In a context of uncertainty and flux, it helps to start from the specific. My starting point is the rise of Syriza, the radical left coalition rooted in the movements resisting austerity that has become the main opposition party in the Greek parliament. Syriza’s ability to give a focused political voice to the anger and despair of millions has made a breakthrough from which we can learn.

This is a matter not only of its soaring electoral support, which rose from 4 per cent of the national vote in 2009 to 27 per cent in June 2012 on the basis of a refusal of the policies imposed by the IMF, the European Commission (EC) and the European Central Bank (ECB), but also of the fact that this electoral mandate is reinforced by organised movements and networks of solidarity that Syriza has been part of building.

This is not to imply that Syriza’s success is stable or that its momentum will necessarily be maintained. One of its 71 MPs, the ex-Pasok member and trade union leader, Dimtris Tsoukalas, warns that ‘votes can be like sand’. Threatening winds will blow persistently from a hostile media determined to exploit any sign of division; from national and European elites creating an atmosphere of fear towards the left and from an aggressive fascist party exploiting xenophobic tendencies in Greek society with some success, having won 7 per cent in the polls.

Syriza does not provide a template to apply elsewhere; it is a new kind of political organisation in the making. Reflection on its rise, however, which has taken place alongside the collapse of support for Pasok (from around 40 per cent of the vote in 2009 to no more than 13 per cent in 2012), throws the present quandary of the left, especially in Europe, into relief. Such reflection also stimulates fresh thoughts on forms of political organisation that could help us find ways out.

Failure of social democratic parties

The quandary is this. On the one hand, there is the inability of social democratic parties to stand up to, or even seriously to bargain over, austerity for the masses as a solution to the financial crisis. To varying degrees these parties are demonstrating their inability to rise to the challenge of a visibly discredited neoliberal project. The decay in party democracy and culture, moreover, combined with an entrenchment of market-driven mentalities, has meant that in social democratic parties the forces of renewal are negligible or very weak.

On the other hand, most political organisations of the radical left, with the notable exception of Syriza, are in weaker positions than they were before the financial crisis of 2008. In addition, the traditional forms of labour movement organisation have been seriously weakened. There has been an impressive growth of resistance and alternatives of many kinds, many of them interconnected and many, like Occupy, besmirching the brand of an already dodgy-looking system. But through what strategic visions, forms of organisation and means of political activism they can produce lasting forces of transformation is an open question under active and widespread discussion.

In other words, while the right, in the form of neoliberalism, was ready for the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989, the left in the North, when faced with capitalism coming as near to collapse as it can – given its ability to call in state guarantees – has been unable to find appropriate ways of building a dynamic of change driven by its alternative values and directions for society.

Syriza in its current form has been forged in the intense heat of the most ruthless turning of the screw of austerity. Syriza is going to face many problems, both within its own organisation as it changes from a coalition of parties and groups to becoming a party with its own direct membership, as well as in the face of new pressures that will come from its opponents both inside and outside Greece. However, after interviewing a wide range of activists and reading interviews and reports by others, I have a grounded belief that the long and difficult process of developing a framework of rethinking political organisation beyond both Leninism and parliamentarism is producing qualitatively new results.

Many of the political resources that shaped Syriza’s response to the present extremities and led it to a position in which it is uniquely – but still conditionally – trusted by so many people in Greek society are the outcome of considerable learning from the trial and error of other radical parties across Europe and the experience of the European Social Forum.

This essay seeks to contribute towards continuing this dialectic of transnational political learning on the left. By generalising from the distinctive features of Syriza, and also bearing in mind lessons from other experiences where parties with similar ambitions have been unable to sustain their transformative dynamic, I will suggest approaches to problems of political organisation, further consideration of which might help to overcome the quandary of the left.

Transforming the state

My discussion of these themes will focus on the problem of transforming the state. This is a major issue for Syriza as it campaigns and prepares for office in and against a notably corrupt and anti-democratic state. One of four sections of the programme drawn up in 2009 by members of Synaspismos, the largest party in the Syriza coalition, is entitled ‘Restructuring the state’.

My framework for approaching this fundamental issue sees sources of democratic transformative power autonomous from the state as decisive to the possibilities of change.

The economic dimension here is crucial. Political change is seriously hindered if it lacks a base in non-capitalist relations of production, including the production of services and culture, however partial and incomplete. At the same time, it must be said that a conflictual engagement in as well as against the state is a necessary condition for systemic change. Such an engagement has to be rooted in, and accountable to, forces for democratic change in society. Without a strategy of this kind to transform and, where necessary, break state power, transformative struggles will recurrently lapse into containable counter-cultures and their potential for the majority of people will be unrealised.

Drawing lessons from local democratisation

To develop my argument, I draw particularly on the experience of the radical left of the Labour Party in governing London in 1982-86; and that of the Brazilian Workers’ Party (PT) in opening up decisions about new municipal investment to a citywide process of popular participation in Porto Alegre from 1989 until 2004. Despite these cases being well known, their lessons for political organisation have yet to be fully distilled.

For my argument, what is significant is that their achievements – each of the city experiments involved a redistribution of resources and, for a period, power and capacity, from the rich and powerful to the poor and marginalised – depended on opening up to and sharing resources with autonomous sources of democratic power in the cities concerned. In other words, they combined initiatives for change from within government structures with support for developing wider, more radical sources of power outside.

But it was very significant that not only had such a strategic orientation failed to change the Labour Party in the UK, it also turned out that neither did the PT in Brazil adopt such a dual strategy once it was elected at the national level, which partly explains the limits of the Lula government in fulfilling many expectations it had aroused for radical social change.

In the Greater London Council (GLC) and Porto Alegre experiments political parties used their electoral mandates to move beyond the constraints imposed by the existing system and instead to strengthen and spread challenges to that system. The spirit they embodied can also be seen in widespread campaigns by public service workers and users against privatisation that involve effective strategies to change the way that public services are managed and public money administered, dragging political parties after them.

All these experiences have underlined the importance of struggling to create non-capitalist social relations in the present rather than defer them to ‘after winning power’. Lessons from these local experiences, however, can help the rethinking that is necessary of what political organisation needs to be like in a context of plural sources of transformative power.

In drawing these lessons, we need also to bear in mind that there are further distinct problems in changing state and quasi-state institutions on national and international levels. To understand the wider significance of the way these local political experiences combine a struggle as representatives within the local state with support for democratic movements and initiatives outside, we need to distinguish between two radically distinct meanings of power.

These are on the one hand power as transformative capacity and on the other hand power as domination – as involving an asymmetry between those with power and those over whom power is exercised. We could say that historically, mass social democratic parties have been built around a benevolent version of the second understanding. Their strategies have been based around winning the power to govern and using it paternalistically to meet what they identify as the needs of the people.

Both the experiences of the GLC in the early 1980s and the PT in municipal government in the 1990s were attempts to change the state from being a means of domination and exclusion to becoming a resource for transformation by campaigning for electoral office in order then to decentralise and redistribute power. I would argue that in practice Syriza is attempting the same project at a national level.

Syriza and the dynamics of social change

The most distinctive feature of Syriza, in contrast with traditional parties of the left, is that it sees itself as more than simply a means of political representation for movements, but as being involved practically in building the movements. Its political instincts make responsibility for contributing to the spread and strengthening of movements for social justice a high priority.

In the weeks following the election of 71 Syriza MPs in June 2012, its leaders stressed the importance of this as central to ‘changing people’s idea of what they can do, developing with them a sense of their capacity for power’, as Andreas Karitzis, one of its key political coordinators, put it. While the party believes state power is necessary, it is clear that, in Karitzis’s terms, ‘what is also decisive is what you are doing in movements and society before seizing power. Eighty per cent of social change cannot come through  government.’ This is not just talk.

This view of strategies for social change influences how Syriza is allocating the considerable state resources it is receiving as a result of its high level of parliamentary representation. The party will get €8 million (almost triple its present budget) and each MP is allocated by the parliament five members of staff.

The idea at the time of writing is that a high proportion of the new funds should go to solidarity networks in the neighbourhoods – for example, to employ people to extend initiatives such as social medical centres, to spread what approaches have succeeded, to link, online and face to face, people in the cities with producers of agricultural goods. Funds will also go to strengthening the capacity of the party in parliament, but a greater proportion will be directed towards Syriza’s work in building the extra-parliamentary organisations for social change.

Of the five staff allocated to MPs, two will work for the MP directly. One will work for policy committees that bring together MPs and civic experts and two will be employed by the party to work in the movements and neighbourhoods.

Behind these priorities is a learning process arising from the vulnerability shown by left parties in other European countries to letting parliamentary institutions, with all their resources and privileges, pull them away from the movements whose political voice they had intended to be.

Committed to movement building as much as party-building

From its origins in 2004 at the height of the alter-globalisation movements (which had a particularly strong impact in Greece), Syriza was at least as concerned with helping to build movements for change in society as with electoral success. There was also a learning process through the European Social Forum and then the Greek Social Forum.

This contributed to not only Syriza’s clear strategic view of the limits of state power for social transformation, but also a self-conscious insistence on norms of pluralism, mutual respect and openness to the new ways in which people were expressing their discontent and alternatives.

Providing a constant reminder of the political methodology they were trying to avoid was the KKE, one of the last orthodox Communist parties in Europe, self-confident in its self- imposed isolation and wary of contamination with ‘unorthodoxy’. Syriza activists, by contrast, were very much part of the open, plural, curious culture of mutual learning promoted by the European Social Forum, and it was explicitly one of their goals that their new political coalition be infused with it. The effects of this were clearly seen in how Syriza related to the youth revolt after the police shooting of Alexandros Grigoropoulos in 2008, not pushing a line or seeking to take control. And they acted in the same way when the protests gathered in Syntagma Square and beyond through 2011.

Syriza activists contributed their own principles – for example, not allowing any anti-immigrant slogans – and applied these with others, anarchists for example, to find practical solutions through the general discussions. The youth wing of Synaspismos had a workshop near the beginning of the Syntagma protests to explain and discuss this non-instrumental, principled approach.

Syriza is also shaped by the converging culture of the different generations and traditions that make up the coalition. The younger generation, now in their late twenties or early thirties, came to the left independently of any ‘actually existing’ alternative. The older leadership had been part of the resistance to the dictatorship in the late 1960s and 1970s. Many of them became the left Eurocommunists of the 1980s.

Both generations were active in the alter-globalisation and social forum movement. This meant that the collective processes of knowledge and cultural production in the movements resisting neoliberal globalisation, both inside Greece and internationally in the 1990s, were central to the personal political development of Syriza activists rather than being a sphere in which they ‘intervened’ to promote an alternative that had already been worked out elsewhere.

Syriza activists at all levels are emphatic about going beyond protest and of having alternatives that are convincing to people who are discontented with the corrupt Greek state and the ‘troika’ of the EC, the IMF and the ECB. This has led to an emphasis on support for initiatives that could make an immediate difference now rather than waiting for Syriza’s election to government. For instance, as the cuts destroy the public health system, doctors and nurses in Syriza are involved with others in creating medical centres to meet urgent social needs and at the same time pushing for free treatment in public hospitals and campaigning to defend health services.

Syriza is also bringing together sympathetic frontline civil servants with teachers, experts and representatives of parents’ organisations to prepare changes in the organisation of the Ministry of Education to make it more responsive to the people and to release the stifled capacities of state employees who genuinely want to serve the public.

