Reclaim the State: Adventures in Popular Democracy

Ostensibly a rejoinder to the neo-liberal celebration of the free market and the deregulation and privatization of government services, this book is really a left-wing attack on the social democratic welfare state. Wainwright (Arguments For a New Left) contends that social democracy is weak, inefficient, bureaucratic and captive to the very business interests it is supposed to tame. Echoing Friedrich Hayek's epistemological critique of state planning from the opposite ideological direction, she argues that social democracy imposes top-down social engineering that ignores the tacit, practical knowledge of ordinary people, and thus stifles the genius for self-government that resides in the masses. These problems are structural defects of representative democracy, which reduces people to passive observers of a contest between political elites, and can be cured only by a participatory democracy that enlists them in the detailed formulation and implementation of government programs. Wainwright examines a number of such""experiments,"" including a public sector union's campaign to stave off privatization in the city of Newcastle, and the internationally acclaimed""participatory budget"" process in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Her somewhat uncritical and often disjointed discussion of these ventures often bogs down in a welter of acronyms. And the results are mixed; most of the plans are not yet implemented, and they involve prosaic initiatives on dreary matters many might wish could be taken care of by faceless state bureaucracies rather than popular mobilizations. Wainwright's populist valorization of""social movements"" and disparagement of electoral politics are familiar New Left themes, but they often do not give social democracy its due.