

Personally, I didn’t invest energy in Respect, beyond cheering Galloway’s victory in a BBC studio on election night. I’d learned the hard way in the Socialist Alliance that the SWP leadership was not going to abandon its sectarian determination always to build itself rather than put its considerable capacities into the building of a far more broadly based and plural political voice of the left. And to be honest, although I was impressed by Galloway’s oratorical skills, my feminism, my instinctive dislike of leaderism and my aghast observations of the Scargill and then the Sheridan debacles made me wary of an organisation that depended so much on a hero.

But it’s not all bad. There are positive lessons as well as negative ones, especially if one looks beyond London (always a good idea). In Preston and Birmingham, Respect branches have begun to practice a different kind of politics, different both from the varieties of parliamentary socialism and from the vanguardist pretensions of the SWP leadership.

When Michael Lavalette became a councillor, initially for the Socialist Alliance and then Respect, in an inner city ward of Preston, he found that no Labour councillors held individual surgeries. He made it one of his first priorities to take up personal cases by making connections with national and international issues. His method was to be available where people gather, from the Catholic church and the mosque to trade union and community meetings. As well as having a massive caseload, he and an alliance of left Labour (and sometimes Liberal Democrat) councillors have won numerous victories, through a mixture of campaigning pressure outside the council and shrewd alliance-building inside it. Over 50% of resolutions proposed by Lavalette have been successful, including an environmental audit of all council policies, a commitment to an integrated transport system, and the successful blocking of the South African multinational Netcare’s involvement in the local hospital. He is one of two SWP members on Respect’s local branch committee of six, and very insistent on the SWP’s role as a minority in a much wider coalition. Salma Yaqoob and Mohammed Ishtiaq work in a similar way in Birmingham, working with community and trade union campaigns and challenging the council leadership on issues on which everyone else is silent, for instance the damaging consequences of the private finance initiative for the city.

Here are two experiments in creating a new politics, giving discontent a political voice at a time when critical opinion otherwise gets drowned in an apolitical miasma of consultations, partnerships, targets and overstressed voluntary organisations, bogged down in bidding for funds to meet basic social needs.

The point of drawing attention to these is not to create a warm feeling in a cold climate, nor to polish the tarnished image of Respect(s): similar examples could be drawn from the work of Socialist party councillors in Coventry or the Independent Working Class Organisation councillors in Oxford, Green party councillors in Brighton and so on.

The point for me about such local experiments is that they are effective because they are answer questions that we (“we” being a wide spectrum of independent and open-minded pluralist socialists) must face if we are to effectively develop an organised political force. (And here I am leaving aside for the moment the urgent need for a proportional electoral system.)

First, what is the point of a political party? As we answer this we should bear in mind two important features of the present situation. On the one hand, there is the serious crisis of the institutions of representative democracy. Any political party of the left that is not in control of its own identity and aware of its independence from these institutions can become controlled by them – a factor in the Respect debacle.

On the other hand, in this age of social movements and networks, a political party has no monopoly over the process of social change. A party of the left must have its fulcrum in the movements and networks that have been built up in the past decades outside political institutions, but must at the same time promote the demands and needs of these struggles within and against these institutions, seeking all the time to open them up and redistribute power outwards. This is how Lavalette and Yaqoob are interpreting the role of Respect, building it as a federal coalition without seeking to corral it into one organisation.

So the second question is how do we build a political party that is modest in its role, rooted in society and social conflicts, not imprisoned in the institutions, plural and open in its culture, democratic in its internal structures and participatory in its recognition of the capacity and knowledge of all? The brevity required by the art of blogging requires me to leave this as an open question (see the forthcoming Red Pepper for an extended analysis of the Respect story, by Alex Nunns). But a test of whether either of the remnants of Respect who meet tomorrow are capable of learning from their process of self-destruction will be whether such principles are explicitly agreed.

Fresh Spice: Red Pepper old and new

christian — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 00:49:04 +0000

In 1988 a leader in the Independent declared that if there was a party representing the left politics of those gathering at that October’s Socialist Conference in Chesterfield (the movement that was eventually to give birth to Red Pepper) it could gain up to 15 per cent of the vote, writes Hilary Wainwright. Some of us involved in the Socialist Conference, including Ralph Miliband, father of current cabinet members David and Ed, strongly believed in the need for such a party and for the electoral reform that would enable it to thrive.

