Book Review : Reclaim the State by Hilary Wainwright

John McAllion

Michael Foot has described "In Place of Fear" as Nye Bevan's "..classic description of Socialism, the most apt and memorable ever written". Written in 1952, the central theme of this classic is that poverty, great wealth (property) and democracy are ultimately incompatible. Bevan argued that:

"..either poverty will use democracy to win the struggle against property, or property, in fear of poverty, will destroy democracy."

Bevan saw parliament as the arena in which this titamic struggle would be fought out, and parliamentary democracy as a sword pointed at the heart of private property. Throughout his political life, he weilded that sword with such passion and brilliance that he inspired succeeding generations of Labour activists to place their faith in the British parliamentary road to Socialism.

More than fifty years on, that faith in parliamentary Socialism has been severely tested by experience. First there were the Wilson and Callaghan years. Now we have a New Labour government that uses massive parliamentary majorities to drive our party away from rather than towards a Socialist destination. In "Reclaim the State", Hilary Wainwright has produced a treatise that speaks directly to these testing times and one that could itself in time become another classic of socialism.

Her analysis of democratic power is very different from that of Bevan's. She, of course, has the advantage of hindsight. Unlike Bevan, she knows where his parliamentary road led. She has seen the evidence of the successive struggles between poverty and property in the parliamentary arena, and she has witnessed the long retreat from Bevan's Socialist vision from the 1970's onwards. She calls on all of us to recognise the serious trouble that 20th century representative democracy now finds itself in.

That form of democracy she describes as having reached its "nadir" in the persons of Bush and Blair. Elected with minimal popular support, unheeding of mass protests, dismissive of international law and subservient to global corporate power, she describes them as having treated democracy with contempt. Yet, they are but symptoms of a wider systems failure across the west.

Parliamentary or representative democracy has simply failed to control or even to challenge the growing power of financial markets and global corporations. In Bevan's titanic struggle between poverty and property, it is property that is winning and, in the author's judgement, winning far too easily. She is not alone in her judgement. Research into more than a thousand elections in over 170 countries revealed turn-outs to be collapsing across the democratic world.

These are gloomy conclusions that will unsettle those in and around our current parliamentary elites. Yet, this is a far from pessimistic book. The author describes the book as a search for stronger forms of democratic politics that have the potential to realise lasting radical change. If the old order is shown to have failed, the book concerns itself with how to build the new democratic order. The task it sets itself is no less than the reinvention of democracy itself.

It opens with an account of five recent meetings in Davos, Florence, Oslo, Ottawa and Taiwan. The first two are gatherings of the increasingly important World and European Social Forums. The others involve youth movements, social activists and trade unionists. It is in these kinds of forums that the search for new forms of political power is to be found. There is also to be found the political energy and passion that is so obviously missing from the formal institutions of representative democracy. The account of these meetings leaves the reader with a real sense of excitement and of something big happening.

We are then taken on a journey to Porte Allegre in Brazil, to East Manchester, onto Luton and finally Newcastle. In all of these places we find people and communities grappling with the problem of how to gain democratic control over the decisions that daily shape their futures. Here people are not content with the ritual of voting others in to take political decisions and then leaving them to get on with it. Municipal budget setting, neighbourhood and community renewal, contracts for delivering public services are shown to be the frontline in a new struggle for popular democracy. Forms of democracy that return real power back to ordinary people.

Yet, these examples are not proposed as alternatives to representative democracy itself. Elected representatives continue to draw their albeit minimal legitimacy from equal participation in the vote. Rather, it is argued that formal democracy should be transformed through the direct and decisive participation of people in the day to day decision making of democratic institutions. In place of business domination of political parties and the political process, the author argues that control should be returned to the people themselves.

The book's arguments are rooted in Tom Paine's concept of a "mass of sense" that exists in the people. Paine argued in the "Rights of Man" that this mass of sense unfailingly came to the fore at moments of revolutionary change, but for the most part lay dormant and went with the people to their graves. He wanted the business of government to be to harness this mass of sense continuously for the good of all. It is exactly this process that the author detects as happening in places as different as Porte Allegre and East Manchester.

This is a book that makes demands of the reader. Specifically, it challenges established mind sets about the role of political parties and of the parliamentary process itself. It demands that we think afresh about what democracy means and how it can be harnessed to contest the field with a triumphant capitalism. Those who thought that a parliament in Holyrood, with or without full powers, is the whole answer to Scotland's problems will be made to think again. For that alone Hilary Wainwright deserves Scotland's thanks.