Melissa Benn welcomes Hilary Wainwright's radical warning to the old world order, Reclaim the State
Saturday July 26, 2003 The Guardian
Reclaim the State: Experiments in Popular Democracy by Hilary Wainwright 252pp, Verso, £15
For some strange reason, British liberals have often preferred to learn their radical lessons from glamorous Europeans, argumentative Australians or appealing young North Americans called Naomi. Equally oddly, they have tended to overlook many of the home-grown, plain-speaking dissenters dwelling on domestic turf. Hilary Wainwright is one such sensible radical who, even after several decades of activism and political writing, continues to plod the streets in pursuit of her political dream of true grassroots democracy.
In recent years, Wainwright has been an enthusiastic observer of and participant in the worldwide anti-corporatist movement, and this book opens with images of explosions of popular energy - from a gathering of young Norwegians in Oslo debating system issues to a meeting of trade unionists and environmental activists in Taiwan. As Wainwright justly observes, when old forms of political power fail, people need to invent new ones.
Reclaim the State is her attempt to speed that invention. It is a rather misleading title in one sense: all that is most forceful and interesting about the new democratic movements comes from outside official structures. However, as she says, this explosion of antiestablishment energy will have little lasting resonance if it cannot harness the powers and resources of the state in order to secure a fairer redistribution of resources, both worldwide and locally.
Wainwright writes acutely about the failures of modern nation states. She takes as her starting point Tom Paine's argument that there resides in all populations a "mass of sense lying in a dormant state - which good government should quietly harness", particularly, he somewhat darkly hints, if it wants to avoid a revolution.
For Wainwright, the modern social democracies are too deeply entangled with global corporate power. Political apathy is simply a reflection of an understanding that the vote alone cannot shift entrenched inequalities, despite Gordon Brown's covert programme of redistribution through indirect taxation and New Labour's ultimately centrally controlling notions of community and participation.
So what does Wainwright want? She offers us four eyewitness reports of local democracy in action: participatory budget making in Port Alegre in Brazil, neighbourhood renewal in east Manchester, the story of an innovative community project in Luton and, finally, the successful bid by public-sector workers in Newcastle to win an in-house contract, beating off corporate giant BT in the process. In the final chapter, Wainwright tries to draw some general lessons for democracy from these scattered experiments.
Unfortunately, this central portion is the hardest to digest, while the more theoretical sections make for a more satisfying read.
Describing the world of delivery plans, funding bids, trade unions and the rest, Wainwright's writing is thick with acronyms and technical detail, a difficulty which dogs many a contemporary political writer. And while it is heartening to read of people coming together at a local level, one too easily feels despair at the continuing corrosion of local authority power and the invasion of private companies into every sphere of the public sector under New Labour.
But Wainwright is an earnest, almost dogged optimist. She sees everything, from local projects to the anti-capitalist movement to the recent worldwide swelling of anti-war opinion, as evidence of the emergence of Paine's "mass of sense", an ever-growing pressure for radical change. Refreshingly, her sights are set on the producer and the public-sector worker rather than the consumer and purely private citizen.
She is also honest enough to state that her ultimate vision is not clear, and that the exact forms of the new participatory democracy remain fuzzy. But her book contains an important warning for the social democracies, engaged in showy public debates about progressive governance. Should the polarisation between rich and poor, the powerful and the powerless, become too great, those in power might take note of her suggestions on how to deepen democracy, ways to deploy that dormant mass of sense among the growing ranks of dissatisfied citizens.
Melissa Benn's Madonna and Child: Towards a New Politics of Motherhood is published by Cape