Notes Towards a New Politics

New Strategies for People Power
January 2002
Notes Towards a New Politics

This briefing contributes towards theorising democratic, egalitarian and emancipatory politics that have for some time been struggling from below. Hilary Wainwright highlights practical lessons learnt from the experiences of labour and broad-based social movements in Brazil, the UK and the USA.

Many of us ’68-ers of various hues for too long took for granted what we considered to be a new left politics . Now, it is not simply that other members of our generation are in power, or at least in office, while we and our values are seemingly in permanent opposition, but also that many of the ideas, certainly the language, of new left politics has been hijacked and flown off to the land of privatisation, de-regulation and the market.

Familiar terms ‘community empowerment’, ‘civil society,’ ‘decentralisation’ - even the ‘third way’ or a ‘new left’ have decorated the speeches of politicians from Tony Blair to Thabo Mbeki, via Bill Clinton and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, as they acquiesce or enthusiastically pursue the agendas of the leading private corporations.

Pages: 
16pages
Edition: 
Transnational Institute
Series: 
TNI Briefing Series 2002/3

Research Director of the TNI New Politics programme

Hilary Wainwright is a leading researcher and writer on the emergence of new forms of democratic accountability within parties, movements and the state. She is the driving force and editor behind Red Pepper, a popular British new left magazine, and has documented countless examples of resurgent democratic movements from Brazil to Britain and the lessons they provide for progressive politics.

As well as TNI fellow, she is also Senior Research Associate at the International Centre for Participation Studies at the Department for Peace Studies, University of Bradford, UK and Senior Research Associate at International Centre for Participation Studies', Bradford University. She has also been a visiting Professor and Scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles; Havens Center, University of Wisconsin, Madison and Todai University, Tokyo. Her books include Reclaim the State: Experiments in Popular Democracy (Verso/TNI, 2003) and Arguments for a New Left: Answering the Free Market Right (Blackwell, 1993).

Wainwright founded the Popular Planning Unit of the Greater London Council during the Thatcher years, and was convenor of the new economics working group of the Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly from 1989 to 1994.