We can’t stand by and leave political institutions to those who want to be free of the pressures of the power of self?determining citizens. We need to occupy those institutions where we can while at the same time organising to replace them

The following is taken from an interesting dialogue between John Holloway and Hilary Wainwright:

Excerpts from Hilary Wainwright’s responses:

1.

” you are right in your analysis of the dominant character of state institutions and their relationship to society: how they separate and fragment economics from politics, community provision from the community, citizens from each other and from their social context.

If however, we carry out an analysis of the dual nature of citizenship, we see that your description captures only one, albeit the dominant, dimension of citizenship. Such an analysis would lead us to contrast the atomised, abstract nature of citizenship underpinning parliamentarist institutions with the potential of citizens as social subjects.

The latter dimension is illustrated historically by the original struggles for the franchise, by situated subjects, that is propertyless male workers and women fighting for the suffrage to be universal. A contemporary example would be the way that, across the world, people are struggling for the promise of political equality to be realised through opening up narrowly electoral institutions and subjecting public power to direct forms of participation in the political decisions previously the secret domain of deals between the political elite and private business. (This has been the impetus behind many experiments in participatory democracy, especially in Latin America.)

We could talk here about subject citizenship or socialised citizenship versus atomistic citizenship. A very recent example of such socialised citizenship would be the movements, including parts of the trade unions, resisting privatisation across the world, often with alternative proposals for how services should be organised to respond to the diversity of social need.

Here are citizens organised as subjects, opening the crack between the state’s stewardship of public money and capital’s need for new markets and new sources of profit. In many such movements, the assertion of subject or socialised citizenship is fused with the revolt against abstract labour. How else to understand what is happening when workers link up with communities to defend and improve the public services they deliver against marketisation?

The ways in which these struggles, and also new networks of the digital commons, are often organised leads me to a further area of disagreement. It concerns your dismissal of institutions per se – your apparent unwillingness to consider the possibility and reality of different kinds of institutions.

I’d like to believe, like you, in the flow, the dance, the moving of movements, but I’ve come to believe that flows need foundations and conditions of a more enduring kind. The flow of citizens’ movements against privatisation of public goods, for example, needed the ‘backbone’, as one Uruguayan activist in the movement for public water put it, of the trade union confederation born two decades earlier in the struggle against the dictatorship. Similarly, the flow of relationships in the open software movement is conditional on the institutional framework provided by the GNU General Public License.

I’ll end with a thought that underlies my insistence here on the institutional dimension. It is surely important to distinguish between two levels of social being: enduring social structures on the one hand and social interaction and relationships between individuals on the other. Whereas the traditional left tended to think only in terms of structures, treating human beings as the carriers or products of social structures, not valuing or even recognising our capacity to act as knowing subjects and alter the structures of which we are part, I feel that you veer in the other direction, presuming only relationships and not taking account of the ways in which structures both pre-exist individuals and depend on them/us for their reproduction.”

2.

“First, I’d make a general point about citizenship, the state and politics. Citizenship is about rights in a shared community – initially a city, then a nation-state, now possibly international institutions. If – and just now it looks like a pretty big ‘if’ – there is the possibility of a world without states, and ‘the state withers away’ – that surely is not the end of politics? Of collective decision-making about resources, priorities, rules, laws, standards, and so on that inevitably involves relations of power? It would be the end of the state as a separate, dominating power, but there would still be politics and therefore citizenship of some kind.

In the forms of organisation and – I insist – self?determined institutions that we create to resist alienation in all its forms, aren’t we aiming to pre-figure in our own organisations a different kind of citizenship? A citizenship where when we elect people (and we will needs forms of both representation and delegations) who don’t then turn that very power we lent them back against us – who won’t, in other words, present politics as an alienated form.

In talking of the organisations that we create now, I’d like to bring in the issue of autonomy and kind of institutions we create to achieve that autonomy. Autonomous organisations – from the state and from capital – are a condition for the possibility of struggling to control and go beyond the state.

Marx illustrated this in his analysis of the struggle for the eight-hour day in late 19th century Britain. He showed how workers’ organisational capacity – driven by their shared interest, cohesion, numbers, the dependence of the ruling class on their votes and their labour – enabled them to develop an autonomous source of political power in both the workplaces and the wider society. This power was used to divide employers and political parties and win legislation that reduced hours of alienated labour.

This was a legislative gain: a gain in and against and potentially beyond the state, not only in terms of improving the lives of working people, but, more important for our argument, for enhancing their autonomous political capacity – giving them more time to communicate, debate, read, think and organise.

This brings me to the struggles that have been taking place on Marsh Farm estate: from the raves struggling with the police, the breweries and the council to provide an alternative to the commercial rip-offs of Luton town centre, through the occupied empty hospice as an autonomous housing action zone, to ‘occupying the rhetoric’ of New Labour’s New Deal for Communities to ensure resident control of public money allocated to the ‘regeneration’ of the estate. In this latter struggle they sought to engage with the state on their own terms.

After 18 years of being in-against and- beyond the state, the community activists of Marsh Farm don’t see themselves as ‘sucked in’, as you imply. On the contrary, they see themselves as, in their own words, ‘reclaiming public resources from these top?down bandits, putting them to use to replace the capitalist structures which dominate our community with far more effective and socially useful ones’.

A key condition of this has been constantly developing an autonomous organisation, vigilantly resisting all pressures to ‘mimic the oppressor’, in the words of Paulo Freire, someone the community cite as a guide. Like you, they insist on ‘learning by doing’. You should meet them!

What you’d see is that crucial to their modest transformative power, as with the historic case of the workers fighting for the eight-hour day, has been the link between the bargaining power of the franchise, the minimally democratic element in the state and the autonomous organisation, values and perspectives of people struggling for social justice in their workplaces and communities.

One of the reasons why the traditional social democratic approach to socialism – gaining state power and then controlling capital – always fails is because in the end social democratic governments, when it comes to the production of wealth, have always depended on capital. And a crucial reason for this is that they never recognise their own allies – working people – as knowing, self-determining subjects with the capacity to be producers and organise a different kind of economy.

This view, embedded in the institutions of social democratic parties and trade unions as they are presently organised, places working class people as simply voters, sources of support, wage earners. The idea that they should share power or link with people or organisations outside of parliament is therefore precluded; they, the politicians, are the engineers of change, and everyone else is excluded from the process.

We can’t stand by and leave political institutions to those who want to be free of the pressures of the power of self?determining citizens. We need to occupy those institutions where we can while at the same time organising to replace them.”