But we also understood that its emergence was not a matter of political will: it depended on factors we could nether predict nor engineer. In the meantime it was important that like-minded socialists campaign, think and debate together across organisational boundaries. As Labour moved steadily to the right, however, seeking persistently to marginalise the left, we had a growing sense of the disenfranchisement of all those who resisted the Thatcherite consensus.

What was to be done? We needed a voice, independent of any political party, for the socialist, green, feminist politics shared by people from a wide range of political backgrounds – though interpreted in a variety of ways. From this need Red Pepper was born.

In this way Red Pepper has always been more than a magazine. However, being effective as a magazine – attractive, readable, provocative and truthful, using the best techniques of effective communication that we could afford – has always been necessary to our political goal of taking the left outside the ghetto in which our enemies try so hard to confine us.

Nearly two decades on from the Socialist Conferences and 13 years since the first Red Pepper, our political goals have developed and our means of communication have leapt ahead qualitatively (in the first years of Red Pepper, I was delivering my copy to Denise Searle, our founding editor, by hand or post). [Hilary now delivers it by email, which has slowed down the editorial process so much that the magazine has been forced to go bimonthly.]

Experiences of radical left parties in government, whether Brazil’s Workers Party, Italy’s Rifondazione Comunista or Germany’s Greens focused my thinking on something I knew but hadn’t thought through: that social movements (including labour movements) plus a political voice don’t of themselves bring about change. The constraining weight of state institutions with all their bonds with economic power – national and international – and the tendency of political parties, however historically radical, to tie their future to an unconditional presence in these institutions – directed my attention beyond questions of voice to those of how to strengthen a political sphere autonomous from the state.

An independent means of communication such as Red Pepper is one obvious, if modest, tool for such a purpose. After all, autonomy depends on there being the means of developing common values, understandings and organisational, creative and solidaristic bonds across the variety of movements and struggles against injustice. We are attempting to achieve this in circumstances in which the dominant political cultures suck all political energies upwards into the maelstrom of institutional and vertical politics. But Red Pepper itself needs a bit of retooling to be really useful in such a complex process.

So let me clarify this autonomy business a little. From the trade unions, through the women’s movement to the alter-globalisation networks, there has always been an insistence on autonomy. Autonomy from the state and from other ruling institutions is a condition for resistance and struggle. It is a condition, too, for imagining, illustrating and creating alternatives. In contexts such as our own in the UK, where the vote has been struggled for and won – however weakened and blunted its power – autonomy must also be the basis of engagement with the state as well as opposition: a source of deeper forms of democratic power and simultaneously a protection against institutional blandishments and repression. It must be a basis for being both ‘in and against the state’.

The difficulty and counter-conventional character of developing such horizontally bonded political life cannot be over emphasised.The effective destruction of the emerging movement that the left created in France around the European ‘no’ is but the latest example of the destructive weight of national, vertical politics.The history of the left in the UK is littered with the skeletons of movements or would-be movements drawn away from their potential base by the institutional pulling power of national parliamentary politics. (The democratic left pressure group Compass is in danger of being the latest victim.)

The new communication technologies provide us with hugely important tools for strengthening and deepening our criss-crossing forms of politics, though with many risks and ambiguities. But of course technological tools are never sufficient.

There are sometimes mind-sets that can hold back the potential for political innovation. One such has been the over-polarisation of the notions of ‘reform’ and ‘revolution’: the source of many a political muddle. Since 1967 I’ve seen myself as a revolutionary in the sense of committing myself to work for the end of an iniquitous economic system in which the few profit from the labour and, on a global scale, the destitution of the many. But in the past 40 years I’ve also learnt that the way people struggle against this system and all its ramifications doesn’t easily fit into the dichotomy of reform versus revolution.

There is, as Paul Mason puts it, ‘a political space between reform and revolution – so pesky to the ideologists of social democracy and communism’. It involves the constant struggle for control ‘either in the workplace or the community or even in [people’s] own personal lives: less than revolution, more than top-down reform’. For me, Red Pepper is in that political space, supporting struggles for popular control, helping them interconnect and develop their own perspectives and their capacity to develop alternative social institutions and to be able to defend and advance these alternatives in the face of the vicious attacks they will face. An alternative to capitalism can only emerge from such a process.

