Hilary Wainwright, A New Politics From The Left.
Hilary Wainwright, A New Politics From The Left. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018. xiv-146pp. ISBN 978-1-5095-2362-7, hardback, £35.00. ISBN 978-15095-2363-4 paperback, £24.99. Reviewed by Gary Hawke[i]
Published in The Journal of Critical Realism
Hilary Wainwright has written a wonderful and humanistic book in which she uses her extensive experience, obtained from a lifetime of dedication to the liberation of working people, to argue for a ‘new politics’ of the left. I would even go as far as to say that it is a book written with love and passion. In essence, this book is Wainwright’s competent exploration of the assumption that an agent is born into a structure but also has the ability to change that structure, described in Critical Realism (CR) by the transformational model of social activity.
She argues, from a socialist perspective, that to achieve structural change for the better the agent needs not only to challenge the structure, but also to contribute their practical, everyday, creative knowledge to the process of designing and implementing transformed structure. It may not be enough just to occupy the old structures, and hope that this will implement change; we may have to take radical steps of self and community transformation if we want to free ourselves from the hegemonic and egoic structures that not only occlude our freedom, but exist because of our collective reproduction of them.
Within A New Politics From The Left Hilary Wainwright has tasked herself to investigate ways in which society can be liberated from the power-to-dominate constraints of capitalism; this then allows her to offer a view of society built on the power-to-transform of the united commons. Wainwright begins her project by exploring a new politics of knowledge; those who control knowledge have power. This is elite knowledge power, where only those who ‘know best’ – the technocrats – control the market and set governmental policy. However, what is ignored is the practical knowledge of the commons. We can make a protest based on the shop floor knowing of the ineffectiveness of the system, and yet nothing changes. Why? The technocrat always knows best.
Wainwright follows CR in seeing this governmental elite, technocratic use of knowledge as power-over (power2,) or power-as-domination. However, Wainwright suggests that social movements may be unaware of the structures and mechanisms in place that maintain inequality. Consequently, once change has taken place, power-as-domination remains intact. This is a case of confusing change and difference, illustrated, Wainwright says, by Beatrice Webb, the Fabian leader who influenced labour policy and yet had little faith in the “average sensual man”.
In part one of her book, Wainwright argues for a move away from ‘power-over’, to a more inclusive ‘power-to’ or ‘power-to-transform’, which critical realists describe’ as ‘power1’. She suggests that this move can be achieved if we enable the sharing of personal and collective tacit knowledge (what I/we can do). However, she argues – following Michael Polanyi – that it is difficult to share this tacit content of knowledge because those who possess it may find it hard to express, or to communicate, with others. This results in there being no alternative but to let the technocrats be the decision makers.
The objective then must be to find ways to share tacit knowledge. A way to achieve this can be found in the work of Paulo Friere. He develops a democratic process that ultimately strengthens citizens’ resilience against the technocrat decision maker; it gives grass-roots power back to the community and brings tacit knowledge into civic discussions. This democratic process does not absent all the structures of power – we cannot avoid issues of power all together – but it provides a method of extracting and utilising those mechanisms of power that support change, and ensuring that social power is under-laboured by power-to or power-as-transformation, rather than power-as-domination.
Wainwright moves on to suggest that although the Labour government in 1945 had a desire for self-government, which is at the heart of the politics of knowledge, they failed to fulfil that desire. Yet at the same time, through the reforming of education in the 1960s, they set in motion a re-vindication of the desire. As the Left began to support programmes of self-governing through a view of social reform as power-to, social activism towards self-government became more achievable. Thus, Wainwright’s argument could be described as an explanatory critique of the Left-wing movement from 1945 to the present day. She seeks to draw out the facts and values of an emergent ‘New Left’ as it struggles with the contradictions of having to work within structures of ‘parliamentary power’ – embodying power-over – whilst advocating for ‘people power’ as power-to, exemplified by such movements as Momentum.
Central to Wainwright’s argument is that the politics of knowledge can become either/both power-over or power-to. To the contrary, I think that power-over/power-to has primarily nothing to do with knowledge but what one does with knowledge. In this case, knowledge becomes a commodity that we need to learn to use wisely. We may have to stop seeing knowledge as something attained and instead see it as ontologically causal, in the same way that we might see creativity. So, although Wainwright later in her book speaks of examples of community activism that she feels demonstrate a move from power-over to power-to through creating a commons of practical knowledge, she does not explore how grass-roots communities, having achieved power, can avoid failing back into power-over. This is something that I have witnessed many times when working with community projects who believe that their power lies in knowing “what is the best thing for the community we serve”.
Let me return for a moment to the inspiring examples of community activism explored in part two of Wainwrights’ book, which she uses to illustrate the basic principles of democratisation of tacit knowledge. Each example takes a pre-existing structure – be that Lucas Aerospace, the Tory government’s privatisation of public services or digital technology – and shows that by coming together and sharing tacit knowledge the bond between the authority and knowledge can be broken. The five lessons Wainwright offers could well be an effective blueprint for all local community initiatives, and they really deserve further research and application from a CR perspective.