It is also mapping the social and cooperative economy in the country to identify how it can be supported politically now as well as to determine what kind of support it should have when the party moves into government to realise Syriza’s goal of an economy geared to social needs. The party’s responsiveness to the steady rise in self-organised forms of solidarity economy amidst the crisis, recognising its potential in terms of constructing an alternative direction for society, is reminiscent of what Andre Gorz’s meant when, in outlining the strategic concept of non-reformist reforms in his Strategy for Labor, he stressed the importance of ‘enabling working people to see socialism not as something in the transcendental beyond but as the visible goal of praxis in the present’.

When Alexis Tsipras declared that the party was ready for government, based on an unequivocal rejection of the economic policy memorandum, it concentrated the minds and organizational discipline of Syriza activists. The movement style and culture of the organisation gave way to a single- minded campaign in which loyalties to this or that group or tendency in the Syriza coalition weakened and a new closeness emerged.

But complaints also emerged about a certain opacity of when and where decisions were made and how to influence them, and fears expressed that the large parliamentary group could reinforce this if it becomes too autonomous. And there is recognition of the danger of Tsipras becoming a celebrity symbol on which the future of the party can end up becoming dependent, weakening internal party democracy and diluting debate – shades of Lula in Brazil, shades too of Andreas Papendreou in 1981. Although the coalition is united on the importance of its claim on government, much thought is being given to how to share leadership, maintain accountability to party and movement activists, how to sustain a critical politicized culture of debate, challenge and strategic militancy; to avoid in other words becoming ‘another Pasok’.

Rethinking the franchise: from atomistic to social representation

Syriza’s experience gives a practical focus to recent discussions in the alter- globalisation movement about whether, in liberal democracies, to engage in, as well as struggle against, the political system – and, more specifically, whether to seek political representation for more than propaganda purposes, and if so with what forms of organisation.

Syriza’s self-conscious combination of organising for government with spreading the capacity for change autonomously from the political system – through solidarity work in the community, agitating at the base of the unions, campaigning for social and political rights, as well as against racism and xenophobia and so on – raises anew the question of whether the vote is still a resource for social transformation or a perpetual source of disillusion and alienation.

In other words, can representation in the existing institutions of parliamentary democracy, along with efforts to change these institutions, strengthen the wider struggle to bring somehow an end to capitalist power – the power of the financial markets, private banks and corporations, all intertwined with and guaranteed by state institutions? My answer is positive, albeit highly conditional.

In the broadest terms, the condition is based, organisationally and culturally, on an understanding of citizenship as social and situated. In today’s societies, ridden as they are with inequalities, this implies an engagement with electoral politics while at the same time strongly challenging what has become of the universal franchise: an abstract, formal political equality in a society that is fundamentally unequal.

Many property-less men and women and their allies who struggled for the vote imagined that exposing, challenging and overcoming unequal and exploitative relationships would be at the heart of parliamentary politics. For the Chartists and many suffragettes, the vote was the opening of a new phase in this political struggle, not a plateau on which to remain. Political representation meant for them a means of ‘making present’ in the political system struggles over social and economic inequality.

The ability of the British establishment, often with the complicity, tacit and overt, of Labour’s parliamentary and trade union leaderships, to contain this potential dynamic is only a well documented example of a phenomenon common in different forms to liberal democracies.

The result is a narrow form of representation in which citizens are treated as individuals in an entirely abstract way rather than as part of embedded social, and at present unequal, relationships. It is a political process which consequently tends to disguise rather than expose inequalities, and protects rather than challenges private economic power.

Returning to radical democratic roots

This tendency has regularly come under challenge by later generations. They have taken up the radical democratic goals of the pioneers by seeking to break the protective membrane of parliamentary politics and open politics up to the direct impact of struggles that are shifting the balance of power in society.

There is much to learn in this respect from two experiences, the radical Labour administration of the Greater London Council and the PT government of Porto Alegre. Both their political leaderships in practice built their strategy for implementing a radical electoral mandate on sharing power, resources and legitimacy with citizens organised autonomously around issues of social and economic equality.

These municipal politicians started from the recognition that the inequalities they were elected to tackle – of economic power, race, gender and more – needed sources of power and knowledge beyond those of the state alone.

In both cases, the mandate was for a politics that would learn from and not repeat the compromises, national as well as local, of the past. In the case of the GLC, the left leadership of the London Labour Party, influenced by a fierce controversy in the national party, was determined to avoid the failure of the 1974-79 Labour government to implement a radical electoral mandate.

This strong political will, along with a direct involvement in community, feminist, trade union and anti-racist movements, led the would-be GLC councillors to reach out to many organisations that broadly shared their aims and involve them in drawing up a detailed manifesto. This became the mandate of the new administration after Labour won the GLC elections in 1981. It was a key reference point in conflicts with public officials both in County Hall and across the river in Thatcher-led Westminster and Whitehall – a source of moral legitimacy for the radicalism of the GLC’s policies.

In the case of Porto Alegre, the ‘taken-for-granted’ way of running the municipality had involved local party elites making mutually beneficial deals which reproduced a structural corruption and secrecy that ensured that the council effectively served, or at least did not upset, the economic interests of the 15 or so families who dominated the local economy as landowners and industrialists.

The PT’s mission, as part of its commitment to redress the gross inequalities of the Brazilian polity and economy, was to put an end to this. Under the leadership of Olivio Dutra, it committed itself to working with neighbourhood associations and other grassroots democratic organisations to open up the council’s budgetary, financial and contracting procedures.

In both cases, the strategies were effective in achieving many of their goals – so much so that in different ways the vested interests they challenged took action, equally effectively in their reactionary terms. These experiences and, in particular, the crucial relationships between autonomously organised citizens and the local state were the product of particular historical circumstances.

Both the British Labour Party and the Brazilian Workers’ Party were the product of labour and social movements and progressive intellectuals but their divergent historical origins were based on differing understandings of democracy and hence of their strategies towards representative politics.

While the PT was created to give a radically democratic lead to the struggle against dictatorship, the Labour Party was founded to protect and extend workers’ rights and social provision within a parliamentary democracy. The Labour Party began from an almost sacrosanct division between the industrial and the political, respectively the spheres of the unions and of the party. The rules governing the relationship have had a significant flexibility; otherwise this ‘contentious alliance’ would not have survived.

By the 1950s this division of labour had produced a profoundly institutionalised abdication of politics by the trade unions to the Labour Party, which increasingly saw legitimate politics as taking place only within narrowly parliamentary confines. The unions could lobby and as part of the Labour Party pass resolutions proposing what governments should do. But for them to take action directly on political issues, including broadly social ones, was out of bounds.

Greater London Council

The London Labour Party of 1981 was of a very different character. It was the product of a powerful challenge to this moderating division of labour, which came perilously close (in the eyes of the British establishment) to breaking the barriers protecting the reactionary UK state against the rebellious spirit of what was at that time one of the best organised trade union movements in Europe.

The Labour Party of the early 1970s was in opposition and radicalising in reaction to the political collapse and compromise of the 1964-70 Wilson government.The Labour Party at this time, especially outside the parliamentary leadership, opened its doors to the influence of social movements, including the base and some of the leadership of the trade unions.

A radical manifesto was drawn up in a relatively open and participatory manner that was not only about extending public ownership but also delegating power to trade union organisations in the workplace.

In government, however, and under the pressures of the City, strengthened by US moves towards financial deregulation, and the IMF, the doors were closed by the parliamentary leadership. The result was an unprecedented struggle throughout the labour movement, which escalated into a conflict not over this or that policy, but over the very nature of representation. This struggle has been well documented.

By the mid-1980s, the left had lost the struggle to change the Labour Party and with it the nature of working-class political representation. In the meantime, the left had not only won and kept control of the party of the capital city in 1980, with the support of most of the trade unions, but with its victory at the elections for the GLC had gained control over a strategic authority with a budget greater than many nation-states. It had the opportunity, the will, the allies and some of the legislative powers – before the Thatcher government started to hack away at them – to implement radical policies.

Once ensconced in County Hall, Labour councillors, driven on by the struggles and organisations in which many of them were involved, and indeed had become councillors to pursue, led the GLC in ways that would transform the relationship between councillors, local government ‘officers’, autonomous citizens’ organisations (including the unions) and the majority of London citizens.

Workers’ Party in Porto Alegre

For a brief moment, this significant local Labour Party behaved in a way comparable to the Workers’ Party in Brazil 6,000 miles away. The distinctiveness of the PT, at least from its foundation in 1980 to the late 1990s (and its importance for our discussion of the conditions under which representative democracy might be a resource for social transformation), is a political practice based on the belief that the formal foundations of democracy – universal franchise, rights to free speech, freedom of assembly, a free press, political pluralism and the rule of law – had to be reinforced by effective institutions of popular, participatory democracy if the goals of democracy – political equality and popular control – were to be realised.

This was the lesson the party drew from not only the experience of bringing down a dictatorship but also the extreme inequalities of Brazilian society, which made even more of a mockery of purely legal claims to political equality than in most capitalist countries. The practical character of these radically democratic forms was drawn partly from the participatory forms developed in the movements from which the PT was founded, particularly militant trade unions and the landless movement.

These participatory forms were then developed through a self-conscious and collective process of trial and error in the formation of the participatory budget itself, in several major cities in addition to Porto Alegre. The culture and mentality of the party’s approach to popular participation was important too. This drew on the traditions of popular education which, most explicitly in the case of Paulo Freire, were effectively a form of political consciousness-raising based on the principle of enabling people to realize their capacities.

The result was a party that had committed itself to developing institutions of popular control through which it would try to share power and strengthen popular transformative capacities. There are many echoes of the PT in the character of Syriza, a reflection perhaps of their common history of struggle against a dictatorship. Returning then to the distinction between power in the sense of transformative capacity and power as domination, we can see how, in both cases, the radical political leaderships attempted to use state powers of domination – over finance and land in particular – as resources for the efficacy of popular transformative capacity.

Thus, in Porto Alegre and other Brazilian cities that developed processes of participatory budgeting, after winning the mayoral elections and gaining centralised control over the budget, the party effectively delegated power over new investment and priorities to the co- ordinated decentralisation of the participatory budget.

At the same time, a group was set up to work with different neighbourhood organisations to facilitate the decentralised process. This was the organisation of the annual cycle of neighbourhood and regional meetings at which proposals for new spending were made; evaluated according to the agreed framework of technical and substantive criteria; discussed through an elaborate, but transparent and rule governed process of horizontal decision-making and negotiation; and then finalised through a committee composed of delegates from the different regions of the city and various thematic assemblies as well as representatives of the Mayor. Progress on the implementation of previous decisions was also monitored through this open process, backed up by the Mayor’s budget office.

In the case of the GLC, there was a similar combination of council action that used its centralised power and resources to delegate power to citizens’ organisations to strengthen the capacity of Londoners as workers or as citizens to determine the decisions shaping their lives.

The GLC, for example, used its power to purchase land to prevent property developers from destroying an inner city community and then delegated the management of that land to the local community alliance, which in the course of resisting the property developers had worked on its own plan for the area. It created a public enterprise board, which helped to save companies from closure on the condition that the trade unions in those companies had certain powers over how the resources were used. It set up a central office within the council with the authority to monitor other departments’ implementation of the electoral mandate, including the commitment to popular participation.

In other words, the centralised power to tax, to control the use of land and so on, was combined with a decentralisation and delegation so the power over how state resources were allocated and managed was shared with popular groups. As with any serious experiment, the problems must be reflected on as well as the aims and the successes.