What does that mean for the here and now?

This requires a quick take on whether Brown’s premiership creates more favourable conditions for this struggle for popular control. (Let us agree that he is not of his own accord going to offer anything significant by way of progressive change.) My take goes back to 1997.This was a moment that contained the potential for real change.

The majority of the people who voted that new government into office thought they were putting an end to nearly two decades of Thatcherism – we don’t need to rehearse what that meant. But New Labour was courting the centre and centre right with Blatcherism and was so focused on exorcising the left from the image and reality of the Labour Party that its proponents had no understanding of the strength of the desire for real change. We all know that story, spelt out in all its arrogant thuggery in the ubiquitous diaries of spin.

The hidden story, though, is of what happened to those expectations. They’ve never gone away. But their expression has been dispersed and uncertain. It includes the election of a series of left trade union leaders, in some cases completely unexpectedly, and now the emergence of entirely new forms of labour organising (see Jane Wills). The election of Ken Livingstone, which Tony Blair pulled out every stop to try to prevent, is another example. The many hundreds of thousands, millions perhaps, who poured on to the streets in protest against war in Iraq is another. So too are the numerous refusals of council tenants to vote for the transfer of their houses.

There’s also the popularity of radical films, music and art; the beneath-the-radar struggles against privatisation of local government services, the health service and education that are also often linked to struggles for the democratisation of those services and local government; the growing support for radical constitutional reform; the bold actions inspired by the alter-globalisation movement on environmental issues and issues of direct international solidarity; the anti-corporate sentiment emerging around many aspects of daily consumption. And so on.

They do not add up to a coherent movement and it is not Red Pepper’s job to corral them to do so. But neither does all this indicate that people are inclined to knock meekly on the doors of the government. They have learnt mistrust the hard way.

The new Red Pepper as magazine aims to provide a space for sharing and debating the alternative strategies that are emerging from those unfulfilled hopes for change, and for drawing on international experience to nourish these debates. It will give a platform for campaigns that lack media outlets over which they have control, a gallery and a stage for artistic endeavours in all media that open up new questions and refresh our sense of possibility.

The new Red Pepper as a website will provide tools for activist networking and debate to help produce the powerful sense of common purpose that we need to keep our nerve, occupy any new spaces opened up by the uncertainty of the Brown government and above all build our autonomy to resist and to propose.

Lessons of Porto Allegre

eddie — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 14:28:53 +0000

Last week, when Hazel Blears announced plans for participatory budgeting – people organising themselves with council support to help decide local public spending priorities – she did so with a very significant statement. “We are now at a tipping point where there is a will right across government to devolve power,” she said, pointing to the success of experiments elsewhere, most notably in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre.

Devolving power is one of those feel-good phrases that need to be considered critically if we are to make the most of such announcements. The problem with devolved power is that it can easily be revoked. This is particularly the case if the power and resources of local government are not increased. So how can participatory budgeting – which, Blears insisted, is “not just consultation” – become a foundation stone of a renewed democracy?

It is worth looking more closely at what can be learned from the Brazilian experience. Direct popular participation in decisions over the municipality’s budget for new investments earned Porto Alegre a United Nations prize as the world’s most habitable city, led to a significant redistribution of resources to the poor, and caused such an improvement in the general quality of life that middle-class citizens accepted a tax increase.

As a means of monitoring investments as well as deciding on them, the participatory budget contributed to an impressive improvement in the infrastructure and services as well as in the transparency and efficiency of financial systems. It also proved to be a strong defence against the pressure to privatise public services.

Since 1989 the participatory budgeting process in Porto Alegre has been built up steadily, renegotiated by citizens and the municipal government every year. Three important principles underpin the process: first, it is city-wide – citizens meet in open assemblies in their neighbourhoods and debate and vote on local priorities, which are then negotiated across neighbourhoods; second, the negotiation takes place on the basis of a set of agreed criteria of need and population size and through a transparent, regular cycle of meetings; third, every citizen has the right to be directly involved through the election of a representative to the neighbourhood assembly.

A striking feature of the Brazilian experience is the high level of support that municipalities give to the process. In Porto Alegre teams of community organisers and popular educators have been involved in training citizens in “budget literacy” – reaching young people, the disabled, the elderly, ethnic minorities and others who might be inhibited from participating – and working with them to help them prepare their proposals.