Having explored the mechanisms leading away from power-over to power-to – by first defining the actions within the states of affairs that attempt to absent power-over and then by defining what is needed to be absented to ensure a successful implementation of localised self-governing initiatives – Wainwright moves on to speculate about what a new politics of knowledge could be on a wider scale. She describes centralised capitalist conglomerates as closed totalities. As such, they remove the opportunity for people to create localised, new forms of production that become initiatives for change. The ‘New Left’ social structures that Wainwright is proposing are open, partial and have internal relationships. Using the metaphor of the healthy organism, Wainwright proposes a social, holistic causality; and she describes this in terms of an ecological system. Goods or services are both: produced and owned by communities; and meet their needs. By using these goods/services, the community keeps their production in a constant state of economic health. Rather than the global conglomerates being the producer, now we have local people with tacit knowledge given the means of production. In a Marxist sense, they are given both the means to produce and the ability to produce for themselves. Refocusing the power-over strategies and placing the local producer at the centre of the economic ecological structure – rather than the capitalistic profit of the conglomerate – allows for the emergence of initiatives such as the Fair Trade movement to flourish. The wider implication is that the value of the internal relations increases. Furthermore, because of digital technology, local communities are now able to include people from across the globe. What Wainwright is saying is that once the structures are in place to decentralise politics and the economy, the stratagems of power-over can be extracted. Stripped of their use for domination, these structures have ‘power-to’ transform the way we think and act socially.
A compelling example used in Wainwright’s conclusion is that of the tragic case of the Grenfell Tower tragedy in which 71 people lost their lives. The Grenfell Tower residents had been sharing their tacit knowledge of safety concerns with Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO) and the Kensington and Chelsea Council since 2013, and yet they were not listened to. Rather than recognising that the local residents’ tacit knowledge was intrinsically valuable because it came from the practical everyday experience of living within the tower, the KCTMO and then the Council chose to treat the residents with contempt, a contempt that demonstrates just how little value is placed on the lives of working people. A case, I think, of valuing profit over human safety.
Wainwright closes her book by arguing for theory/practice consistency. She supports her argument by considering the current version of praxis demonstrated by Corbyn’s anti-parliamentary stance. The hope is that by including working people within the decision-making process – giving space for the sharing of their tacit knowledge in the creation of positive solutions to work and family problems – the Labour Party becomes a Party of Radical Transformation. However, to do this the Labour Party has to let go of the false belief that working people do not possess the everyday creative capacity to solve social problems.
To build such transformative capacity requires a cultural shift; we have to take radical action. This appears to be happening in Barcelona, with the formation of Barcelona en Comú. This is a citizen platform that aims to transform the city through the collective democratisation of grass-roots tacit knowledge, creating the opportunity for participatory democracy. However, Barcelona en Comú is not a political party but an open platform in which anyone can take part. By embodying the power-to-transform capacity of the public commons, Barcelona en Comú’s Aba Colau was voted into power as the first female mayor of Barcelona. In the quote below, Marina López summarised the basis of the success of Barcelona en Comú, which mirrors the central message in Wainwright’s book.
We have always set out to involve as many people from as many social groups as possible. We’ve tried to rethink the public space so the debate can happen in the street.
Lopez in Burgen (22 June 2016) in an article by the Guardian entitled, ‘How to win back the city: the Barcelona en Comú guide to overthrowing the elite’
Is it possible that here in the UK we can create a similar people’s platform for transformational change? I think we can. We already have a people-powered movement, in the form of Momentum, which supports Corbyn, and which gives people the opportunity to use their tacit knowledge to transform, not just the Labour Party, but society for the better. In so doing they are supporting the interests of the many, not the few.
In reading this book, I was a little disappointed that Wainwright does not move farther in the dialectic towards Bhaskar’s The Philosophy of metaReality. It feels for me that Wainwright’s project may not be successful if it does not include the final movements of Bhaskar’s dialectics: that of identity over difference/unity over split, and here I think is the problem faced by the Left. As long as we are singing from the same song sheet, we are of one voice: I join a social movement because at one level, we share the same core universal view. Yet my rhythms and mediations mean I might have to shed some of my version of the view to meet the collective’s view. Thus the individual is subsumed into the collective. Indeed, Barcelona en Comú (reference ?) has noted that one important element in its success is ensuring that everyone is of like mind. To ensure social cohesion we also need to work on our own internalised power-over egoic structures, structures that might be helping the continual actualisation of capitalism. We need to work on ourselves so that we are able to see that axial rationality and universal solidarity are the basis for a politics of knowledge that includes both the agent and the type of society the agent wants to reproduce. It begs the question: Would it be useful for Wainwright to leave behind the constraining Left view, however new that view might be, and take her exploration into an alternative form of politics of knowledge as a power-to-transform that begins to address the building of sound structures that lead to the final goal of Bhaskar’s metaReality – that of eudemonia?
Nevertheless, in an age where
the constant message is that ‘there is no alternative’ to austerity and
neo-liberalism, A New Politics From The
Left offers a refreshing alternative. It suggests a socialist view that
does not follow parliamentary politics but shines a spotlight on the power of
the social collective to create practical, effective ways of self-government. It
is a manifesto for radical transformation that needs to be read by every social
activist, talked about and mined for its applications.
[i] Gary Hawke is the editor of The Order of Natural Necessity: A Kind of Introduction to Critical Realism. The book is based on the transcript from 6 hours of video content that Roy Bhaskar and Gary worked on in 2014.