Learning from failures and weaknesses

These problems shed a harsh light on the tensions between the forms of political organisation developed historically within liberal representative politics to gain and sustain office within the state and the forms of political organisation needed to build popular control over the state. To a significant extent, the political innovations towards the second goal were, in both cases, developed through the momentum of the process building on neighbourhood, workplace and social movement organisations that had already formed. The pressures of the immediate often meant that difficult issues raised in the actual practice of relations between parties and autonomous initiatives and movements were not always publicly recognised and discussed.

In the case of the GLC, the emphasis on working with civic and trade union movements was strengthened by the limited nature of its own official powers for implementing Labour’s radical manifesto commitments. Much of the practical and political process of the relationship between the council and these independent organisations was dependent, however, on the GLC-appointed officers (most of whom had a movement background) and committed councillors, rather than Labour Party organisations on the ground.

A continuing engagement with autonomous movements, beyond the institutional relation with the unions, had not become generally built into the political habits of local Labour Parties. This had begun to change in the late 1970s and early 1980s, reaching a peak with the support that local Labour Parties and unions organised with others in communities and workplaces across the country, including London, for the 1984-85 miners’ strike. But this social movement struggle-oriented culture was not entrenched enough to withstand the defeats imposed by the Thatcher government, including the abolition of the GLC itself as the elected government of London.

In Porto Alegre, where relations between the PT and social movements were very close, with much overlapping membership, a major problem was the extent to which leading activists in both were drawn into government positions, weakening both the party outside government and autonomous community and social movement organisation.

A second problem concerned the participatory budget process itself. Although all the evidence points to a significant increase in the active involvement and growth in self-confidence and organising capacity, especially among the poor, women and blacks, a serious limit emerged to the extent to which participatory budgeting developed popular transformative capacities beyond the point of making and prioritising pragmatic demands.

The source of this limit lay in the separation of the participatory budget process from strategic policy-making as, for example, on urban planning. As participation in budget decision-making grew numerically and participants gained in confidence and political awareness, activists, including in some of the poorest areas, pressed for information and involvement in planning policy. But this was never fully opened up.

Close observer-participants suggest several explanations. One is that the PT within the municipality was not able to exert sufficient centralised control over the behaviour of the different departments, to implement this desire of the participants in the participatory budget. Planning officials were particularly protective of their departmental interests. Sergio Baierle indicates that it also reflected the development of a ‘governmental cadre’ amongst the PT who became distant from, and paternalistic towards, the community activists.

A third problem with the participatory budget process was an absence of publicly debated and agreed guidelines for agreements between City Hall and community organisations involved in the provision of services such as childcare and recycling. The absence of an insistence on certain standards of equality, democracy and public efficiency – quite a well-developed feature of the GLC’s processes of grant giving – meant that the PT-led process of decentralisation of resources to community organisations was vulnerable to the encroachment of the neoliberal path of community management, whose destination was usually some form of privatisation.

The problems encountered in London and Porto Alegre were not necessarily insurmountable. Both processes had developed a certain capacity to innovate through trial and error. But in both cases the rise of market- driven politics closed the space for further development of these experiences of democracy-driven rather than market-led reform.

In the case of the GLC, its abolition took place during the period when the neoliberal right was at its most triumphant. Moreover, some sections of the left, including those whose visions of socialism had been tied to the fortunes of the Soviet Union (or, like Tony Blair, had no vision of socialism whatsoever) became entirely defensive, turning into naïve new converts to the capitalist market as the source of efficiency and ‘modernisation’. As a result, they only weakly defended, and sometimes attacked, the innovations of the GLC. Certainly, they worked to delete its memory rather than to learn from it.

In the case of Porto Alegre, the defeat of the PT in 2004 was a result of many factors, including a certain loss of direction in the local PT and disappointment with the early years of the Lula government as it succumbed to the pressures of the IMF.

It is significant that the full development of both experiments was curtailed by the impact on parties of labour of the global momentum of neoliberalism, for their importance is that they illustrated in practice a direct answer to market-driven politics. This politics did so in the way it began to develop a non-market alternative that responded to severe democratic failings in public administration, while still recognising the importance of the state in the redistribution of wealth and the provision of essential services and infrastructure. Whereas the conversion of social democracy to the neoliberal paradigm involved unleashing the capitalist market as if it could be the source of new energy needed to reform routinised and unresponsive state bodies, the early PT and the radical left in London (and elsewhere) looked to forms of democracy that released the creativity lying dormant among the mass of people as the source of new energy for the management of public resources for the public good.

The attempted obliteration of this option, through the pervasive ideological imposition of the dichotomy of an old statist left versus the dynamism and entrepreneurialism of the capitalist market, was in effect a continuation of cold war mentalities into the twenty-first century. Left alternatives are underdeveloped precisely because of the successes of this obliteration.

But when we look for the sources from which a transformative politics can now grow, it is important to recall that the transformative alternative did not entirely disappear. This was seen in Brazil, if not in the PT itself, then through highly politicized movements and networks such as the Movemente Sans Terre. While even in the UK it survived in spirit in various campaigns, from the one that defeated Thatcher’s poll tax to the more recent ones of, for example, UK Uncut against corporate tax evasion, combining creative forms of direct action with the research of committed academics, journalists and trade union whistle-blowers, followed up by supportive MPs.

Struggles to transform the state

Here, I want to reflect especially on the many movements and initiatives that undertook struggles against privatisation since the mid-1990s. Many of these were also struggles to transform the state. There are enough examples from across the world to suggest that these indicate a significant development among public sector unions and wider alliances, especially at a local level but with national and international support.

These experiences indicate a positive response to the breakdown of the division of labour characteristic of social democratic labour movements, as noted earlier, between trade unionism as concerned with industrial relations and the employment contract and parties taking responsibility for wider political issues, including the welfare state.

Here, in the refusal of trade unions to accept the commodification of public services and utilities, and at the same time voice the reassertion and renewal of the goal of maximising public benefit rather than profit, unions are directly taking responsibility as citizens for what was the sphere of representative politics.

In a sense, they are defending the earlier use of the state to redistribute and to decommodify; but they are also opening up a dynamic of renewal and transformation of those non-market relationships. What is it that makes these struggles transformative, going beyond defending existing relationships and initiating a new dynamic that releases the creative capacities and powers of working people?

The key development here is that trade union organisations grounded in specific workplaces, and cooperating with associations of users and communities, have begun to struggle around the use values produced by their members, rather than simply replicating the relations of commodity production and bargaining over the price and conditions of labour.

Indeed, to win the struggle for public services they have turned their organisation from being a means of representation and mobilisation to also being a way of democratically socialising the knowledge that workers – and users – already have in fragmented form of the service they deliver or use, and gaining a full view of how the service could be developed and improved. They are in effect making overcoming of the alienated nature of labour a part of their struggle to defend but also realise the full potential of the public sphere of non-commodified provision.

Political organisation in transition

The examples in this essay all illustrate a transition from socialist change as centred around the state to an understanding of transformative power organised in society. Government – in these cases, local government – remained important, not as the prime driver of change but as exercising specific powers – of redistribution and socialisation of land and finance, and the defence of public services.

These are powers that can support the capacities of self-organised citizens to resist and transform, both in ways that they can be used against capital and in ways that can facilitate self- organisation and support democratic and decentralised management of public resources, including as ‘commons’. What can we conclude about the implications of this transition for the nature of political organisation?

We have had a glimpse through these examples of the GLC, Porto Alegre and transformative resistance to privatisation, of the multiplicity of forms of political organisation and initiative, in which the objective of political representation and/or government office is only one part of the process of change.

The concept of the ‘political’ has, over the past four decades or so, gained the broader meaning of concern with transforming power relations throughout society. Many of the initiatives which are, in this sense, political more often than not focus on a particular site of social relations but do so with a wider vision and cluster of values in mind.

An aspect of this broader interpretation of politics is the way that these activities are increasingly creating alternatives in the present which not only illustrate the future they are working for but also seek to open up a further dynamic of change. In this respect we made a comparison with the innovative strategic thinking of Andre Gorz in the mid-1960s; but in thinking now about political organisation, a contrast will help to identify a further feature of the present transition. The organisational dimension of the struggle has changed considerably since Gorz’s time.

For many reasons, involving both the political defeats of traditional organisations of labour, the socially devastating impact of neoliberal economics and also radical changes in technology and the organisation of production, we face extreme forms of fragmentation and dispersion.

In effect, the problem of creating prefigurative change in the present with a dynamic towards future change is as much about ourselves creating new forms of self-organisation in the present as about reforms through the state. We can see the practice of this through campaigns around resistance and alternatives to privatisation.

We have described how these campaigns aim to achieve changes in the present which also illustrate an alternative future, defending or recovering public provision from takeover by the market, but also making them genuinely public in their organisation, not merely their ownership. These campaigns could not rely on the existing organisations of the labour movement. Considerable organisational innovation has been required involving links with communities in which the union is one actor amongst many, and the traditional labour parties have had only a minimum presence. Such campaigns have highlighted the need for the conversion of the union from a means of defensive bargaining to a means of gathering workers’ knowledge and taking militant action to transform services in response to users’ needs.

New forms of communication and understandings of knowledge

This hybrid of old and new organisational forms, developed and combined for a common purpose, is a widespread pattern producing new organisational forms. Any useful mapping of distinctive features of the transition in organisational forms should include two further features of this multiplicity of political organisation.

The first concerns the importance of the means of communication. Organisation is always in good part about communication, as well as about decision-making and discipline. The new communication technologies now enable a qualitatively greater variety of means of collaboration. They facilitate means of networked coordination based on common goals and shared values but recognising a plurality of tactics and organisational forms and therefore not requiring a single centre. Such networked approaches to transformative politics preexisted the new technology but there has been an escalation of possibilities which have in turn expanded our organisational imaginations, as well as producing new problems.

The second related feature concerns knowledge. The spread of dispersed yet often connected and collaborative forms of organisation also creates favourable conditions for realising the political potential of the plural understandings of knowledge developed in practice by movements in the 1970s, especially the women’s movement and radical trade union organisations and also, from different origins, in the traditions of popular education and grassroots political organising in many parts of the South.

The shift from a state-centred understanding of change to one focused on developing transformative power in society is associated with these radical changes in our understandings of knowledge. The movements of the 1970s asserted in their practice the creative, knowing capacity of so- called ‘ordinary’ people, against both the ‘scientific management’ of the Fordist factory and the centralised, exclusively professional knowledge of the Fabian social democratic state. Their understandings of the importance of experiential as well as theoretical knowledge, tacit as well as codified, underpinned the first phase of thinking about participatory democracy in these earlier decades of rebellion and a so-called ‘excess of democracy’.

This also alters the whole context of political programmes, leading to a far wider, more participatory process of the development of ideas than traditionally has taken place within political parties, emphasising alternatives in practice as well as, indeed often as the basis for, reforms required from the state.

In many ways, the functions associated with a political party are now carried out by many autonomous actors sharing common values. To think through the implications of this complexity for political organisation it is important to distinguish different kinds or levels of political activity. For example, the focused kind of unity required for an election campaign is not what is required for helping to build a network of social centres or alliances of community groups and trade unions, where spreading information and facilitating diversity according to local circumstances will be more appropriate. It makes sense for the question of organisational form to be related to the purpose of the activity.

