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New Politics: Principles, Practice, Challenges
Hilary Wainwright
Speech at Aisa Europe People's Forum, Hanoi, September 2004
I've been trying to think about the relations we would like between parties and movements in our strategies to change the world. It's difficult, because although we know a lot about movements, few of us have had any positive experiences of parties. We have very little practical idea of what kind of a party, if any, we would like.
A group of us at the TNI started the `New Politics' research project as a way of thinking about this issue and other problems concerning political power and radical social transformation We were determined that our work would be driven by the creativity - the mistakes as well as the successes - of practice. Theory can sometimes close things down, or create ungrounded fantasies. Yet with new politics we are talking about a material and contradictory process, for which we don't know the outcome. We don't know exactly how the new politics will turn out. We search for it through investigating the innovations that are emerging out of practice. ( Including our own - we are not somehow `apart' from the struggle). Of course we need to take time for theoretical reflection and investigation; but the questions that drive us will especially be stimulated by the discoveries and difficulties emerging from practice.
What I want to do now, to prepare the ground, is to summarise the innovations that have taken place in the theory and practice of movements and parties over the past thirty years. (I'm taking the movements of 1968 as the starting point because this was the first time in recent history that the whole methodology and raison d'etre of left parties both social democratic and Leninist or Trotskyist were challenged by a new politics springing from social movements, including the workers movement). Innovations can easily be lost: scattered by defeats or appropriated and emptied of meaning by establishment political leaders trying to sharpen their image. Tony Blair for instance is always peppering his speeches with the language of the new left, even talking about `new politics'. (Yuk!)
One of the reasons why this summary of where new thinking about movements and parties has reached is important is because nowadays all political parties on the left are talking about `opening up' to the movements. However when you listen between the lines, they mean very different things - sometimes almost nothing at all. It will help to ground our thinking more firmly if we assess the work that has been done before us.
The problem was brought home to me recently when I heard a very well-meaning comrade from the French Communist Party describing how the party is opening up to the movements. The way she described the relationship of the party to the movements was like this: "our role when we work with the movements is to provide an explanation of the social justices they are struggling around", and also "to provide the movements with the wider vision". It is like treating movements as immature political actors, as children, with the implication (maybe unintended) that maturity is eventually to become members of the Communist Party.. Here you can see that it is one thing for a party to to `open up' to the movements and another to open up to being transformed by the movements. What is alarming about the approach of this French comrade (just treating her as an innocent example) is that it is widely understood among people involved in or supportive of the kinds of movements which have been developing since 1968 that these movements are not `single-issue' or `sectoral movements', they have a wider vision and full understanding of the causes of the injustices they face. More often than not they are political in every sense of the word other than being parties intervening in electoral politics.
The political character of these recent movements, whether we are talking about the student and antiVietnam war movement of the late 60's, the women's movement which began in the 1970's and continues to this day, or the `alter-globalisation ' movement of to-day is not an accident. There is a profound, structural explanation. These movements have emerged out of contradictions too radical for the existing political system, including existing left parties to respond to. Thus , the feminist movement challenged the social relations of the social democratic state - its internal relationships and relationship to citizens - ; it refused the division of labour throughout society including between waged work and unwaged work and it subverted the gendered nature of our culture in ways that no political party could answer or follow through. The feminist movement had to draw on and develop its own resources to provide answers, generating a new cultures, making new alliances, creating new organizational forms in the process. Here was a case of a social movement, far from being behind the political parties, moving, sometimes precariously, on to a new, unexplored political terrain. . Similarly, the more recent anti-capitalist, alter-globalisation movement is taking international organization, international knowledge, international struggle to a level that no left or Green political party can fully comprehend and they are often linking this direct and practical internationalism to the creation of local alternatives, in ways which again are highly political in the sense of illustrating, however temporarily, the possibilities of another way of living, way beyond the imagination of most existing political parties.
