Politics, Power and Participation: what does it mean to democratise power? by Hilary Wainwright

The Labour Party’s commitment to the common ownership included the commitment to ‘the best obtainable system of popular administration and control’. Here was a recognition, buried in labour movement history that democracy is something more than parliament: it’s also about popular control over how public resources and institutions are run. When Labour did finally bring parts of the country’s infrastructure and heavy industry into public ownership, the idea of ‘popular control’ was pretty much forgotten. Public control meant state control; socialism became increasingly identified with the state.

Traditions of popular participation and popular power were rediscovered – often in new ways – in the 60’s and the 70’s with the radical workplace trade unionism across Europe and through movements for social liberation: of young people, women, black people, gays and lesbians. A new impetus has been given recently to the idea of popular power by movements and radical political parties in Latin America in particular in the muncipalities of Brazil and the aspirations of the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela.

These experiences in the South have inspired citizens in the North who find the possibilities of exercising democratic control over politics diminishing daily. People are demanding the right to share power with elected politicians. We are no longer prepared to trust them to act on our behalf. But as politicians sense the decline in their legitimacy, they too espouse the rhetoric of partcipation: communities and different social groups are being consulted ad nauseum while real power relations – of state and economic domination remain untouched. How do we develop the autonomy and strength of community groups and social and labour movements to challenge power rather than be incorporated by it?

We need to rethink left politics to answer this. Grass roots social movements of recent years – feminism, black movements, the global justice movement, gay and lesbian movements and radical parts of the trade union movement offer some tools for this rethinking. In practice they distinguish between two radically distinct meanings of power: on the one hand, power as the capacity to transform and on the other hand power as domination.

Historically the major parties of the left have tended to be built around a benevolent version of the second understanding of power: around winning the power to govern and using it paternalistically to meet the needs of the people. This has meant a politics focused around legislation and state action.

The social movements’ assertion of power as transformative capacity produced a break with this narrow definition of politics. It led to a far wider understanding of the scope of politics, way beyond the traditional focus on state, government and legislation, and involving the struggle for justice and dignity in all the relationships and institutions of our daily lives.