New forms of politics and organisation

Moreover, there is no necessity for different activities and organisations that share common values be part of a single political framework. There is a wide variety of ways in which common values can be communicated and shared.

There remain, however, many unresolved issues. One is the problem with which we began: that of representation within the political system, to redistribute public resources and redeploy state power. This is a purpose which again requires distinctive organisational forms. To develop these, we need to return to our theoretical sketch of a critical approach to representation based on citizens not as atomistic individuals with a formal, abstract political equality, but as citizens embedded in concrete, and at present, unequal social relationships, as workers, as dispossessed in numerous different ways, as women, as ethnic minorities, disabled and so on. What strategies and organisational forms best ‘make present’ and gain political resources for the struggles to overcome these inequalities and sources of exploitation?

We noted how actually existing parliamentary democracy effectively tends to occlude and reinforce inequalities of wealth and power unless directly challenged. This is a process intensified by conceding key decisions to opaque and unaccountable national and international bodies; and, as a consequence, a depoliticization of most of the central decisions affecting the future of society.

This trend is often associated with neoliberal globalization, but it is only a continuation of a process endemic in liberal democracy: leaving key issues concerning the future of the poor in the hands of the capitalist market; as we saw in the past history of Porto Alegre, the future of the residents of the favellas in the hands of the elite of landowning families; of inner city London communities in the hands of speculative property developers; and of public services in the hands of predatory corporations.

The common feature of the counter strategies attempted in London and Porto Alegre was one based on municipal collaboration with those struggling directly against these inequalities: the organisations of the poor in the favellas through the participatory budget, the inner city of communities in London through direct involvement in formulating and implementing the council planning process and support for their proposals against the pressures of landowners and property developers, respectively.

Organisationally, they entailed a form of political representation based on an electoral mandate and accountable for its implementation to those citizens with specific sources of power, knowledge and organisation necessary – but without sufficient politic support – to carry through the change.

I have argued that political representation in such contexts involves a clash between two entirely different understandings and forms of organisation of political power. Organisational forms are needed, therefore, for the purpose of making present in the political system struggles in society. These struggles reinforce the electoral mandate by actively claiming and elaborating the commitments made. Such forms of political representation are up against entrenched institutions which take as given and as beyond their responsibility the inequalities and problems against which these struggles and the electoral mandate are directed.

The kind of organisation whose purpose it is to carry through this social, unavoidably conflictual, form of representation has to be organised to serve the struggles and movements whose demands and needs it is pursuing through the political process. This is much more complex and harder than being ‘a voice’. If parties are understood as those organisations seeking political representation and government office, then we are talking here about a political party. But it is a party – or parties – of a very distinctive kind (of which we have experienced so very few).

For a start it would, as should be clear from our previous evoking of the multiplicity of forms of political organisations for radical social change, be part of a constellation of organisations, outside of political institutions sharing more or less explicitly common values and goals.

Secondly, these new kinds of parties would effectively be serving within the framework of a commitment set out by the electoral mandate, developed through the participation of this wider network or constellation. Forms of accountability and transparency for the work of representatives in implementing this commitment would be central to the organisational character of the party.

Thirdly, the party organisation would necessarily be double-sided with its 2013 members, including those involved in the work of representation, involved in building these extra-parliamentary organizations of transformative power. As we saw with Syriza and others, they would be involved not especially as leaders but as fellow activists, contributing to and sharing their particular sources of power and knowledge. Such a new kind of party would require specific organisational forms to counter the pressures drawing representatives into the flytrap of parliamentary politics, with all its tendencies towards a separate political class.

We saw in both London and the GLC and Brazil and the PT, that the inability of the two parties to continue to build up the presence of social movements, and open up state resources for social struggles, lay in the weakness (in the case of the Labour Party) or weakening (in the case of the PT) of the parties’ organised links with society. There are lessons here that Syriza could well bear in mind. Political parties are shaped in part by movements that were decisive in their origins: for the PT, the movements for democracy and equality against dictatorship and oligarchic rule; and for the London Labour Party of the early 1980s, by the maturation of the movements of the late 1960s and 1970s.

Parties are also constrained by the system they are working in. With Syriza, perhaps, we have one of the first parties to be shaped predominantly, though not exclusively, by the movements that have developed to resist neoliberal capitalism in the face of a political class completely disconnected from the mass of people. One of the 29 women MPs that make up a third of Syriza’s parliamentary group, Theano Fotiou, described the overriding purpose that the structure of the new party must fulfil: ‘It must be a structure for the people to always be connected to the party, even if they are not members of the party, to be criticizing the party, bringing new experience to the party’.

They created a coalition to which nearly two million people felt connected in spite of – maybe partly because of – a determined attempt to whip up fear. Syriza arrived at this through much learning both from fellow Greeks and from political experiences across Europe. It is clear that as we strengthen our continent-wide capacities to refuse austerity and organise behind the non-reformist reform of a democratic and equal Europe, we will learn a lot from them.

My thanks to Greg Albo, Roy Bhaskar, Leo Panitch,Steve Platt, Vishwas Satgar, and Jane Shallice for helpful discussions and suggestions on earlier drafts, to Red Pepper and Transnational Institute companions for their constantly stimulating collaboration, and to Marco Berlinguer for many discussions that have influenced the arguments in this essay.

This Essay was first published in Question of Strategy, by www.merlinpress.co.uk;  Socialist Register 2013

For more see
Union Solidarity International
Greek Solidarity Campaign
Another Road for Europe
Syriza’s website

This article is from the forthcoming issue of Red Pepper – for more like this, subscribe today.