A basic institutional contrast between the British and the Brazilian experiences is highlighted by a World Bank report on Porto Alegre, which notes that municipalities in Brazil have “considerable autonomy over their revenues and expenditures”. This is fundamental to the embedded nature of the process. Locally elected municipalities will find it difficult to take away power from an active and autonomously organised citizenry.

A recent Mori poll indicated that there is significant public support for direct involvement in budget decision-making. The Blears proposals need to build on this support in a way that avoids simply institutionalising small expectations, but rather strengthens the challenge to inequalities both within towns and cities and on a national scale.

Hilary Wainwright is the author of Reclaim the State: Experiments in Popular Democracy

hilary@redpepper.org.uk

What next? - Rebuilding the British Left

Alex Doherty — Sun, 20 May 2007 18:26:37 +0000

It’s a paradox that the architect of New Labour has been the beneficiary of a slow-motion revolt against many consequences of his creation. Gordon Brown will be prime minister not only because of a politically cleansed parliamentary Labour party, MPs’ fear of a divided party and the left’s failure to get its act together; he will also be in No 10 because Blair had become an electoral liability. MPs knew voters had had enough of war and occupation, rampant privatisation and political sleaze.

On the surface, it looks like he will talk of change to ensure that the basic direction of the government remains pretty much the same. But it is not enough for the left just to be sceptical and carry on as before. Reflecting strategically on the conditions of Blair’s departure means identifying the contradictions in Brown’s present positions and exploring the kind of actions that could break through these limits.

In addition to Iraq, Blair’s departure is about the disintegration of Brown’s distinctive formula of relying on market economics to achieve social ends. Every positive social achievement of this government is overshadowed by a negative. This is not just a matter of a symmetrical balance sheet; not only do the positive achievements tend to be micro measures, but the negative side of the balance sheet presents structural limits on the changes that any number of incremental measures can bring about.

The chancellor’s redistribution through tax credits and similar initiatives has helped stem the growth of income inequality at the bottom end. But the means Brown chose to build a “strong” economy – strengthened private markets with maximum returns on private investment – has meant inequalities are worse today than when New Labour took office. Similarly, the increase in public spending, especially on health and education, is constantly undermined by a misconceived reliance on private business, resulting in a roll-call of social inefficiencies, damaging fragmentation and escalating costs.

There’s no lack of locally effective protests in the face of all this. But how can they develop to have a sustained impact on the government? Learning from the past 10 years of where resistance has been most effective and from international successes against market-led politics, I’d make three suggestions.

First the widespread local action around privatisation, social housing, environmental issues and city regeneration needs more resources and support if it is to have the national impact it deserves. Organisations with infrastructure and resources, notably the trade unions and more radical NGOs and churches, could and sometimes are responding to this need. The campaign Defend Council Housing is something of a model, building a powerful national body with strong union and parliamentary support and a key role being played by tenants and community organisations across the country, and socialist organisations playing a facilitating rather than a sectarian role.

Unions need to drop their caution and misplaced reliance on behind-the-scenes deals with government. Instead, they should become the backbone of national movements such as Keep the NHS Public, radical networks campaigning around waste, transport and other environmental issues and the growing movement for participatory, rather than privatised, forms of local government.

Second, an emphasis on developing alternatives and movements that nurture ideas. We should heed Milton’s insistence that “much argument, much writing, many opinions is but knowledge in the making”. A party that discourages argument produces a political culture hostile to experimental thinking. But in many towns and cities unions and community groups are generating practical ideas for alternatives to the marketisation of public services. These examples need to be publicised, learned from and generalised.

What could be the electoral repercussions of such movements? It must be clear after this week’s events that we can’t expect a lead from the parliamentary Labour party. Action elsewhere has to be reflected there, but the dynamism has to be extra-parliamentary.

This isn’t an anti-electoral point. Across Europe, union and social movements have succeeded in changing the direction of electoral politics. Take Norway. There unions pursued a strategy of developing alternatives to privatisation and campaigning for or against candidates on the basis of their response. In Trondheim and then nationally, this helped to produce a coalition that has begun to reverse the process of privatisation and introduce new forms of democratic public management. In Britain PCS, the civil servants’ union, has experimented with such tactics at the local elections. At its Easter conference, the National Union of Teachers set up a political fund with exactly this kind of initiative in mind. In the north-east, unions are directly emulating the Norwegian experience.

