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- 06/06/2008: Working class people deserve a party to speak for them by Nick Wrack
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- 03/06/2008: Can Brown be beaten by John McDonnell’s Manifesto? by Mark Hoskisson
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Supporting blogs
What does it mean to democratise power?
Politics, Power and Participation: what does it mean to democratise power? by Hilary Wainwright
The Labour Party’s commitment to the common ownership included the commitment to ‘the best obtainable system of popular administration and control’. Here was a recognition, buried in labour movement history that democracy is something more than parliament: it’s also about popular control over how public resources and institutions are run. When Labour did finally bring parts of the country’s infrastructure and heavy industry into public ownership, the idea of ‘popular control’ was pretty much forgotten. Public control meant state control; socialism became increasingly identified with the state.
Traditions of popular participation and popular power were rediscovered – often in new ways – in the 60’s and the 70’s with the radical workplace trade unionism across Europe and through movements for social liberation: of young people, women, black people, gays and lesbians. A new impetus has been given recently to the idea of popular power by movements and radical political parties in Latin America in particular in the muncipalities of Brazil and the aspirations of the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela.
These experiences in the South have inspired citizens in the North who find the possibilities of exercising democratic control over politics diminishing daily. People are demanding the right to share power with elected politicians. We are no longer prepared to trust them to act on our behalf. But as politicians sense the decline in their legitimacy, they too espouse the rhetoric of partcipation: communities and different social groups are being consulted ad nauseum while real power relations – of state and economic domination remain untouched. How do we develop the autonomy and strength of community groups and social and labour movements to challenge power rather than be incorporated by it?
We need to rethink left politics to answer this. Grass roots social movements of recent years – feminism, black movements, the global justice movement, gay and lesbian movements and radical parts of the trade union movement offer some tools for this rethinking. In practice they distinguish between two radically distinct meanings of power: on the one hand, power as the capacity to transform and on the other hand power as domination.
Historically the major parties of the left have tended to be built around a benevolent version of the second understanding of power: around winning the power to govern and using it paternalistically to meet the needs of the people. This has meant a politics focused around legislation and state action.
The social movements’ assertion of power as transformative capacity produced a break with this narrow definition of politics. It led to a far wider understanding of the scope of politics, way beyond the traditional focus on state, government and legislation, and involving the struggle for justice and dignity in all the relationships and institutions of our daily lives.
25/02/2008 at 07:43 pm
Intesting article- agreew with some but not all and may indeed post a reply later on.
How do you get to post an article on here- as opposed to a reply?
Jason
25/02/2008 at 07:51 pm
Hi Jason,
To post an aticle you will need to send it - pref as a word file - to me. I will then post up. I would assume that we will be setting up more explicit proceedures in the coming weeks.
26/02/2008 at 06:08 am
Thanks for an interesting opening post on this subject, Hilary.
Some interesting questions here.
I think Clause 4 did in a certain sense involve “a recognition, buried in labour movement history that democracy is something more than parliament”
However, the operative verb is buried.
It was deliberately worded ambiguously and vaguely to mean different things to different people
The original text is as follows “”To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.”
But what can this mean? Nationalisation in a predominantly capitalist economy? Worker co-operatives? Employee shareholder schemes?
It could mean all these but could also mean the working class ruling itself- particular industries being run by the workers and users of those goods or services as part of an overall democratically planned economy.
It was meant to mean both, I’d suggest, to bamboozle and distract the newly radicalised workers looking to Russia and workers’ councils (soviets) which then still retained a great degree of popular democracy and participation.
It was meant, I am hypothesising, to distract them away from the necessary self-activity of the working class and its demands to abolish the role of private capital in the economy and say trust us. We’ll represent your interests.
Whereas revolutionary socialists would advocate direct democracy and workers’ control.
The rediscovery of working class participation in the shop stewards’ movements of the late 60s and rank and file movements of the 70s, also coming into contact with the radical politics of socialism, the new social movements, Black, women’s and gay liberation was another fertile period.
However, yet again our interests were co-opted and suppressed into the largely empty promises of politicians to tinker with the state, to have as Hilary argues a
“left have tended to be built around a benevolent version of the second understanding of power: around winning the power to govern and using it paternalistically to meet the needs of the people. This has meant a politics focused around legislation and state action.”
