Reclaim the State: Experiments in Popular Democracy

by Hilary Wainwright

The anticapitalist protests at Seattle and Genoa are dramatic symbols of a growing collective anger about the globalizing power of a few multinational corporations. But there is more to anticapitalism than concepts like participatory democracy and economic solidarity form the heart of alternative but equally compelling visions.

Hilary Wainwright, writer and long-time political activist, set out on a quest to find out how people are putting such concepts into practice locally and taking control over public power. Her journey starts at home, in east Manchester, where local community groups are testing Tony Blair’s commitment to ‘community-led’ regeneration by getting involved in the way government money is spent. In Newcastle, she joins a meeting of homecare workers and their clients to challenge the threat of privatization of homecare services in that city. In Los Angeles she talks to the people behind the community-union coalitions that have had major successes in improving the impoverished bus system and in winning a living wage for employees of firms contracted by the city. And in Porto Alegre she discovers the wider democratic potential of the participatory budget, the basis of investment decisions in many Brazilian cities. Local democracy and ‘people power’, it turns out, provided the foundations for a global alternative, as her visit to the World Social Forum reveals.

Wainwright concludes with a set of proposals for turning resistance into lasting institutions of participatory democracy – an embedded bargaining power against corporate and military elites. This, she argues, will require very different kinds of political parties from ones currently alienating voters. Reclaim the State shows that the foundations for new political directions already exist, and provides imaginative and practical tools for building on them.

256 pages, Hardcover

First published July 31, 2003

Reviews

[Malcolm · Rating 4 out of 5]

With so much of the debate about neo-liberalism in recent years focussing on mass global resistance (think Seattle, Prague, Genoa and the like) and global features (think, banking crisis leading to recessions, concentration of power in the hands of a few uber-wealthy individuals and corporation) this reminder that there is local struggle and success, that popular democracy is still feasible, is timely (although I suspect some tighter editing would have made it better – there are places where the bigger picture got lost in the detail, minutiae even). That said, the book fits a bigger political picture – both in terms of the work Wainwright does as editor of Red Pepper (I think Britain's finest activist magazine of the left) and over the years as an activist (see her work on industrial democracy – The Lucas Plan – and on work in the Greater London Council in the 1980s – A Taste of Power) in building a vision and practice of a democratic, activist, transformational left-wing politics. The issues that she is exploring here are vital in struggles for a more just society where the state and the economy serve the people. Essential reading (as is Red Pepper).

[Teresa · Rating 3 out of 5]

often way too dry despite very interesting ideas (and hopeful ones)

[Clement]

Reclaim the State: Experiments in Popular Democracy