Norway has a particularly democratic form of proportional representation. But surely this kind of campaigning needs to be put firmly on the British political agenda – now that we have witnessed the nauseating spectacle of a Labour leader anointed without an election.

Politics Outside the Box

Tim Holmes — Wed, 02 May 2007 16:55:37 +0000

Increasingly across the world you find people on the left coming together independently of party allegiances to try to set electoral agendas that break the boundaries of mainstream politics. Sometimes they’ve had a dramatic impact – like the trade unionists in Trondheim, Norway, (see Red Pepper, print issue March 2007) whose defence of public services was decisive in the election of a left coalition that has halted the privatisations of previous regimes. At other times they’ve set off a new electoral dynamic, as across America citizens alliances outside of party politics have worked to elect progressive democrats and make them accountable.

Their impact depends partly on the electoral system – Norway’s must be one of the most proportional in the world. It also has repercussions at the other end of the democratic scale, like the US, when people take responsibility for putting the democracy back into an electoral politics that (often wealthy and dynastic) politicians have effectively made their private obsession.

Talk of private obsessions leads on to Westminster, where we are currently confronted with the farce of MPs of varying brands of New Labour striding forward to declare the importance of ‘debate’, while in the background their supporters act out scenes from a parliamentary soap opera devoid of genuine politics.

On the left there are constrained and divided efforts to focus on the issues of inequality, war and peace, climate change and all the other issues about which there is genuine concern. In the Labour Party, left leadership contender John McDonnell is slogging his guts out trying to take a real debate to a steadily diminishing party membership. And Michael Meacher is contributing serious policy proposals on pensions, taxes and the environment. Let’s hope the chance of a serious left leadership challenge, leaving behind all the debilitating divisions between so-called ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ left, will induce them to do a deal.

But the future of left politics depends on efforts way beyond the Labour leadership election. Over the next months, Red Pepper wants to initiate a debate about the kind of independent, non-sectarian political initiatives that could bring down the pillars of the temple of Westminster, because – let’s face it – this is at the root of our problems, including our relations with the rest of the world.

We have a political system that is uniquely suited to a secretive military alliance with the US, and ideally favourable to the governmental arrangements that enable the EU to pursue neoliberal policies no better than those of the US. Its closed, unaccountable and elitist character gives the financial interests of the City unique access to the centres of political power and provides a nesting place from which corporate lobbies can shape policies and ensure a favourable environment for themselves.

Any independent platform must tackle this systemic problem on both a political and an economic level. We would need to start with apparently modest measures, such as opening up freedom of information, abolishing the royal prerogative, giving MPs power to recall parliament and introducing a proportional electoral system. (It is time that what’s left of the left in the Labour Party recognised that their continued adherence to ‘first past the post’ means that a huge opportunity is being missed to turn the present depth of popular disillusion into a concerted force for change.)

These constitutional reforms need to be combined with an opening up of state institutions to more direct forms of democracy. This would be far from the consultative processes favoured by New Labour, often as legitimation for various forms of privatisation. I’m thinking here of a real sharing of power between representative politics and autonomous institutions of direct participation that have real decision- making power over budgets and public administration.

This leads on to the economic strategies necessary to realise such an egalitarian vision of democracy. Participation in public life requires time and a reorganisation of work, the provision of a basic income and a reordering of economic priorities to favour the needs of a democracy. This in turn implies a direct challenge to the authoritarianism that is integral to the nature of wealth production in a capitalist economy. This tension between democracy and the realities of corporate and financial power has never been so glaring as now, with financial greed having been allowed to let rip and reveal its true grossness.

Information technology has opened up opportunities for a new leap forward in the development of a social economy – in which, at its most basic, many people already participate individually through peer to peer sharing of music, films and other ‘cultural goods’. It also offers exciting possibilities for making public services more responsive to individual needs, in a way that the market cannot. In itself, of course, a new technology doesn’t guarantee social and democratic progress. If we don’t take control of it, the same technology could just as easily provide the tools for an ever wider commercialisation of daily life and an ever deeper depoliticisation of power.

