by Hilary Wainwright, Verso
Hilary Wainwright looks at four examples of what she calls "popular democracy" and asks what activists in the socialist and global justice movement can learn from them. The first is the "Participatory Budget" process set up by the Brazilian Workers' Party in Porto Allegre where they form a majority in local government. Elected representatives from all over that city collectively draw up the budget for public expenditure. There are of course limits on the amount "the people" can spend, but the process is undoubtedly very democratic. The other examples are British: the government's New Deal for Communities Schemes in East Manchester and Luton and how these have been subverted for the common good by groups of activists; the UNISON-led campaign against privatisation of IT services in Newcastle city council.
Wainwright's starting point is a quote from Tom Paine - "There is existing in man, a mass of sense lying in a dormant state, and which unless something excites it to action, will descend with him, in that condition, to the grave." This is a radical idea - that there is a "common sense" among ordinary people, the majority of people, derived from lived experiences. That sense of the mass of people is a more just basis on which to decide how to organise society. It's a good starting point for analysing how we can reform and reorganise our unequal society. It is not, however, a socialist idea.
As she writes it, for Wainwright the key agency of change in the world right now is the "social movements", "popular" democracy and the "people". It is not, as it is for Marxists, the working class. The curious thing is that in fact Wainwright is writing not about "people" organising to control the supply, quality and direction of government-owned services, but about working-class people organising. Only, she does not use the actual words "working class" very often. There is a distancing here, although it is not explicit, from "traditional" struggles, i.e., workplace struggles.
Marxist socialists would argue that wherever the working-class is organised and as long as the working class is solidly organised it can build powerful levers for both reforming and ultimately transforming society. However the inequalities between capital and labour - the class relationship based on profit generation for the capitalist and exploitation of labour - is at the heart of determining how our society is organised. The clashes between capital and labour - in the economic and political spheres - are the most transforming, most dynamic of all struggles in capitalist society. And like it or not these powerful transformative struggles are often rooted in industry, in the workplace.
How did the Brazilian Workers' Party get so powerful electorally? It was built in working class neighbourhoods, its focus was the entire experience of working class life for sure, but it came to life and was sustained through the years by industrial struggle in Brazil's most strategically important industries.
Although this book details local experiences, Wainwright is not specific about what she means by "social movements". What parts of society does she mean? Her examples are all working class: unions, poor pensioners, working class youth.
And what does she mean by movement? For instance a big component part of the community projects being organised in East Manchester are tenants' groups. Is there such a thing as a tenants' "movement" in Britain? We may talk loosely of a tenants' movement, and doubtless there are tenants' groups everywhere; over the last years have been many unifying tenants campaigns - against transfer of council housing stock for instance - but is there a UK-wide tenants' movement?
At the end of the book Wainwright argues enthusiastically for a different kind of party, a party which is "the electoral voice of coalitions of social movements", but she does not develop her argument much. There is an unquestioned and unquestioning assumption that there are such things as clear, strong and coherent "social movements", and that parties based on these movements can be built and can survive without a very clear notion of the politics they are based on. Everyone getting together in a new party with a broad "social justice" agenda just simply must be a good thing. The trouble with such vague and open-ended agenda is it leads you into accepting long-term coalitions where the interests of the workers are downgraded - would be made into one sub-section of the new party's manifesto.
The strength of Wainwright's position is that she does see the need for activists to engage with the existing state, to put the powers that be under pressure. She sees reforms as both necessary to improve the quality of people's lives and as staging posts for wider, deeper struggles. From that point of view, despite her lack of clarity, Wainwright has written a useful account of how people, that is, working class people, are self-organising for change.
Score: 7/10
Reviewer: Cathy Nugent