New words expressing new concepts usually indicate stirrings at other levels of reality. So when we read of widespread ‘peer-to-peer’ activity (sharing without central authorities) and the spread of ‘open source’ (the mutuality of creativity), or come across seemingly paradoxical concepts such as ‘produsers’ (users producing value as they use), or entirely new concepts such as ‘phyles’ (transnational networks of small companies in which the values of the commons are predominant), we should find out about the innovations that old language does not capture.
We are witnessing the emergence of a new ‘proto’ mode of production based on distributed, collaborative forms of organisation. It is developing within capitalism, rather as Marx argued the early forms of merchant and factory capitalism developed within the feudal order. In other words system change is back on the agenda but in an unexpected form, not as a socialist alternative, but as a commons-based alternative.
Capitalism in its present form is facing limits, especially resource limits, and in spite of the rapid growth of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) economies, is undergoing a process of decomposition. The question is whether the new proto-mode can generate the institutional capacity and the alliances able to break the political power of the old order.
One way to describe the changes now taking place is as a shift away from a context in which the technological and economic advantage lies with economies of scale and mass production that depend on cheap global transportation and, thus, the continuous availability of fossil fuels. The move is to ‘economies of scope’, where bringing down the cost of common infrastructure for networked enterprises brings competitive advantages.
It is in achieving these economies of scope that the distributed, peer-to-peer forms of production made possible by new information and communication technologies can be deployed.
Distributed production: who has control?
The ecological and resource scarcity crisis makes the shift to economies of scope seem all but inevitable. Such a shift takes two major forms: the mutualising of knowledge, which is the ‘open source’ model; and the mutualisation of physical resources, which takes the form of ‘collaborative consumption’ in order to mobilise idle resources. Both occur in the greater context of the horizontalisation of human communication and the common value creation that have been enabled with the internet. These involve forms of mutual accommodation between centralised institutions (such as corporations and states) and decentralised, interconnected productive publics (such as open source software producers and social network users). In such accommodations there is a clear divide between those contexts where control is firmly vested in the companies, and is disadvantageous to the workers/producers, and forms in which the community dynamics remain dominant, and institutions have to adapt to the rules and norms of a community.
In the sphere of immaterial production, Facebook and Google are representative of forms in which individuals share their expressive output but do not collaborate with each other on common objects. Typically, such platforms will use business models that do not return the value to the users who have actually created it.
Commons-based peer production, by contrast, is emerging as a proto-mode of production in which the value is created by productive publics or ‘produsers’ in shared innovation commons, whether they are of knowledge, code or design. It occurs wherever people can link up horizontally and without permission to create common value together. It has the most potential as a leverage to transform what is now a proto-mode of production into a real mode of production beneficial to workers and ‘commoners’. To achieve this, strategic and tactical breaks with capitalism are necessary, though not necessarily with market forms.
How does commons-based peer production work?
Generalising from practice in the sphere of immaterial production, the new system functions as follows.
The contributors are either volunteers, or paid employees of collaborating companies. The infrastructure of cooperation is often maintained by a new type of ‘for-benefit’ association, such as the Wikimedia Foundation, which oversees Wikipedia, or the so-called FLOSS (Free/Libre and Open Source Software) Foundations such as the Apache Foundation, which provides organisational, legal, and financial support for software that powers much of the web.
These foundations do not command and control the labour of production but enable and empower its emergence and the social allocation of resources by the associated producers. Around these commons, we see the emergence of entrepreneurial coalitions. These consist of enterprises that create market value ‘on top of the commons’.
An example here would be the open source provider Red Hat, which distributes and supports a commercial version of the free Linux operating system. Their role in the feedback loop of value creation consists in making possible the individual social reproduction of the commoners/contributors, and often sustaining the for-benefit associations that also act as buffer between the community of peer producers and the entrepreneurs.
This new emerging modality tends to out-cooperate and out-compete classic modes of capitalist production. This is because of its higher innovation potential (there is no privatisation of innovation); the ability for distributed parallel development on a global scale without the use of costly bureaucracies of control (as with Wikipedia, every module can be worked on separately, by any contributor with the necessary skills); and the much cheaper production costs due to price structures free of the rent of ‘intellectual property’ (IP). Where these new forms occur – in knowledge production, free software production and now emerging in physical production – they tend to displace proprietary and IP-based modes. A study by the Computer and Communications Industry Association estimates that the US ‘fair use’ economy, based on shared, ‘balanced copyright’ knowledge, already employs 17.5 million people and accounted for one sixth of GDP in 2007.
Replacing capitalism?
As with the proto-capitalist modes under feudalism, today’s new forms co-exist with the dominant modality and may at first even strengthen it. In peer production today, the individual workers are still employed by capital – but at the same time the role of the commons and the community, and its explicitly co-operative, non‑capitalist logic, is a core aspect of the new organisation of production. Peer producers are knowledge workers and an integral part of the working class, while the entrepreneurial coalition is often dominated by a ‘netarchical’ capitalist class – a new category of capitalist that is no longer dependent on the ownership of IP rights but rather on the development and control of participatory platforms such as Facebook. This netarchical class knows how to capture value out of social production for the benefit of capital.
The new mode of peer production has features that prefigure a new productive system in the sense that the sharing of knowledge, code or design essentially follows a logic similar to communism as described by Marx: anyone can contribute, and anyone with access to the network can access the resource. Resources are allocated socially, through the decisions of the contributors to allocate their skills and energy to a particular part of the project. The solutions are added back to the same commons, and can be used by all, even where they have been created by developers who are also employees of capitalist companies.
The paradox, of course, is that this really-existing communism is interdependent with the really-existing capitalism of the entrepreneurial coalition that works with that particular commons. This makes the transitional mode of peer production a new terrain of social tension, struggle and, eventually, adaptation between various social forces.
Ultimately, the potential of the new mode is the same as those of previous proto-modes of production – to emancipate itself from its dependency on the old decaying mode, so as to become self-sustaining and thus replace the ‘circulation of capital’ with an independent ‘circulation of the common’. In a circulation of the common, the value that is created by the commoners for the commons would directly contribute to the further strengthening of the commons, without dependence on capital. How could this be achieved?
Critically, it would require an amendment of the existing sharing licenses, to prevent the value capture (without retribution) of capital – for example, the use of the ‘peer production’ or ‘copy-far-left’ licence, as proposed by Dmytry Kleiner and chosen by the P2P Foundation.
Our proposal is that the users of the commons should be commons-friendly enterprise structures and not profit-maximising companies. These ethical companies, whose members are the commoners/contributors themselves, would be organised as global open design companies. These would be linked to networks of small factories that produce on the basis of shared values and could more easily adopt open-book management, open recruiting and open supply lines, ensuring transparency to the whole network, in order to create maximum mutual alignment between participants. This is simply an extension of the existing organisational practices of ‘immaterial commons production’, which combines full transparency of all actions with negotiated coordination.
In order to turn peer production from a transitional mode within capitalism to a potential new dominant mode of production, we have to bring together the commonist aspects of immaterial cooperation with manufacturing companies that do not reward shareholders and owners of capital but rather the value creators themselves. By interconnecting these emerging players we will create a powerful seed form for the future.
One possible way of doing so is through a conversion of the existing social/solidarity economy towards shared innovation commons. If social economy actors adopted shared innovation commons, they would become hyper-cooperative, and hence effectively competitive with multinational corporations, which they would outperform in terms of speed and depth of innovation, as well as price, since they would operate without intellectual property mark-ups. From what Marx called ‘dwarfish forms’, they would transform into powerful global players.
How does this apply to manufacturing?
A corporate-driven move to distributed forms of production has been underway for some time. When this ‘classic’ distributed manufacturing is coupled with the principle of shared innovation commons – that is, as the distributed production of ‘open hardware’ – much more dramatic changes could be afoot. Marcin Jakubowski of the Open Source Ecology project, which develops about 50 types of open hardware-based production machinery (open source tractors, bricklaying machines and so on), and Wikispeed, the open source car project, have announced the development of an ‘extreme manufacturing’ platform.
We regard this as the peer production equivalent of the invention of the assembly line by Henry Ford. It inserts the rapid production methodologies that have proven themselves in open source software production (such as ‘extreme programming’) into the world of machine design, and links it directly to microfactories and distributed enterprise.
As Jakubowski explains this model, it directly addresses the issue of economies of scope by offering a globally mutualised production infrastructure: ‘Extreme Manufacturing (XM) is an open source hardware development methodology, which focuses open source design and collaboration, and the revenue model is distributive enterprise . . . The magic of this method lies in synergistic, lively, distributed, parallel development.’ He explains how it is lean in its organisation but ‘maintains sufficient structure for scalability’.
This sort of distributed system can operate within a capitalist framework but can also, when linked with shared innovation commons, provide a new form of open and distributed manufacturing centred on social, rather than profit-driven, value creation. The bases for an integrated distributed manufacturing system are currently under rapid development. They include distributed access to machinery: 3D printing and other forms of personal fabrication, such as currently developed in FabLabs and hackerspaces, as well as in emerging microfactory models such as Wikispeed and Local Motors.
It requires distributed access to physical places for collaboration – co-working centres – as well as the widespread possibility for peer learning. Distributed access to financial capital is a further condition, notably crowd-funding, social lending and distributed, decentralised currencies such as cryptography-based digital money Bitcoin. The spread of these peer to peer forms of funding has already attracted the attention of the Bank of England executive director, Andrew Haldane, who has suggested that peer to peer finance models could sweep away the inefficient retail banks before too long.
Access to distributed forms of energy and raw materials will also be fundamental. Here too there are established trends in this direction. For instance, half of Germany’s solar energy is produced by community‑owned local cooperatives. The availability of appropriate legal forms to allow for entrepreneurship in this new modality will be necessary.
If it is true that the capitalist mode of production is reaching its limits, and that this emerging new mode of value creation creates significant opportunities for commons-centred production, then we need to seize this opportunity – not just at the micro-level as a new social practice, but as a societal project for emancipation.
How would peer production be extended to the whole of society?
The current capitalist system is based on two entirely erroneous premises: first, that nature is abundant and can be infinitely exploited to obtain endless growth; and second, that sharing of innovation, culture and science should be hampered through privatisation of intellectual property – an imposition of artificial scarcity. These macro-economic principles are then written into the ‘constitutions’ of profit-maximising corporations, which are legally obliged to enrich their shareholders by maximising social and environmental externalities.
Peer production models show us a new possible reality in which the democratic civic sphere, productive commons and a vibrant market can co-exist for mutual benefit. This model has three dimensions. At the core of value creation are various commons, where innovations are deposited for all humanity to share and build on.
These commons are facilitated and protected through non-profit civic associations, with the ‘partner state’ as their territorial equivalent, empowering and enabling that social production. Around the commons emerges a vibrant economy undertaken by different kinds of ethical companies, whose legal structures tie them to the values and goals of the commons communities, not absentee and private shareholders’ intent of maximising profit at any cost.
Where the three circles intersect, there are the citizens deciding on the optimal shape of their provisioning systems. This is what happened when the counter-power structure of Occupy Wall Street in New York decided to complement its free provisioning of food with the Street Vendor Project, enabling supporters to buy food from local street vendors. This was a conscious, citizen-driven choice for an ethical economy subsumed under the citizenry and its political commons. Occupy and the indignados signify the birth of digital-native social movements, and a necessary politicisation around the new productive and social possibilities.
While the shift to distributed production may be inevitable, the form it takes is open to evolution. This will be determined not just by the social construction of alternatives, in which communities, corporations and the state intersect, but also by outright social struggle, including in the field of political representation.
A political expression of the commons
New social movements always start first as a new subculture, consisting of people who invent new social practices. The file sharing communities at the root of the Swedish Pirate Party initially consisted simply of music lovers who wanted to share their music and discoveries. These communities discovered that such sharing was actually illegal, because the laws still attached to intellectual property do not give the user sovereignty over their acquired material but subject it to a prohibition on sharing, in order to ensure a guaranteed rent income to entertainment corporations.
At first, such communities did not directly attack the system that repressed their freedom to share. Instead they started building their own infrastructure. This included the new type of creative commons and other ‘copyleft’ licenses that formalise the right to share.
However, there is a stage in the evolution of a new social movement and culture when political power is crucial to ensure its survival and development. It is not enough to create new institutions on the margins of society; effective defence mechanisms against the constant attacks of the dominant powers become a necessity. This means building a political coalition.
The Pirate parties, one of which is expected to carry 10 per cent of German voters in the next election, are the first political expression of free culture. The Pirates are the natural defenders of the digital commons at the heart of the new mode of production. Sociologically, they attract the votes of the precarious youth generations that are most involved in the new productive modalities.
The Greens and ecological parties also claim to be the natural defenders of the commons. They are often the parties of choice of older, highly educated, knowledge workers.
The left and social justice parties, some of which have made significant gains in recent elections in in Europe, are of course parties of the productive commons. They could be a force that understands the advantages of distributed production that can be accessed and owned by the workers-producers themselves. They often receive the votes of government employees and industrial workers who are still loyal to the older labour traditions.
A final element in a new political coalition would consist of progressive liberal forces. For example, in Denmark, culture minister Uffe Elbaek is known for his commons-friendly approach. Such parties can represent a link with socially progressive entrepreneurs who create enterprises around the commons.
From these diverse roots, a new progressive majority can be created around free culture, respect for nature and its limits, the necessity of social justice and ethical entrepreneurship. This ‘grand coalition of the commons’ can create a new political majority for social change.
While none of the parties involved is as yet quite ready for it, a convergence of commons-friendly forces could create the conditions for a new social hegemony that could challenge the current dominant players and potentially re-arrange both peer production and a commons-centred society, so that it is driven by the commoners and operates in their interest.

The creativity of labour

Hilary Wainwright poses some questions about how to achieve a commons-based alternative to capitalist production
he work of Michel Bauwens and the P2P Foundation on a peer to peer/commons approach to production is important for several reasons. First, it draws attention to the fact that the new information, design and communication technologies make possible economies of co-ordination and transaction that provide potentially historic opportunities for scaling up, spreading and expanding the many dispersed economic initiatives driven by social values rather than profit maximisation.
Bauwens identifies this potential in the full knowledge that these same technologies enable the canniest corporations to become increasingly powerful while at the same time minimising their costs. Distributed, decentralised production is for Bauwens a contested terrain, full of ambivalences and risks as well as opportunities for transformative politics.
The second reason for the importance of his work is his focus on the growth of a commons of knowledge and design, in both immaterial and increasingly material production, as a development of immense strategic significance and with an already transformative character. In itself this commons is no island of unalienated work, however. Take open software development, for example: the success of Apple, Google and IBM is based on a business model, as Bauwens implies, that gives these companies access to creative labour while leaving responsibility for productivity with the developers themselves. In doing so, they avoid incurring the costs of recruitment, training, pensions, childcare leave or other means of sustaining labour.
Bauwens claims to provide a complete design for a new model of production: ownership, management structure, distribution system and all. His strength is his specific focus on the knowledge and design commons but at the same time an openness to the wider connections that will help realise its transformative potential .
Some questions, then, from a sympathetic point of view, to help to take the argument further. First, if the most intelligent predator companies are already exploiting commons production, what is to stop the corporations from fencing this commons in? What wider connections to what countervailing forces, initiatives and sources of support could enable this commons to contribute to a wider challenge to the capitalist firms?
I’m thinking here of connections within the economy, as distinct from – but not opposed to – the kind of political alliance that Bauwens interestingly but a little optimistically sketches. For example, what possibilities are there of linking up with and strategically enhancing the co-operative and solidarity economy discussed by Robin Murray and others in the previous issue of Red Pepper?
Is there a role for the unions in developing such an alternative? Levels of unionisation are low among IT workers. Open software developers, though, have a variety of strong networks of their own that act as sources of recognition and employment, and provide a degree of protection, bargaining power and sometimes a basis for campaigning on issues of common concern – for example, in opposition to attempts to impose proprietary enclosures. Could unions learn from experiences of supporting organisations of the self-employed, such as Streetnet in South Africa and Sewa in India, or from other unions such as the National Union of Journalists that have supported freelance workers for a long time? How would unions have to change to make the issues of control over the use and purpose of human creativity as important as the struggle over employment conditions and payment? Would it help to see labour as human creativity as itself a commons?
It would lead to asking: what are the institutional, including financial, conditions for nurturing and realising the creativity of each for the benefit of all? This would apply at micro levels – how enterprises should be organised – and at the macro. What means of livelihood, with what public support, would be required to have some autonomy from the labour market? What legislative frameworks would be needed; what support for education, training, sabbaticals? And how can we envisage non-capitalist market forms that can be experimented with here and now as part of the contestation and competition with capitalist forms?
Above all, though, as the left shows tentative signs of electoral recovery, we must learn the lesson of how social democracy has been bulldozed or captured by corporate power. This is in no small part due to the fact that its programmes of redistribution were not rooted in a distinct strategy for production, with the creativity and solidarity of labour at its centre. Bauwens offers an opportunity for thinking and acting over production beyond capitalism. We should grasp it in all its complexity.

At the same time, no veteran of the movements of the late 1960s and 1970s can help but be struck by similarities. There’s the same strong sense of power from below that comes from the dependence of the powerful on those they dominate or exploit. There’s the creative combination of personal and collective change, and the bringing together of resistance with experiments in creating alternatives here and now. There’s the spurning of hierarchies and the creation of organisations that are today described as ‘horizontal’ or ‘networked’ – and that now with the new techno tools for networking have both more potential and more ambiguity.