We are at a political and moral turning point in our social and economic development. But you would never know it from observing life in the political box.

Aiding the Blockade

Alex Doherty — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 20:03:57 +0000

If you are going to hurl your body at the gates of nuclear insanity, do it in Scotland and cause maximum disruption to the Faslane base. The Scottish people are with you (over 70 per cent would like to see Trident scrapped, at the last count). And the local police mutter the threat of an impending arrest – ‘ I have to warn you ‘ – like a schoolchild dutifully but mechanically reciting the school motto.

In my experience, at any rate, they even enter into the spirit of things in the cells, opening the hatches of our solitary cells for us to hear the singing of a fellow arrestee – or maybe this is a custom in the Dunbarton nick and they do it for the more tuneful drunks as well? These policemen and women would rather not be spending their time arresting poets and professors for, ironically, `breaching the peace’, or cutting samba players and others out of ingenious lock-ons – protesters locked together via metal tubes, or with their arms stuck into barrels of concrete, for example.

‘We want to be getting on with real policing,’ the officer in charge at Dunbarton police station, told me. With elections due in May, the police’s political masters, the Scottish executive, can’t risk toughening police tactics and Westminster has to accept the electoral calculation. After the election – well, things could get interesting.

If the polls are right and the SNP and pro-independence parties win the majority, and if public pressure keeps the SNP to its commitment over Trident (see page 24), then there’s a constitutional crisis in the making and the police will be bystanders as the blockades gather momentum. If New Labour manages to be in a majority again, policing could well get tough, and out of the hands of the local constabulary, with whom the steering committee of Faslane 365 are in regular contact.

It’s the importance of developments in Scotland, which has long been a weak link for New Labour, that makes joining a blockade at Faslane so worthwhile. You really could help to make a difference to the success of the campaign.

You can be part of the protest in your own way. If your profession can be adapted to blockading, like the 30 academics arrested for holding a seminar to halt the traffic into the base, then practise your trade. Across the country, there are more than 100 local blockading groups, including many organised around different professions, such as health workers, clergy, academics, students, comedians and actors.

If your friends are likeminded and enjoy purpose in their pleasure, make it the venue of your birthday party, as has one anti-Trident protestor, Kathleen, already.

The Faslane 365 steering group encourages blockading groups to be as autonomous as possible, deciding their own theme and tactics, organising their own training, accommodation, food and so on, but offering all the support they need. The Manchester group, for instance, put on several local training sessions and built up a 50-strong contingent. They made the 11- hour journey on a 1950s’ double-decker bus, with the advertising panels reading ‘Manchester says No to Trident’, ‘What would you spend 40 billion on?’, ‘Nurses or Nukes?’ and ‘Trams not Trident’.

Considerable local publicity is generated in their own towns and cities by these groups and there is growing national coverage, both sides of the border. The ‘elected representatives’ blockade gave that a boost last month with MEPs, MSPs and MPs all doing a stint in the cells. International publicity is growing with groups joining the blokades from Germany, Canada, France, Japan and Belgium.

The Faslane blockaders are also disrupting the base itself. Protestors regularly hear internal tannoys announcing that one of the two main gates has had to be closed. A cleaning contractor has refused to go in when the protest is on, and it’s likely there are other reverberations too.

The Faslane protest is also acting as a catalyst for protest at other Trident-related sites – Aldermaston, Devonport, Plymouth – as well as the London march on 24 February. But there’s a lot more to do. One in every three days for the next three months is covered by a promised blockade, but there are still plenty of gaps. There are gaps in constituencies of support too: for example, union banners are still noticeable more by their absence.

Anyone going to Faslane will get all the support you need – as a group or as an individual – from training for the blockading on the evening before, through legal support, to a good send off when you’re released from the nick. And there’s a need for people to join the protests whether or not they are willing to be arrested.

Go to www.faslane 365.org for all you need to know.

Our Space - the New Frontier

Alex Doherty — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 10:07:49 +0000

The left needs to do much more than simply oppose the marketisation of public services – it must promote a positive alternative. Hilary Wainwright sets the scene.

Marketisation without limits. That, effectively, is the message of health secretary Patricia Hewitt. Here speaks a government that is absolutely convinced that there is no alternative to the market model of delivering public services. A model in which the state becomes the contractor and, more or less half-heartedly, the regulator. What underlies this zeal?