In these ways then, the movements of the last 30 years have been deeply political, and in some ways more radically political than any left political party. But on the other hand at different moments, they have recognized a limit to their politics. They had no direct access or relationship to the political process, yet their vision and demands led them to specific policies which in order to succeed needed action within the political system as well as action independently of the political system. For example, the movements in Germany had a very radical vision about alternative energy and they needed some force within the political system who would stop the nuclear power stations. Or the women's movement across Europe had a very radical vision of transforming personal life, relations between men, relations with children, and so on; amongst other initiatives they set up nurseries, but these needed public funding and a decision within the political system. So there was a period in the mid 70's and early 80's in Europe where many movement activists, without separating themselves from the movements either tried to change established parties like the Labour Party in Britain, to make them more responsive to the movements or set up new parties to be literally `a voice of the movements', like the Greens in Germany.
In this first phase of this cycle in the relations between movements and parties they created got swallowed up by the political system. The history of German Green is a classic illustration of the strength of the conservative forces of the state . In spite of all its efforts to protect the radicalism of the party from the weight of the state, the Green party has been incorporated, divided and driven to the right in ways that have weakened the movements in Germany and provide important lessons for any future attempts to create `parties of the movements' Or in the case of Labour party, movement activists got swallowed up and than spat out. There are exceptions where there has been a conscious attempt by the movements to create their own sources by autonomous power, whether is Zapatistas in Mexico which has not sought any lasting relationship with a political party or the landless movement in Brazil, the MST which has an increasingly uneasy relationship to the Workers Party (PT) in government.
This leads us to an important and perhaps obvious distinctions between two senses of being political: first the idea of `being political in a sense of transforming society dismantling of old power structures of both the economy and the state. This is not the conventional use of the term "political" - it's not after all, conventional to talk about transforming society - so it is a concept that gets very easily lost, particularly at times of defeat. For instance in Britain under Thatcher the use of this concept of ` political ' was restricted to a small sub-culture; now however, the radical direct action movements against neo-liberalism have given it meaning again amongst wider sections of society. On the other hand there is the much more narrow sense of political, meaning literally the institutions of the state and the supposedly democratic government of the state.
Clearly one of the key questions arising from that first phase where the movements begun to get involved in political parties or even set up political parties like green party, is how to develop autonomous sources of transformative power independent of the existing political system, in order to be able interventions in the political system that contribute to the process of transformation?.
In order to answer this question we need to understand better the actual and potential transformative of social movements, both as distinct from and in relation to political parties.
A good place to start is being understanding the critique that the radical movements of the 70's made of the traditional parties of the left. I am thinking of the model of the Leninist party in particular and the assumption behind the way these kinds of parties. But social democratic parties shared many of the same assumptions, particularly concerning notions of leadership and knowledge.
The first fundamental challenge which the new movements posed to both the Leninist and the social democratic party was to refuse to accept that they had a monopoly of politics: that only the party had an overview of society; that only the party had access to the power to bring about change.
Behind this party presumption to have a monopoly over politics was the further assumption that assumption that seizing state power or gaining political office was both the necessary and sufficient condition for social change. What the new movements from the women's movement through to the anti-globalisation or alterglobalisation movements and also the radical parts of the workers movement are demonstrating in their practice, is a variety of different sources of transformative power at every level, from the personal, the neighbourhood and the workplace l through to the global.. They are insisting that the power to change society is not something that you can delegate to others, to a political party, it is something that lies within yourself, working with others first to refuse to be complicit in existing power relations, and therefore to find and invent the means of resistance and second, as we resist to create alternatives, to struggle prefigure in the present what we are trying to achieve in the future. Change is therefore something that you make in your everyday life, in your own relationships, economic, social and political.
In this way, recent social and radical workers movements are returning to a basic insight of Marx's concerning the creativity of the masses. We could say that one of the most important insights on which Marx built his theory of exploitation and of the communist alternative was that the productivity of capitalism, the wealth it generated and the wealth that capitalists appropriated all depended on the creativity of workers. This creativity was distorted and alienated by capitalist institutions and the problem is how to liberate, how this living creative labour can gain full expression.