And the same hoary problems reappear: informal and unaccountable leaderships, the tensions between inclusion and effectiveness. The Tyranny of Structurelessness, the 1970s pamphlet that tackled these unanticipated pitfalls from the perspective of the women’s liberation movement in particular, may be well read.

But that was 40 years ago – even before the widespread use of faxes, let alone personal computers and mobile phones! How could reflecting on these marginalised earlier movements possibly take forward the debates opened by Occupy and the Indignados?

From social rebellion to capitalist renewal

The fate of the energies and aspirations of that rebellious decade is a long and complex cluster of stories. To consider their relevance today, I want only to point to a historical process that was not generally anticipated at the time and still is not fully understood. This was the capacity of capitalism, as it searched for ways of out of stagnation and crisis, to feed opportunistically on the chaotic creativity and restless experimental culture of the movements of the 1960s and 1970s.

For example, from the 1980s, at the same time as attacking the trade unions, corporate management was also dismantling the military-style hierarchies characteristic of many leading companies and decentralising the production process. A new generation of managers, especially in the newer industries, was recognising that workers’ tacit knowledge was a rich source of increased productivity and greater profits – so long as workers had little real power over their distribution.

Another example is how, in the endless search for new markets, culturally-savvy marketing managers were able to identify and exploit the commercial opportunities in the expanded horizons and wants of the increasing mass of women with incomes of their own.

The key underlying feature of these and similar trends is that much of the innovative character of capitalism’s renewal in the 1980s and 1990s – underpinned by the expansion of credit – came from sources external to both the corporation and the state. In fact, frequently its origins lay in resistance and the search for alternatives to both.

In other words, capital proved very much more nimble in responding to – and appropriating – the new energies and aspirations stimulated by the critical movements of the 1960s and 1970s than did the parties of the left – for which these movements could have been a force for democratic renewal.

What kind of a counter-movement?

Now, with the credit that underpinned the apparent ebullience of this particular period of capitalism having become toxic, the search for alternatives is back. As I write, the Financial Times, much to its own astonishment, is publishing a week of articles on ‘The Crisis of Capitalism’. The opening article declares that ‘at the heart of the problem is widening inequality’.

Are we seeing in the combination – not necessarily convergence – of unease within at least the cultural elites, the growth of sustained popular resistance and public disgruntlement, the emergence of what Karl Polanyi called a ‘counter-movement’ to the socially destructive consequences of rampant capitalism? And to what extent might the ideas of the movements of the 1960s and 1970s influence the character of that counter-movement?

A fundamental break

To answer this we need, briefly, to remind ourselves of the core nature of the original social critique made by the 1960s/70s movements and in particular the nature of its potential break with the institutions of the post-war order: their paternalism, their exclusions, their narrow definition of democracy and their assumption that production and technology were value neutral.

Central to the character of this critique was its aspiration, more in practice than in theory, to overcome the debilitating dichotomies of the cold war: between the individual and the collective/social; freedom and solidarity/equality; ‘free’ market versus ‘command’ state – dichotomies that were refrozen through neoliberalism and the manner of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The ideas and practices of the women’s movement are particularly illustrative. This movement came about partly from the gender-blind inconsistencies and incompletely fulfilled promises of the radical movements of the time. It deepened and extended their innovations, adding insights arising from women’s specific experiences of breaking out of their subordination.

Especially important here was an insistence on the individual as social and the collective as based on relations between individuals: a social individualism and a relational view of society and social change. After all, the momentum of the women’s liberation movement was animated both by women’s desire to realise themselves as individuals and their determination to end the social relationships that blocked these possibilities. This required social solidarity: an organised movement.

The nature of its organisation was shaped by a constant attempt to create ways of organising that combined freedom and autonomy – what every woman struggles for in her own life – with solidarity, mutuality and values of equality. The result – cutting a complex and tense story short – was ways of relating that both allowed for autonomy and also achieved co-ordination and mutual support, without going through a single centre. In other words, here was what could be called an early, pre-ICT, ‘networked’ form of organisation.

The political economy of networks

This networked form was distinctive because integral to its origin, character and sustainability were values of solidarity and equality and democracy. Awareness of these origins could help us now, when networked organisations are everywhere, to distinguish between the instrumental use of the concept of network in essentially undemocratic organisations (within states and corporations, for example) and, on the other hand, as a way of connecting distributed activities based on shared values of social justice and democratically agreed norms.

The latter possibility is radically enhanced through the new information and communications technology in its non-proprietorial forms. The new possibilities of systems co-ordinating a multiplicity of autonomous organisations with shared values, through democratically agreed norms or protocols, can help upscale economic organisations based on non-capitalist – collaborative, P2P (peer to peer) co-operative or other social and democratic – forms of ownership, production, distribution and finance.

What enables us to make this apparently surprising leap from the forms of organisation shaped by the consciousness-raising groups of the women’s movement (or indeed other civil society initiatives of the same period, such as the factory shop stewards’ committees combining against multi-plant, multinational corporations and developing alternative plans for socially useful production) is the importance they give to practical, experiential knowledge and the need to share and socialise it.

The political economy of knowledge

The reason why this is important for the development of a political economy beyond capitalism is that behind the imposed choice between capitalist market and the state is the polarisation between scientific, social and economic knowledge on the one hand and practical knowledge on the other. While the former was regarded as the basis of economic planning and centralised through the state, defenders of the free market held up the latter as being held individually by the entrepreneur and capable of coordination only through the haphazard workings of the market, based on private ownership. The relevant breakthrough of the women’s and other movements of the 1960s/70s was to make the sharing and socialising of experiential knowledge – in combination with scientific forms – fundamental to their purposeful, but always experimental, organisations. And to do so through consciously co-ordinated/networked and self-reflexive relations between autonomous/distributed initiatives.

Translating this into economics in the age of information and communications technology – a project requiring much further work – points to the possibility of forms of co-ordination that can include and help to regulate a non-capitalist market. A regulated, socialised market, that is, in which the drive to accumulate and make money out of money is effectively suppressed. It also provides a basis for democratising and, where appropriate, decentralising the state, within the framework of democratically agreed social goals (such as concerning equality and ecology).

It is over these issues concerning the sharing of knowledge and information and the implications for the relationship between autonomy and social co-ordination that the ideas coming from the Occupy movement can creatively converge with those of earlier movements. It is interesting in this context to read the economics working group of Occupy London describing in the Financial Times how Frederick von Hayek, the Austrian economist and theorist of free-market capitalism, with his ideas on the significance of distributed knowledge, is ‘the talk of Occupy London’. No doubt this was partly a rhetorical device for the FT audience. But the challenge of answering Hayek and his justification of the free market on the basis of a theory of distributed practical and/or experiential knowledge does provide a useful way of clarifying for ourselves the importance of the networked social justice initiatives of today and the anti-authoritarian social movements of the past for an alternative political economy.

There is a point at which Hayek’s critique of the ‘all knowing state’ at first glance converges with the critique of the social democratic state made by the libertarian/social movement left in the 1960s/70s. Both challenge the notion of scientific knowledge as the only basis for economic organisation and both emphasise the importance of practical/experiential knowledge and its ‘distributed’ character. But when it comes to understanding the nature of this practical knowledge and hence its relation to forms of economic organisation, these perspectives diverge radically.

Whereas Hayek theorises this practical knowledge as inherently individual and hence points to the haphazard , unplanned and unplannable workings of the market and the price mechanism, the radicals of the 1960s/70s took, as we have just explained, a very different view. For them, the sharing of knowledge embedded in experience and collaboration to create a common understanding and self-consciousness of their subordination and of how to resist, was fundamental to the process of becoming a movement. In contrast to the individualism of Hayek, their ways of organising assumed that practical knowledge could be socialised and shared. This led to ways of organising that emphasised communication and shared values as a basis for co-ordination and a common direction. It provided the basis for purposeful and therefore more or less plannable action – action that was always experimental, never all-knowing; the product of distributed intelligence that could be consciously shared.

At the risk of being somewhat schematic, it could be argued that the movements of the 1960s/70s applied these ideas especially to develop an – unfinished – vision of democratising the state. This took place both through attempts to create democratic, participatory ways of administering public institutions (universities and schools, for example) and through the development of non-state sources of democratic power (women’s centres, police monitoring projects and so on). It involved working ‘with/in and against’ the state, such as when the Greater London Council was led by Ken Livingstone in the early 1980s.

Today’s movements are effectively focusing their energies especially on challenging the oligarchic market, and the injustice of corporate, financial power. Here the development of networked forms are increasingly linked to distributed economic initiatives – co-ops, credit unions, open software networks, collaborative cultural projects and so on. In this way, today’s movements are beginning to develop in practice a vision of socialising production and finance and creating an alternative kind of market, complementary to the earlier unfinished vision of democratic public power.

What they have in common, more in practice than in theory, is an assertion of organised democratic civil society as an economic actor, both in the provision of public goods and in the sphere of market exchange.

Cultural equality

This emphasis on the development of strategies for political and economic change that empower democratic civil society, rather than an exclusive reliance on the state, marks a distinct development beyond the politics of the social democratic reformers of the past. The architects of the welfare state and the post-war order, with all its achievements and limits, believed in economic and political reform. But they did so generally on the basis of assumptions of cultural superiority: they, the professionals, knew what was best for the masses. By contrast, the rebellions of the 1960s/70s were asserting cultural equality. Their goals concerned economic and social needs but in a context of challenging dominant understandings of knowledge, emphasising the public importance of practical, tacit and experiential knowledge. This underpinned commitment to developing the organisations in the workplace and wider society that could share this knowledge and turn it into a source of transformative power.

The broadly anti-capitalist movements since the late 1990s are remaking that struggle, in radically changed political and economic circumstances. The context is framed by a new form of cultural domination. It is in effect the imposition of a financial accounting mentality. Thus, pensioners are defined as a ‘burden’; workers are defined as ‘costs’. Higher education is defined as a personal investment, as if everyone determined their future in terms of a personal rate of return rather than a contribution to society. The aim is a culture of acquiescence to the cuts and privatisation in the interests of an unproblematised goal of ‘growth’.

How can we challenge these new forms of cultural subordination, turning citizens, by the dictat of an imposed accounting system, into mere ‘hands’ or ‘dependants’ in the language of 19th-century capitalism?

Alternative values in material practice

Part of the answer is surely to be found by illustrating in practice the alternative values that could found a political economy based on a framework of equality, mutuality and respect for nature. Many such illustrations are up and spreading: credit unions that organise finance as a commons; public sector workers countering privatisation with proposals for improving and democratising services for and with fellow citizens; ‘free culture’ networks insisting on the use of ICT as a means of extending and enriching the public sphere rather than a digital oilfield for profit; a revival of co-operatives and collective consumer action around energy, food and other spheres in which the logic of capital is particularly destructive to society and the environment. The strategic question we have to work on is how to generalise from, interconnect and extend these scattered developments.

In this sense the insistence on ‘being the change we want to see’ and creating alternatives here and now has a macro significance as well as a micro one. The exhaustion of the existing system is in some ways far deeper than in the 1960s and 1970s but we should never underestimate the ability of capital to adapt and appropriate – which is why we must think ambitiously, though remaining grounded, about our collective organisational innovations.

Finally, what about relations with the state?