This is exactly the wrong sort of left. We want, I’d suggest, a left based on popular participation, of workers’ democracy and workers’ control that does of course make demands on the state – e.g. for more resources, for more democratic control- but sees ourselves in the broadest possible way- the working class organised into councils of action or peoples’ assemblies or social forums or whatever the new term will be (and it probably will be a new term)- as a new way of self-rule replacing the old government of the dictatorship of a small group of people over the many.
Brazil and Venezuela are also interesting. In the first, I get the impression Lula’s participation budgets stand exposed as a fraud- to co-opt the working class into managing aspects of the state without having real power. At the worst it can be foisting difficult decisions about cuts- whose services are slashed onto the people themselves and is about as democratic as asking a local population to vote to shut two libraries or half a school- whilst leaving the profits of the rich untouched.
In Venezuela, I think Chavez also plays a balancing act between the masses and the bourgeois saying one thing to one, another to the other, with plenty of deliberately vague, ambiguous statements meaning all things to all people.
However, I think there are potential popular organs of struggle meaning the situation there is more fluid and perhaps even does have the possibility of socialist transformation- it would mean though a political battle to win against the idea of the Chavista state real workers’ democracy.
I think it is good we are opening up these sort of debates in the Manchester movement for an alternative conference and an alternative politics.
There will be lots of different ideas within our movement and lots of new ideas if- and we must- we win new people to it.
A contribution on what sort of politics the movement needs with a lively comment thread is here
http://permanentrevolution.net/?view=entry&entry=1935
I am very confident that we can but we do need to really really focus on putting out national calls and national mobilisations for the event.
Hilary can you write an article for Red Pepper and an appeal for trade unionists, community action groups and the various networks you’re in to appeal for people to get to Manchester? And for funds. Let’s make this real!
Thanks once again for an interesting article
Jason
26/02/2008 at 09:25 pm
News today confirmed what we all already knew… all the promises of jobs- 3500 they said- thousands pounds worth of investment and regeneration have turned to dust. Nothing new there then. Working class communities left out in the cold again.
New Labour think gambling’s bad for our health… may be they’re right… may be they’re wrong (let the local people decide democratically)… but one thing’s for sure they’re always ready to gamble with our lives.
Yet more lies, yet more broken promises- it comes so thick and fast everyday day in day out day in day out no one is surprised or barely raises an eyebrow. They play poker with our lives? Tell us a new one!
Except we’ve had another promise of… wait for it…
“”alternative, but equally effective projects”.
Now that’s probably government-ease for f… off and die.. death by degrees, a thousand disappointments, they’ll hardly notice one more .
More endlessly deferred promises. It’s not the community that’s shameless- it’s the murdering ministers and their lying lapdogs.
But let’s try a new game! Pretend to take them seriously. Call their bluff!
So they lied last time. This time we’ll hold them to it- or should that be hold’em and we’ll raise you!
Put the money on the table and let us plan our “museums, theatres, retail, commercial and housing developments”
But what about taking them at their word?
Give us decent jobs, decent services, cheap housing under tenants’ control- get the privateers out and let working class communities decide through our own democratic committees.
We demand at least 3500 jobs- and at least equal funding as promised before.
East Manchester still has some of the worst deprivation in the country, with high crime rates, low health indices, low educational attainment and high rates of family and individual breakdown.
We’re used to glossy pamphlets and empty promises.
But let’s fight back- let’s get out on to the streets and DEMAND our rights.
Give us our jobs! The council are threatening legal action. Says councillor Sir Richard Leese. Lame or what? Jobs for the boys.. well the Cambridge educated elite anyway.
More money for the lawyers then and long months of wrangling and arguing so they get rich and we get… nothing
As the government clearly can’t be trusted to deliver on regeneration and its promises give us the money and we’ll design the services and decide how they’re run under local democracy where people make decisions through votes not councillors and business lobby lash-ups.
Forget the legal action.. let’s take to the streets.
And come to join the festival of ideas…at the Manchester convention of the left…
Join all of those left out of the new Labour circus… and let’s make some noise … and get some real f..ing action!