The movements of the late 20th century and early 21st century other movements have extended Marx's insight by revealing and resisting other forms of suppression and distortion of people's creativity of the majority of people. One of the questions implicity driving the organizational inventiveness of these movements - their desire to avoid the hierarchies of a command based organization, for example - was how they can mutually release each others creativity, share each others' knowledge and, often hidden, capacity and build new forms of tranformative power as a result. In this way they made a direct challenge to the
assumptions that traditional left parties made about knowledge, and related to this, leadership. Leninism and social democracy alike had a very limited understanding of knowledge - typical of the positivistic epistemology of the first half of the 20th Century. For them the only knowledge that was relevant to political action was scientific, or social scientific knowledge. Knowledge that could be codified and centralized through a single agent, a single leadership. Putting is very crudely, the assumption was that the party would develop, and disseminate this knowledge. There was very little recognition of practical, tacit knowledge, the knowledge that stems from experience; there is no systematic attempt to give effective expression to the creative, knowing capacity of ordinary party member or supporters, let alone activist in grass roots movements.
Recent movements, by contrast, and political groupings working closely with them, with the disillusionment of relying on a benevolent state or a paternalistic party, have developed in their practice a very radical critique of that understanding of knowledge and pointed, in just the way they organize, to the importance of knowledge embedded in experience and in practice. Without romanticising the movements, and recognizing the unevenness of their histories, they have sought to organize in a way which shares practical knowledge and creativity, socialising it and turning it a source of transformative power. In the process, have also often changed the relationship with intellectuals. In general, though there are many exceptions, they are not anti-intellectual, anti -research, anti-theory. Theory and research is more and more becoming a tool, servants, in a process of developing much more total and radical form of knowledge.
The one party that has built a transformative understanding of knowledge into it's methodology is the Brazilian Workers Party, under the influence of radical educationalist Paolo Frerie. Frerie's saw the task of education as being to bring forward and find ways of expressing and realising the creative capacity within everyone. At it's best, in sharing power with citizens in the decision-making over municipal budgets for example, the PT has turned this into the task of politics. The problem now in Brazil, is that the conservative weight of the state apparatus, reinforced by the pressure of the IMF and the financial markets is pulling the PT leadership away from these roots and making it frightened to empower the citizens who have give Lula is mandate and now want to help him realize it.
This brings us to the notion of leadership: with the traditional left party, leadership is concentrated around one point. For the movements there are many centers of transformative power, ranging from alternative radio stations and social center to the international networks of trade unions and social movements that can halt the World Trade Organisation. Each of these produces its own form of leadership, at different times for different occasions.
There clearly remain many problems which the movements have not yet solved and for which new kinds of parties might play a role.
I will only mention them now - there is no space for detail. The first is the problem of coordination and cross-fertilisation of all the different centers of power. This is a problem facing movements across Europe as we try to build a plural and at the same time forceful agency and subjectivity for social change to challenge and create alternative to the present institutions of the EU and the corporate elites which influence them. Here there are many innovations to be made by using information technology in a politically creative way. This will involve the parties and any quasi-party organizations radically breaking from all desires to have a monopoly over political control. It will require a new culture that can live with uncertainty and co-ordination from below. But it will also require the movements to find ways of being transparent and accessible, in order to avoid the classic movement problem of what feminists described, from their own experience as `the tyranny of strucuturelessness'
The second problem is the problem of representation in the electoral political system.
Such an intervention in electoral political institutions has to be of a new kind if it is to avoid the kind of pitfalls of the Green party in Germany , the left in the British Labour party; the dangers what seems to be happening to PT in Brazil. It has to take full account of the characteristic of bourgeois state, which in every country is built on all kinds of historically developed mechanisms that separate the representatives from people. The way in which the party represents the people has to be rooted in a power that can actually challenge those mechanisms. This means a party that is organized to be under constant, creative pressure from the movements, is constantly accountable to the movements. It can't be a party that aspires to be in control of the movement. It has to be a party that respects the autonomy of the movements, and recognizes that this autonomy is a necessary condition for their transformative power, a transformative power on which the party depends.
Personally, I think movement people need to be thinking and experiementing together with the process of creating this new kind of party. Only they will do it in a way which from the start give only a modest role for the party: as one actor amongst many. There is now a deep crisis of electoral political institutions. We can't leave it to the right wing to fill it. Or to people who dressed in new clothes and speaking a new language will repeat the failures of the past.
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