I once heard Jack Straw answer a warm up question on Any Questions: ‘What was your vision of the good society in 1968?’ Without a moment’s hesitation, he answered: ‘The command economy plus parliamentary democracy.’ Now, presumably, the answer would be: ‘The global market plus parliamentary democracy’ – said with equal certainty.

It is as much a fantasy formula as Straw’s student vision. And the reality of private corporations beyond the reach of elected politicians is as much on a slow fuse to disaster as the impermeably authoritarian states of the Soviet bloc.

The corporate juggernauts are being met with resistance as they drive through our public services. In August, a local campaign in Langwith, Derbyshire, won its appeal against the US United Health corporation taking over the local GP practice. But such opposition is dispersed and without a coherent alternative. ‘There’s no doubt we need to develop our own design for the NHS without the market,’ says Langwith GP, Dr Elizabeth Barrett, ‘but I’m only just beginning to think about it.’

The problem is less one of organisational unity on the left than of the need for a powerful, shared sense of direction that can resonate with the disaffection that is far more widespread than the committed left alone. To generate a sufficiently ambitious vision we need at the same time to be more realistic and more imaginative, simultaneously more attentive to the creativity implicit in local struggles and more willing to learn from international experiences.

We have to face the fact that an immensely powerful process of destruction and reconfiguration of economic, state and cultural institutions is going on; and unless we are able to assert an alternative dynamic, its outcome will be determined by the United Healths of this world. We also have to recognise that under existing forms of democracy – Jack Straw’s parliamentary democracy – our political institutions are too conservative to offer a sufficiently innovative means of developing an alternative.

Social democratic state institutions have long been difficult to get to move. The rare exceptions, like Ken Livingstone’s GLC in the 1980s, prove the rule. The inbuilt cautiousness is only overcome through stimulating the pressure from social movements and radical civil society – funding the third sector not just to implement policies but also to bite the hand that feeds it and keep the politicians to their initial radical electoral mandate (an interesting contrast with the shackles that government now puts on its funding of this sector).

The new fluidity of state institutions – initially a destructive process – is producing, mainly in the course of resistance, ad hoc attempts to design a deeper democracy. Dr Barratt points to the ways she is working with patients and staff in opposition to the government’s market model to open up the management of the local primary care service. On North Tyneside, trade unionists are resisting the wholesale privatisation of services, all the time pushing for openness and trade union and user involvement in the procurement and bidding processes to secure a public sector option. In effect, they are trying to subvert marketisation by way of a wedge of democratic control over public delivery.

Jack Straw’s youthful scenario exposes the problem with the past methodology of a large part of the communist and Labour left. This is the focus on structures – property, state institutions and so on – ignoring other levels of social reality, including interactions between people, the complexity of the individual as a social being – emotions, personality, psychology – and relations with nature.

Writing in this month’s Red Pepper, Jonathan Rutherford considers the work of the think-tank Compass on approaches that take these other levels of social reality seriously. But as he points out, any ‘new’ politics of the left must avoid the opposite mistake to that made in the past by not focusing on issues of individual personality, interactions between people and relations with nature without at the same time challenging the structural conditions – such as material inequality, unaccountable centres of economic and military power and the rampant, unregulated market – that block the possibilities of emancipatory social relations, environmental justice and individual fulfillment.

The challenge here is to develop institutional structures that are open to fluidity and innovation. Command bureaucracies don’t do this. But rather than seeking the solution through markets or private monopolies, the need is to find ways for the state and its services to reinvent themselves in response to multiple social needs, social and economic struggles and the emergence of new kinds of social relationship.

There is no simple formula for this. We need to build time into our political activity for investigation and reflection, including using the web to generate new tools for creative collaboration. Maybe we should develop ‘OurSpace’ to brainstorm, exchange ideas and learn from the countless thousands of practical experiments that are redesigning social relations and making demands for new structures to sustain them.

Athenian Democracy

jo — Tue, 16 May 2006 18:23:54 +0000

In the build up to the European Social Forum (ESF) in Athens, the fourth since Florence in 2002, the Greek organisers were modest in their expectations of its political significance. It will be a well organised event; but thatll be it, said Panayotis Yulis from the ESF social and political rights network on the eve of the gathering that took place in the abandoned airport next to the almost abandoned Olympic village from 4-7 May.

