Rethinking political parties
Red Pepper, 8 February 2008
The The The situation now is that by far the majority of people actively Like many others, I’m not anti-party. If I lived in Italy, Norway or Yet the sum of extra-party, movement-oriented activity does not somehow At their most effective, progressive social movements radicalise public Perhaps we need to experiment with hybrid forms of ‘movement party’ The unconscious foundations of political behaviour This frustration prompts me to stand back and investigate some of the Just as the unconscious mind can determine a person’s behaviour, so Take three examples that have driven me to try to unearth assumptions underlying political behaviour. First, there is the inability at many levels of the Labour Party (and The second example comes from the radical left. Consider the recurrent A third example has been part of my own unconscious in the past: an To begin such a tentative exploration of the political unconscious I Rethinking power The political thinking influenced by grass-roots movements Historically the major parties of the left have tended to be built The assertion of power as transformative capacity, first by the This understanding of power as transformative capacity is related to a This understanding was evident vividly in the women’s liberation I’ve highlighted the radical dynamic of this approach to power. It can As we know, the Labour Party did not take up these opportunities for Structure and agency I emphasise this because it is this political philosophy that underlies A useful framework for deepening our critique and highlighting the The critical realist Roy Bhaskar makes a useful distinction between The traditions of socialism that have been the basis for powerful But if we distinguish between social structures and relations between Thus, although we do not at any one time produce structures, we Changed understandings of knowledge Closely associated with an understanding of transformative power are This does not imply a postmodern, relativistic notion that anything These new understandings of knowledge point towards an emphasis on the This recognition of the importance of experiential and practical The Social Forum process internationally is perhaps the most important New models of political representation: Latin America Where do these notes on rethinking power, knowledge, agency and A first implication of the analysis of power as transformative capacity In general terms one can say that the goal must move from winning the It is an approach best illustrated by experiments in Latin America: These experiences are answering the question of what political A key element in making this possible has been the existence in most In these circumstances the distinctive contribution of radical left Non-state sources of democratic power This idea of non-state sources of democratic power is crucial to Again, some of the most developed examples are from Latin America, such These organisations are more than ephemeral campaigns. They are trying We have to ponder critically how relevant the Latin American experience Another lesson we can learn from a critical understanding of Latin Hilary Wainwright’s essay was first presented at a Transform! Italia seminar in Rome
membership and influence of political parties is declining throughout
the western world, and most quickly in Britain. Hilary Wainwright
examines the role of the party in transformative politics and asks how
the left might reimagine this crucial instrument of political change
need for radical social change is pressing and the desire for it
widespread. Traditionally, political parties have been the means of
giving shape, leadership and coherence to such desires. But in present
circumstances they are simply not up to the task. There’s never been a
golden age for parties of the left but there have been periods – the
1920s up till the late 1960s – when the majority of people desiring
change in a broadly socialist direction would be members or supporters
of mass socialist or communist parties.
pursuing goals of social justice, equality, deeper democracy, a social
and environmentally sustainable economy and a demilitarised politics
are politically active without being members of political parties. I am
too.
Germany, for instance, I’d probably join Rifondazione Comunista, the
Socialist Left Party (SV) or Die Linke. But I would not see party
activity – at any rate not in the forms that it conventionally takes –
as my main focus.
add up to political change, even if it were more adequately
co-ordinated. We cannot point to ‘social movements’ to get us out of a
tight spot. It should be clear by now that movements come and go and
cannot be evoked as some self-evident answer to the problem of creating
effective agencies of social change.
consciousness. Generally, however, they are unable to give these shifts
in consciousness a wider political coherence. This means that the
desire for change that such movements stimulate can be politically
ambivalent, tapped by the right if these hopes don’t get political
expression and coherent alternatives from the left.
organisation, especially in a context in which the nation state, the
traditional focus of political parties, can only be one of many focuses
of political struggle. It is clear from experience, however, that
so-called movement parties provide no simple answer. We’ve watched in
dismay the movement dynamic behind parties such as the German Greens,
and more significantly the Brazilian Workers Party nationally, being
subordinated to the conservative pressures of conventional electoral
politics, state institutions and the financial markets.