One of the distinctive features of the recent movements and the steady development across the world of forms of social or, more radically, solidarity economics is an ambition to be part of a process of systemic change. This inevitably raises the question of the relation of these usually autonomous initiatives to the state and to electoral politics.

Most activists in these experiments, rightly, have no faith in the ability of the political class to lead ways out of the crisis. But there has been an overly-generalised theorisation of engagement with political institutions as necessarily counterposed to the building of non-capitalist economic relations in whatever spaces can be struggled for now. Experience, however, points to the possibility of a pragmatic and cautious engagement with political institutions from a consciously and determinedly autonomous base.

An example of this can be found in Argentina, where networks of workers’ co-ops have struggled for legislation favourable to their interests [PDF link]. For example, starting with support at a municipal and provincial level in Buenos Aires, they have won the legal right to maintain ownership and control of occupied factories. The logic of their approach has been to develop autonomous sources of power rooted in actual alternatives, rather than merely forms of pressure and protest that leave the creative initiative (or rather lack of it) with the political class.

This experience effectively illustrates an alternative, progressive recognition of the creative, productive power of civil society to the one described earlier in capitalism’s ability to absorb and subordinate the creativity of the critical culture of the 1960s and 1970s.

In conclusion

This brings us back to my opening question of what use there might be in revisiting these earlier movements. In sum, my arguments point to the importance of the unfinished foundations in democratic civil society of an alternative political economy – including a different kind of state. You could say we were rudely interrupted in our work. But maybe, as we join with new generations with capacities and visions way beyond our own, we will be collectively stronger if we recover what was potentially powerful and what the elites feared and tried to destroy.

It’s not easy to sum up succinctly what the managers of the ruling order felt so threatened by in the 1960s/70s, so let’s use the words they employed themselves. It was ‘an excess of democracy’ that lay behind ‘the reduction of authority’, concluded the Trilateral Commission when it investigated the causes of the political and economic crises of the early 1970s on behalf of governments of the dominant western powers. The elite alarm at that time was thus more than just the regular ruling class fear of the mob. The notion of ‘an excess of democracy’ implied a fear of intelligent and organised opposition, which was hence less easy to counter.

It was the autonomous and yet purposeful, organised and capable nature of the movements – including, perhaps especially, in the workplace that they feared most. Here was the emergence of a new generation with allies throughout society that no longer accepted the place allotted to them by the elite democracy handed down to them after the war. And yet that generation comprised the children of the post-war democratic order, gaining legitimacy through appealing to its claims and its unfulfilled promises. At that moment, the elites lost their authority. Simple repression would no longer work – not that they didn’t try it.

Related to this and later on, as the ideas of the radical movements began to shape political debate in the mid-1970s and early 1980s, the threat, at least in the UK, became that a form of socialism (or at least a viable political vision threatening to the elites) might emerge that could no longer be dismissed by reference to the failure of the Soviet model. Norman Tebbit, Margaret Thatcher’s right-hand hatchet man, put it neatly in reference to the radically democratic Greater London Council of the early 1980s: ‘This is the modern socialism and we must destroy it.’

The grounds for these fears lay in the distinctive features of those movements and projects described in this article. In their ways of organising (combining autonomy and co-operation, creating the participatory conditions for the genuine sharing of knowledge), the alliances they built (across the traditional divides of economics, culture, labour and community) and their vision (beyond state versus market, individual versus social), they held out in practice the possibility of an alternative, participatory and co-operative political economy.

For a time, the new political culture seemed unstoppable. Now, in the presence of Occupy and the multiplicity of movements that share in new ways the same hopeful characteristics, it feels as if, like a mountain stream that disappeared from sight, the same ‘excess of democracy’, with its springs in the 1960s and 1970s, is bubbling up again.

Many thanks to Marco Berlinguer, Roy Bhaskar, Robin Murray, Doreen Massey and Jane Shallice

The point was partly an ecological one. But the surrounding placards indicated that the gardeners also intended it to make a symbolic point about the broader significance of the march. ‘Plantemos’ declared a large cardboard placard, meaning: ‘we plant ourselves’ – ‘we stand firm’.

Mariel, who was dressed as a bee – essential to flourishing horticulture and now facing pesticidal destruction – explained that the activists who organised the garden were part of the agro-ecology bloc on the march. The march as a whole had several layers of self-organisation that became apparent at certain moments. There were three main focal themes – all issues on which active alliances had come together over recent months: education (yellow flags), health (green flags) and housing (red flags).

As we approached the Arc de Triomf, someone on a loud hailer announced that the different directions in which those following each of the themes should go, guided by an open lorry carrying the appropriate flag. The idea was that the demonstration would end not with speeches to the assembled masses, on the traditional model. Instead, the plan was to hold assemblies to discuss action and alternatives to cuts and privatisation.

News came through later in the evening that two of these assemblies had taken action, leading an occupation of a third hospital – two that were making redundancies had already been occupied the day before the demonstration. They had also squatted a large unoccupied building to turn it into housing for ten families. Evictions have become a focus of intense conflict in Barcelona as the numbers grow every day.

As well as clusters around themes, it was the regular neighbourhood assemblies, feeding into an occasional assembly of assemblies, that were the organism that gave the demonstration its impressive life.

The neighbourhood assemblies emerged in early summer this year, following the birth of the Indignados movement in the occupations of the squares of Spain and Greece. As the occupation of Barcelona’s Plaça de Catalunya reached its peak towards the end of May and the general assembly in the square began to plan its future, the locus of organised indignation spread to the neighbourhoods – sometimes reviving or connecting with pre-existing neighbourhood associations, sometimes building on quite dense social bonds. For example, the assembly from Sant Andreu, a predominantly working-class neighbourhood in the north of the city, marched for over an hour to reach the demonstration, proudly announcing their assembly on their yellow T-shirts.

Like many on the demonstration, they brought handmade placards. Some of their slogans were specific: ‘education is not for sale’, ‘for high quality education; against the cuts’. Others were more general: ‘nothing to lose; all to gain’, ‘the system is dead, the people are alive’. A lot of these homemade banners highlighted the exhaustion and corruption of the political system, one offering a reward: ’2,000 euro for an honest politician’. Abstentions could be high in November’s elections.

There is disillusionment too with trade unions. In the occupation of the square earlier this year, it was not only parties that were not wanted, but also the unions. They had been part of a social contract with the government that had let workers down, leading to a fall in wages and weak protection. Most significantly, they showed no concern – and often hostility – to the growing numbers of people, especially among the young, who had no chance of a long term job. Yesterday only the CNT (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo), the union founded by the anarchists and still less bureaucratised than other trade unions, dared show its face.

Interestingly, though, there are signs of workers recovering the confidence to organise in their workplaces as a direct result of the collective action taking place on the streets, and waking up the unions in the process.

Bea recently worked in a call centre. She remembers the fear that made her fellow workers timid and passive. She was impressed that after the occupations of the squares, the call centre workers went on strike over injustices they had previously suffered in silence. ‘It was as if the strength of the example of collective action on the square gave them the confidence, broke through the fear,’ she said.

Where this kind of awakening will lead is unclear. General goals are clearly expressed: real democracy based on popular assemblies in the neighbourhoods, reform of the electoral system for different levels of government, the right of referendums including on the European level, an end to cuts and privatisation of public services, banks and finance under public control, economic development based on co-operation, self-management and a social economy – the list is long and elaborate (see here, for example).

The important, distinguishing feature of this vision of change is that it is not centred on what governments should do. Rather it is a guide to action at many levels, starting with what the people can do collaboratively, through spaces they occupy, resources they reclaim, new sources of power they create. There is a self-consciousness that the creation of far-reaching alternatives will take time. In conversation, the slogans are put in context: ‘we’re going slowly, because we are going far’ is a common saying.

One thing is certain: the energy, creativity and will comes from outside the existing institutions. Bargaining, pressure, people and organisations that bridge the outside and the inside will no doubt be part of the process of change, but the established institutions have lost the initiative.

There is no bravado about this. Among those I talked to on our way home from the Arc de Triomf and the improvised garden, there was anxiety as well as elation at the size and success of the demonstration. ‘I feel some people are looking for leaders,’ said Nuria, a translator and free culture activist.

But in the many levels of organisation producing this impressive show not only of anger but of serious engagement in creating alternatives, it becomes clear that this is not a ‘leaderless’ movement. It is emerging, experimentally perhaps, as movement where leadership is shared and is learnt – a movement that can grow and flourish as well as stand firm.

From the moment Kenny knew that his cancer was terminal he left those with whom he worked in no doubt that our grief should be brief. There was too much ‘to get done’, as he would put it, to hang around being melancholic. But more than this – and he would be too modest to say it – Kenny set us an example of the imaginative and strategic kind of trade unionism that we urgently need to build today.

He expected us all to continue his work – in Neruda’s terms, to make part of his spirit our own. This was not for reasons of ego; that was not his character. The obligation he gave us came from his passionate belief in effective and strategic organisation to create a society beyond capitalism, combined with his equally strong belief in the collective intelligence and power of working people to create that alternative.

Instead of a traditional obituary, then, here is a first sketch of the kind of trade unionism which he was continually refining through practice and through a distinctively open and creative collaboration with others.

These others will I’m sure, contribute more.

Participatory, empowering organisation

Kenny’s starting point, and returning point, was the need constantly to build, renew and develop a strong and creative trade union in the workplace; an organisation able also to reach out to the city and fellow citizens, to be a strong base for a regional strategy and to be a resource for international solidarity.

For Kenny, a strong organisation required ways of organising through which individuals gain self-confidence, realise that they have a voice, grow their capacities and in turn contribute to the development of a dynamic collective power.

Education through action, through going in at the deep end with support and encouragement, was fundamental to Kenny’s approach. He was influenced by the Brazilian popular educator Paulo Freire, especially Freire’s emphasis on education through empowerment: Kenny’s way of leading was always to share power, to encourage others, to help people realise capacities they doubted they had, and always to explain and debate policies so that everyone understood and could apply them creatively to their own circumstances.

Here he put especial emphasis on bringing on young activists, attending new stewards training sessions for example, and, by all accounts, inspiring in these young trade unionists the confidence to challenge the status quo.

Another important part of Kenny’s approach to collective power was his engagement with feminism. He interpreted feminism as both working for gender equality in the union and in the council, and giving especial support to women, and other marginalised social groups, and also as a rich source of new insights for creating an organisation that built the self-confidence of all, not just the already articulate and confident.

This kind of participatory, self-conscious organisation, with the will and the power to take collective action, was a foundation stone of his capacity to give effective leadership – as always with others – to politically ambitious strategies in the council, across the region, and sometimes on a national and international scale.

An example I witnessed first-hand was the resistance he led to BT’s bid to privatise the council’s back office between 2000-2002, followed by the central role the union took in guiding the implementation of a publicly-led process of effective reform, with considerable savings reallocated to frontline services and no redundancies. Throughout this difficult but effective transformation process, the council’s management knew that, in the words of one of them: ‘if we got things wrong, Kenny would escalate the issue. There’d be trouble. I had no doubt about this.’

Such a remark from a manager working with, and sometimes in conflict with, Kenny indicates that his stress on the empowerment of others did not mean he backed away from taking the lead himself. On the contrary, his was a leadership by example, and he would follow up with forceful and insistent argument. Whether you agreed or disagreed you knew that what drove him was a desire to ensure that ‘things got done’.

