We continue our (belated) treatment of a report by Hilary Wainwright of the Networked Politics meeting at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation by activists from the European left.

Excerpt:

“This emphasis on a shared but necessarily networked struggle for the conditions of social creativity also marks the break – which has been implicit since 1968 – from a traditional socialist focus on questions of structure to addressing questions of social interaction, the development of the individual personality, and sustainable relations with nature, all of which bring us back to the question of the commons. It seems to me that the revival of interest in the idea of the commons is actually about an urge to return to the original aspiration of socialism, with a new language and under new conditions – the new awareness of the social character of knowledge, the urgent sense of a common environment under threat, the de-socialisation of significant labour processes. But that original aspiration remains relevant: the common, associative management of the ‘common treasury of the world’, and the common ownership and control of the means and processes of production. As well as being a search for what this means in an age of globalisations, the revival of the idea of the commons is also a reaction against the ways in which, during the twentieth century especially, state and party institutions have mediated, appropriated and substituted themselves for the complexity and dynamism of these ideals, beyond all recognition.

Whether ‘the commons’ is counter-posed to the state or used as a language for transforming the state depends to a degree on different national experiences. Rather than thinking of the commons as a delimited sphere, between market and state, I would view it as a goal of transformation for the organisation of both all social resources, including labour, that can always be pre-figured in and against the actually existing institutions of market and state. This leads naturally to the issue of political representation, which of course needs space of its own and is only beginning to be explored in the context of the question of the commons.

Democracy beyond representation

Our discussions on political representation have been searching for a new model of engagement with the state. Our starting point has been the nature of the autonomy of social movements from political parties and institutions. Given the history of the ideal of the commons in the hands of the state, the question of autonomy, and then of what kind of relationship to build on the basis of autonomy, is central.

I want to suggest that the distinctive contribution of left political parties, or their representatives in political institutions, should be to open up the institutions, to redistribute power outside them so that it can be shared and support new institutions and new relationships of control over state power. Their distinctive position is thus one of straddling the political institutions on the one hand and the conflicts and emergent sources of power in society on the other. The aim must be to both open up and democratise the institutions and, as a necessary part of this process, to encourage and support emerging institutions based on deeper forms of democracy and the principles and practices of the commons. A classic example would be the power-sharing of participatory budgeting in municipalities in Brazil and now in parts of Europe, and its relation to the growing social economy in both continents. But there are many other examples.

What are the conditions and presuppositions of such an understanding of political representation? I will just mention one here: it concerns the emergence of non-state sources of democratic power. It’s a concept that needs further debate on another occasion but the point is this: while radical mass movements have not been sustained 1970s-style or Seattle-style or anti-war-February-15th-style, but what is striking is a need to create lasting sources of sources of democratic power autonomous from the state: democratic institutions that go beyond, but are often an outcome of, movements.

I’m thinking here in the UK of developments like London Citizens; or union branches like those fighting for alternatives to privatisation taking on a responsibility for the public interest that has been vacated by elected politicians; community organisations which similarly take on a public responsibility to propose solutions for estates and neighbourhoods abandoned by the political class; asylum seeker and refugee organisations that go well beyond campaigning to provide an infrastructure of support and defence; the global networks like ‘Our World is Not for Sale’ that provide a force for accountability on global institutions and corporation that have escaped the conventional mechanisms of parliamentary accountability. It’s probably a world-wide phenomenon taking many different forms; certainly I’ve observed it in parts of Latin America and Europe and even in the UK. And this is what convinces me of its distinctive, emergent character – if something innovative happens across so many places, there must be something going on.

We are not talking here about relying only on direct democracy and popular power – these struggles need and want support from within the institutions, hence an opening and democratisation of existing political institutions. But we are talking about phenomena that are more than movements and ephemeral campaigns. They are trying to create different kinds of relationships here and now, based on principles of the commons, and at the same time building democratic power to challenge and transform institutions driven by private profit or bureaucratic self-interest. Any rethinking of public administrations, political economy or political organisation must make these actual experiments in co-operation and democratic power one of its starting points.”