basic concepts involved in our thinking about change. Consider, for
example, concepts of knowledge and its social organisation, of power
and its plural sources, of representation and alternative models and,
more fundamentally, of agency – how do we now interpret for our own
times Marx’s famous remark about men making history but not in
conditions of their own choosing?
with institutions: their behaviour can be shaped by unacknowledged
assumptions rooted in their history. And just as individuals wanting to
break from damaging patterns of behaviour try to subject those
unconscious processes to critical analysis, so with organisations: the
capacity consciously to innovate requires the identification of
assumptions that underlie habitual political responses and their
subjection to conscious debate.
not just among privatising evangelists) to recognise that public
service workers and users could be driving forces for genuinely radical
changes to our public services. I’ve often found that underlying this
blindness are unexamined assumptions about the nature of knowledge that
are in essence highly restrictive, elitist and mechanical.
failure of what could be positive attempts by the Socialist Workers
Party (SWP) to initiate a broadly based political alternative to New
Labour – first with the Socialist Alliance and then Respect. A fatal
factor here is the SWP’s implicit concept of leadership and power,
which seems blind – wilfully or otherwise – to the existence, relevance
and potential power of a wide diversity of initiatives and traditions
with common or overlapping political values, but autonomous from the
SWP.
equation of ‘parliamentary socialism’ – the tragic fate of socialism in
the Labour Party – and electoral politics. Here our unconscious has
been influenced by an electoral system that has all but excluded the
radical left and the Greens from political representation. The result
has been very superficial thinking about what representation is for and
a tendency to engage in electoral politics either with gritted teeth as
something to be done every so often to gain a propaganda platform, or
to be completely intoxicated by the experience of engagement with the
public after years in the political ghetto, and to lose one’s critical
faculties. Both responses have lost all historical sense of the
struggles for the franchise and the possibilities for building on these
victories with a new model of representation, opening up state
institutions to the pressures of movements and conflicts outside the
political class.
draw on what I have learnt from the theory and practice of social and
trade union movements over the past 30 years. I should explain at the
outset my use of the concept of ‘transformation’ as it has only
recently become part of English political debate. It is useful because
it refers to forms of change that transform the basic structure of
society or the institution under discussion; it also leaves open the
means of change, avoiding the problems of the polarisation between
reform and revolution.
distinguishes between two radically distinct meanings of power: power
as transformative capacity and power as domination, as involving an
asymmetry between those with power and those over whom power is
exercised.
around a benevolent version of the second understanding of power: that
is, around winning the power to govern and using it paternalistically
to meet the needs of the people. This has shaped the nature of
politics, concentrating it around legislation and state action. It has
underpinned the position and self-conception of the political party as
having a monopoly over political change. This in turn has meant that
parties have tended to see the political role of movements as
subordinate – a matter of lobbying, support and mobilising pressure
behind legislative, parliamentary action spearheaded by the party.
student, feminist, radical trade union and community movements of the
late 1960-70s, and more recently by the global justice movement, broke
with this narrow definition of politics. It led to a far wider
understanding of the scope of politics, that is of efforts to end
injustice and to realise the dignity and potential of all; a scope way
beyond the traditional focus on state, government and legislation,
pervading all the relationships and institutions of our daily lives.
The other side of this opening and deepening of the definition of
politics has been an effective challenge to the party’s monopoly of the
leadership of social change.
distinct understanding of social change, implicit in the practice of
the movements. Crucial here is the way that we started from our own
circumstances and took personal responsibility for change by refusing
to reproduce relations of oppression and exploitation – in our own
lives and in our implicit complicity with it elsewhere, especially in
the global South – and by struggling to create spaces for
transformation and to at least illustrate alternative values.
movement, which directed its energies towards mobilising whatever
resources it could to bring about change in the present, both in
personal relationships and, closely connected, in the social and
cultural environment that had reinforced women’s subordination. It made
demands on the state for support but on the basis of its own
alternatives and self-organisation. Similarly in the workplace, for a
brief but inspirational period in the 1970s, the shopfloor
organisations that had developed since the 1950s became the basis for
real shifts in the balance of power in the management of factories and
for alternative plans for industrial policy and reorganisation.
also stop at the level of personal change without making the wider
connections that require a collective exercise of transformative power.