His qualities as both an inspiring and a practical leader gained wider national recognition when he became the Deputy Convenor of UNISON’s Northern Region. Together with the Convenor, Clare Williams, and also Kevin Rowan of the Northern TUC, they developed and have continued to strengthen a coherent regional strategy of resistance focused on economic and social alternatives – one of those urgent tasks at the forefront of Kenny’s mind to the end, where still there is much to get done (more of which below).

One of the reasons for the ability of the Northern Region to deliver the action that it promises has been the fact that a guiding principle of the regional leadership, no doubt due to Kenny’s influence, is that every campaign has a workplace dimension; it has to be discussed with workplace reps in a way that enables them to make it their own and develop it as they feel appropriate, with the support of the region.

Strategic intelligence

‘Getting things done’ with Kenny was usually part of a longer term and strategic attempt to shift the balance of power in favour of labour – and working people more generally. Whether it was challenging Thatcher’s Compulsory Competitive Tendering (CCT) or resisting New Labour’s outsourcing and Public Private Partnerships (PPPs), Kenny’s approach always involved first researching the enemy, exposing their arguments, identifying their weaknesses.

This helped to breakdown the appearance of the inevitability of marketisation – New Labour’s notion of ‘the real world’. It laid the basis for insisting, against ‘TINA’ (‘There Is No Alternative’), that there are alternatives.

In order to build up this strategic intelligence, Kenny led the branch and the region to deploy a constant and varied team of committed researchers, from UNISON, from the Centre for Public Services (now the European Public Services Strategy Unit), and from local universities. This research was usually a collaborative process based on valuing a variety of sources of knowledge, rooted in practice as well as the product of research: the method was to involve union activists in the investigation, following up their insights and questions in a way that helped to create a new level of awareness and confidence.

Well-researched arguments were also key to building alliances that shifted power relations in Newcastle’s Civic Centre, and now across the region. For example, the pressure to outsource depends for its success on the complicity of council managers – often a result of a fatalistic acceptance of the private sector as offering the only alternative to a cash-strapped, demoralised council. Kenny’s leadership combined convincing arguments with industrial action to great effect, breaking managers’ support for privatisation and building up their confidence in in-house solutions.

Moreover, in the context of the longer term strategy, the experience of developing these arguments and building for the industrial action created the momentum and membership involvement to drive the transformation and keep management accountable to the negotiated change.

Beyond the workplace; the importance of community and regional organisation

It should be clear by now that for Kenny, trade unionism could never be limited to the workplace.

His broad view of the role of trade unions had several aspects. A basic one was that as far as he and the UNISON branch was concerned, the council had a responsibility towards supporting staff when they faced problems outside the workplace, in the face of, for example racism in the community. At one point a black UNISON member was facing persistent racist harassment. Kenny’s response was to insist that council management sort out some protection for her, as one of their employees. The manager, Barry Rowland, now Newcastle’s Chief Executive, responding, as he often did, to Kenny’s threat of ‘trouble’, set up CCTV outside her house.

The same approach applied to members facing demolition of their houses and developer imposed ‘regeneration’. In 1999 Kenny led the branch to throw its considerable strength behind local residents of the old riverside community of Scotswood (in commercial terms, a prime inner city site) as they resisted a plan, named, without irony, Going for Growth, that declared their houses to be fit only for demolition with the inhabitants re-housed outside the area to make way for a private development.

His broader view of the role of the union also had a political dimension of a new kind, transcending the traditional division between industrial relations (the responsibility of the union) and broader social and political matters (the responsibility of the Labour Party). Kenny worked with many others over a long period to create – pragmatically, and without laying down ideologically dogmatic lines – practical political movements in which trade unions naturally took responsibility, in an open and inclusive manner, for social and political issues.

Whether it was defending communities, improving public services or resisting the BNP, Kenny sought to build a collective power based on trade unionists as both workers and as citizens.

Thus from the first sign that the BNP was trying to gain a foothold in the North East, exploiting the failings of Labour and the way it took working class support for granted, UNISON led an effective and persistent campaign countering the arguments of the BNP. In 2004 it launched the North East Unites Against the BNP and through the Northern TUC bought the unions together an into the campaign, ensuring that the BNP had no council seats in the North East.

The kind of city-wide collective power that Kenny imagined went well beyond the general talk of ‘links with the community’. It started by making practical use of the fact that union members are themselves part of the community. Kenny and other UNISON activists initiated a plan for UNISON members to become involved in supporting and building organisations in their own community, as well as funding community organisers.

At the same time, as cuts and privatisation began to threaten public services across the city, in the NHS and in the local Metro rail system as well as in local government, Kenny, as part of the leadership of the regional labour movement described earlier, with student and community organisations to create the Public Services Alliance to support and co-ordinate otherwise scattered struggles and develop and win popular support for a city and service wide programme of public led alternatives.

Politics: principled and pragmatic

Kenny would hate to be made out to be some kind of saint! But it must be said that he had an enviable ability to be unflinching in his principles, focused and true to well-crafted and collaborative strategies and at the same time very open-minded, flexible and pragmatic about finding tactics that actually worked, made sense to people and could be lead to tangible achievements. He could work politically at different levels.

The autonomy of a well-organised, politically sussed union, in the workplace and regionally, provided the conditions for this. Through this organisational base, he had in effect helped to ensure that there were strong forces behind him in dealings with the timorous conservatism of conventional politics.

At the same time, this autonomous source of strength with its wider links with autonomous movements internationally fed an imaginative vision of new kinds of radically transformative political agency.

Thus with others, inside and outside the Labour Party, he was able on the one hand to construct a region-wide political strategy that was supple enough to maintain a constructively critical relationship with the Liberal Democrats (in control of Newcastle council between 2004 – 2010 and key political players across the North East), at the same time as getting Labour groups to realise the need to provide a credible alternative approach to the cuts, using the union’s influence and credibility in communities as well as workplaces as a vital source of pressure. (This resulted, among other things, in Labour winning back Newcastle council in May on an agenda that UNISON had played a key role in shaping).

At the same time, witnessing – from the late 1970’s onwards, and speeding up with New Labour – the sapping and suppression of all socialist or radically democratic impulses from the Labour Party, he was always exploring practically and intellectually new forms of political organisation and representation, rooted in the visions and power of social and labour movements.

Here he drew both from the relatively recent past (we first met through debates following the book Beyond the Fragments in the early 80s, about learning from feminism to inspire convergences of social and trade union movements) and from international experiences.

He was especially inspired and curious about the experiment of Polo Democratico in Colombia. Polo is a modest alliance to campaign for political representation of varied sections of the vibrant Colombian social movement; it recognises that in the context of systtematic political violence against progressive organisations.

It is these extra-parliamentary movements which have the capacity to be the driving for social change. The intertwined struggles in Columbia, and especially the region of Valle del Cauca, for human rights and defence of public services and labour conditions against a particularly vicious variant of neo-liberalism, have been a central focus for Kenny. Not least because Patrick one of his three sons – all of whom he talked about with immense pride and love – was working there as an organiser and translator.

Through them and Clare Williams, the Northern Region of UNISON has been giving regular and focused support especially to campaigns and movements organisations in Cali.

One example from which Kenny felt there was much for UNSION to learn was Nomadesc, which has been using the tools of popular education to develop a new generation of leaders to replace those killed by the regime.

Polo Democratico caught Kenny’s attention because it made political representation the political servant of radical social and labour movements, rather than the Labour Party’s reverse tendency to treat movements, especially the trade unions, as subordinate – mere sources of finance and voting fodder – for the party’s electoral priorities.

He was enthusiastic about meeting one of PD’s Senators Alexander Lopez, who was president of Sintraemcali, a public services union, during its now legendary and ultimately victorious struggle to oppose the privatisation of Cali’s utility services.

In politics then, as in his other activity he dealt with the immediate practical tasks at the same time as his mind was working on a longer term vision of change.

Alternative plans; trade unionists as visionaries

Whether resisting privatisation in the Civic Centre, confronting the problem of unemployment and economic decline in the region, or facing the local elections with no party fully representing what the union stood for, Kenny was insistent that unions and communities need to promote a positive alternative.

Here several influences were at work. There was the vivid memory of the campaigns of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s when similarly creative trade unionists from the shipyards and heavy engineering industries united the region in huge demonstrations insisting ‘Don’t let the North East die’.

Underlying the unity and chutzpah of these campaigns were the ‘workers alternative plans’ which these skilled and socially conscious engineers drew up to show that their skills were certainly not redundant, on any responsible public criteria.

Through extensive popular participation they drew up detailed practical proposals for the socially useful (and, it would now be said, ecologically necessary) products that they could be making instead of joining the queues for the dole. Now their ideas, around wind-power, agricultural equipment and so on, are common sense.

Kenny picked up the same logic and applied it to developing alternatives as part of the resistance to both privatisation of services and the private take-over of Newcastle’s most commercially valuable, and socially and aesthetically precious land. Once again the confidence that there is an alternative helped to build a huge demonstration, this time around the slogan, ‘Our city is not for sale’. Popular movements and initiatives in other cities, especially in Latin America, were also a source of stimulus to Kenny’s fertile imagination.

Hearing of the way that the Workers Party in Porto Alegre in Southern Brazil shared power with its citizens through participatory forms of budgeting and administration, he overcame his fear of flying and with financial help organised by UNISON’s then president Veronica Dunn, made the trip to see for himself, when in 2001, the World Social Forum gathered in Porto Alegre. He came back inspired, determined to make the ideal of participatory democracy a reality both in the union itself and in the goal for the administration of Newcastle Council.

An integrated strategy, glued with courage and mutual trust

In each these dimensions of a renewed trade unionism – empowering forms workplace organisation, strategic intelligence, organising as citizens as well as workers, developing alternatives, working politically at different levels, learning and working internationally – Kenny’s approach was not unique. It was in their integration into a coherent strategy that his work illustrates, in practice, a distinctive model; one which, surely, could help take our movement out of its present difficulties?

It was partly his personal qualities that provided the glue with which he held these dimensions (often in tension with each other) together. Now that he as an individual is gone, we need to make these qualities explicit too, in order to make them our own, in the spirit of Neruda.

Here I would stress his courage. Though sensitive and sometimes inwardly nervous and strangely unsure of himself, he always acted decisively in standing up to injustice. With intelligence and eloquence he never had any hesitation in challenging those with official power. And because of another quality, his instinctive belief and trust in others, this was never bravado, it was always with a view to mobilising the counter power to overcome the injustice and open up new possibilities of change.

Though rooted in the local and the specific, he was to his dying day, trying to spread and generalise.

As his favourite banner brought tenderly back from the World Social Forum, to grace the walls of the UNISON office on the first floor of the Civic, put it:

‘Globalise the struggle, globalise the hope.’

A PS on this note of generalisation: Kenny had been an enthusiastic participant in the European Social Forum, galvanising large UNSION delegations to participate in the Forums in Florence, Paris, Athens; and finally being a key organiser of the Forum in London, and a collaborator on Eurotopia, a cross-Europe magazine supplement on issues such as resistance and alternatives to privatisation.

One of the last projects he was working on was a ‘Better Way’, social-forum-style conference to be held in November in Newcastle. It will enable us to follow up his legacy with suitable strategic ambition while making sure it reaches workplaces, young people and other would-be activists across the North East!

Kenny Bell
30 May 1949 – 14 Aug 2011
Deputy Convenor, UNISON Northern Region
Branch Secretary, UNISON Newcastle City Council Branch