The political context of the left in Greece helps to explain this somewhat fatalistic approach. The left there has long been weighed down by the strength and the heavy dogmatism and sectarianism of the most orthodox communist party in Europe. The anti-Stalinist Synaspismos party, strongly influenced by the social movements of recent years, receives just a few per cent of the vote. An autonomous social-movement left has had no identity whatsoever.

By the Monday after the ESF, however, members of the Greek Social Forum, the main grouping behind the event, could not believe what had happened. The forums 80,000-strong demonstration was the largest demonstration ever called independently of the Communist Party, said Sissy Vovou, one of the organisers of the forums womens assembly. Most notable were the many young people who were not members of any political organisation. Its a sign of a subterranean radicalisation. The positive aftermath was spoiled only by the taste of tear gas after a group who call themselves anarchists tried to provoke a reaction from the police by chucking Molotov cocktails.

It wasnt just the size and composition of the demonstration that made the concept of social movements likely, at last, to become a potent part of the language of public debate in Greece. It was also the forum itself, which was organised very consciously to illustrate that it is possible to run a 30,000-strong extravaganza of political discussion and cultural experience in a participatory, egalitarian and pleasurable way.

Out were big plenaries with endless lists of celebrity speakers; in were focused seminars involving networks whose roots were first put down in the previous forums in Florence or Paris and are now coming to maturity. Out were corporate sponsorship and high price entrance fees; in were solidarity funds, low entrance fees and thorough international organising work, leading to over 1,000 participants from Turkey and 3,000 from eastern Europe.

A generally good-humoured social movements assembly at the end of the forum heard of focal points for action over the next year. These include a Europe-wide week of action to campaign for complete withdrawal of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, against the threat of a new war in Iran, against the occupation of Palestine, for nuclear disarmament, and to eliminate military bases in Europe; and a day of mobilisation across Europe and Africa in favour of an unconditional legalisation and equal rights for all migrants, and the closure of all detention centres in Europe.

There was a mood of satisfaction with the three days of intense, almost sleepless, international planning. Its been more focused than ever before. More new ideas have come up than ever before, said Alla Glinchikova, one of 100 Russian participants from the Moscow Social Forum.

The flow of new ideas coming from the ESF is something even Le Monde remarked upon in its leader on Europe Day a few days after the Athens forum. It pointed to the ESF as a source of alternatives at a time when the European elites are at an impasse. I found a widespread insistence on the importance of deepening our analysis. Its not enough just to be against Bolkestein [the EU directive introducing market forces to essential services]. We need specific analyses of how neo-liberalism is being carried through in different countries, the impact of enlargement and what can be learnt from the UK, commented Kenny Bell, deputy convenor of the northern region of Unison. To this end the network of public service trade unions is organising not just action but a Europe-wide seminar in October.

This conscious connection between action and analysis was also indicated by a new seriousness towards the knowledge of the movements. An aspect of the power of the movements is the fact that as they act and organise they are generating knowledge from below, said Mayo Fuster, one of a group of researchers, media and techno activists working to systematise the collective knowledge of the ESF.

But along with these signs of maturity went a sense of the need for innovation within the innovation. A few years back the focus was on breaking up hierarchy, creating decentralised, autonomous forms of organisation, ensuring space for the multiplicity of initiatives, projects and organisations that made up the movements. The concept of the network expressed the idea of coordination without a centre. But now there is a search for new ways of interconnecting the multiplicity.

The search comes out of practical needs, felt after taking decentralisation to its limits. For Yannis Almpanis, the human hub at the centre of the process of merging the hundreds of seminar proposals into a manageable list, the need is for more open collective decision making with clear rules to overcome the problem of informal power. For example, techno-political tools, using the web as a means of interactive communication and collaborative work, are playing an increasing role in the development of the ESF. They are vital to extending decision-making beyond those who can afford the airfares and the time to attend organising meeting a recurring source of informal power.

For the next ESF gathering the talk is of holding it somewhere like Brussels and organising it on a Europe-wide basis, rather than it being nationally hosted as in the past. As indicated by the Eurotopia survey discussed on the following pages, there are still many tensions and disagreements and very uneven growth. How the social forum process responds to these challenges will determine whether it can build something of lasting influence on the foundations laid in the past few years.