This is clearly a central issue in addressing the causes of climate
change.
radical social change at a national level. Local attempts to experiment
with this new politics in the 1980s, most notably with the Greater
London Council, were also swept aside. But this was not simply a matter
of political ill will or reasoned disagreement; it was the result of a
complete incomprehension of a fundamentally different understanding of
politics. The assumption that underpinned traditional parties of the
left was that the state, government or party – the social subject –
acted on the rest of society – the social object. This traditional but
still influential model took insufficient account of the way in which
change is coming from within society, the way in which those who were
previously considered the objects of change are themselves actors for
change, including self-change.
the inability of social democratic parties – and the Euro-communist
parties, which essentially adopted their methods – to follow through
whatever reforms they made in the early post-war period and turn them
into a dynamic of social transformation. And the legacy of this
traditional and flawed understanding of politics lingers on in the
parties of the green and radical left.
importance of the new methodologies implicit in many of the social
movements of recent years is provided by critical realism. This is a
philosophical school that was itself a product of the political and
cultural struggles of the 1960s and 1970s and provides a necessary
alternative to both the limitations of structuralism and the dead ends
of postmodernism.
four planes of social being: human interaction with nature; enduring
social structures; social interaction and relationships between
individuals; and the complexity of the personality. The dominant and
governing traditions of socialism have focused on issues of social
structure, often to the exclusion of the other three. Particularly
relevant to the argument of this essay is their conflation of
interaction and relationship between individuals with structure (there
is not space here to deal with the political implications of the other
two levels).
political parties have tended to treat human beings as the product of
social structures to an extent that left little room for the
potentialities – and pitfalls – of human agency. It was as if the
complex and dynamic character of Marx’s thesis that we make our own
history but not under conditions of our own choosing had been
forgotten. The tendency was to assume that structural change –
nationalisation of the leading companies, setting up the NHS and so on
– was not only necessary but sufficient to bring about social
transformation. This also meant treating structures as rigid
constraints on what was possible and produced a conservatism that has
become overwhelming in the face of corporate globalisation.
individuals, we create a space for agency and the nature of constraints
becomes more complex and more historically variable. At any moment in
time, structures pre-exist individuals. They create constraints on our
capacity for action. They also provide the means, the conditions, of
our agency. We cannot act without them. On the other hand, structures
cannot endure without the actions of the human beings who use them.
continually face choices about whether to reproduce or to transform
them. In other words we can’t wake up in the morning and decide exactly
what to do or what kind of society to create. But neither are we
without the capacity to act as knowing subjects able to act on and
alter the structures of which we are part. Dominant socialist
traditions have tended to elide structure and agency; indeed one reason
for the feeble acquiescence of social democratic parties historically
to the hostile pressure from both state and big business has been the
fact that they never saw their members and supporters as knowing,
creative agents of change with society, only as voters and supporters.
the distinctive understandings of knowledge influenced by
movement-based politics. In good part as a result of this politics and
– not unrelated – developments in the philosophy of science, we are
increasingly aware of the plural sources of knowledge: as tacit,
practical and experiential as well as scientific. We are working
increasingly with complexity, ambivalence and uncertainty.
goes, that there are no independent grounds for judging arguments. On
the contrary, it implies that supposedly ‘postmodern’ concepts like
‘deconstruction’ and a recognition of the many perspectives from which
a single phenomenon can be understood must be reclaimed as tools for
analysing and changing a complex real world.
horizontal sharing and exchange of knowledge and collaborative attempts
to build connected alternatives and shared memories. They stress the
gaining of knowledge as a process of discovery and therefore see
political action, the exercise of transformative power, as itself a
source of knowledge, revealing unpredicted problems or opportunities.
This implies a self-consciousness of the sense in which actions are
also experiments and therefore the need for spaces and times for open
reflection on, argument over and synthesis of different experiences.
knowledge deepens the nature of debate. It implies debate driven not so
much by the struggle for positions of power as by a search for truth
about the complexity of social change, a production of collaborative
knowledge that itself becomes a source of power.
and appropriately transnational experiment so far in finding ways of
sharing ideas rooted in both experience and different political
traditions. Like any experiment it is messy and uneven but contains
crucial lessons from which any rethinking of the party and the
development of political programmes must learn.
structure lead in terms of rethinking political parties? Here all that
I can do is to note some pointers and ask some questions.
is that action in and around political institutions is but one – albeit
crucial – sphere of action and struggle for fundamental change. But are
there any implications for the direction and content of such action?
power to govern for the people paternalistically to being a struggle in
collaboration with organised citizens to change political institutions
from sources of domination to resources for transformation. What does
this mean in practice?
Workers Party-controlled local authorities in Brazil, the MAS
government in Bolivia and the Bolivarian process in Venezuela, where
parties (or, in the latter case, a leader) winning elections have then
used their democratic legitimacy to attempt to reach out beyond
parliamentary institutions and strengthen popular control over the
state institutions, trying to turn them into public resources for
change controlled by a combination of participatory democracy and
elected politicians.
representation is for with a new model of representation. This is one
that, after the struggles against dictatorship or extreme forms of
corruption and oligarchic rule, takes elections and representative
democracy seriously, not as a sufficient definition of democracy but
rather as one part of a strategy for more radical democratic –
including economic – transformation.
parts of Latin America of strong and for the most part highly
politically conscious forms of popular democracy or non-state sources
of democratic power – in neighbourhood organisations, movements of the
landless and indigenous people, and radical trade union organisations.
(This is one reason why the commercial media have much less effective
political influence in these countries than in the global North, in
spite of their best and most insidious efforts to influence hearts and
minds.)
political parties, at their most innovative, has been to open up the
institutions, to redistribute power, to facilitate a sharing of power
with organised citizens, and to stimulate and support new institutions
of public participation in control over state power. They have sought
to straddle the political institutions on the one hand and the
conflicts and emergent sources of power in society on the other. The
logic is to work both in and against the institutions and with
autonomous movements and social conflicts to open up and democratise
the institutions. Encouraging non-state sources of democratic power has
been a necessary part of this process.
rethinking the party. The key point is this: while radical mass
movements, from those of the 1970s to the recent anti-war movement,
have not been sustained, there is widespread evidence of efforts to
create lasting sources of democratic power autonomous from the state –
movements with sustained institutions that have a democratic legitimacy
in the face of discredited established political institutions.
as the landless movement (MST) in Brazil. Other examples include
transnational networks like the ‘Hemispheric Social Alliance’ that
provide a force for accountability on global institutions and
corporations that have escaped the conventional mechanisms of
parliamentary accountability.
to create different kinds of relationships here and now, based on
principles of participatory democracy, and at the same time building
democratic power to challenge and transform institutions driven by
private profit or bureaucratic self-interest.
is for Europe. One problem we face in the North is the way
parliamentary democracy and a symbiotically related media has developed
an immense capacity simultaneously to incorporate and marginalise all
such extra-parliamentary efforts at radical democracy. But as national
and local state institutions lose their legitimacy, some are breaking
through. The strengthening of these grassroots-based forms of
democratic power, including their connection and exchange of ideas and
organisational lessons with each other, is essential to the idea of a
new, transformative model of political representation along the lines
exemplified in Latin America. This political organising at the base is
a priority on which many of us could agree whether we are members of a
party or not.
American experiences – and some European ones too – is how electoral
activity can be an extension of movement politics. It faces all kinds
of pitfalls but also imposes disciplines and provides the stimuli of
translating transformative politics into practical and widely
accessible alternatives. The conditions may not be of our choosing but
through a collaborative and engaged rethinking, inspired by a wide
range of historical and present day experiences, we can indeed still
make history.
