Hilary Wainwright
“Alternatives to privatisation: democratising the state, past, present and future”*
21 février 2023 — 17h00–19h00
Université Paris Nanterre, bâtiment Weber, salle de séminaires 2
*Séance en anglais
Il est possible de suivre à distance en demandant votre inscription à Bradley Smith (bsmith@parisnanterre.fr)
Abstract :
Public services in the U.K. are collapsing. This is not because of the strikes but because over the past 40 years a hoard of greedy businesses and their government allies have eaten their way into all the country’s essential, previously public services, a bit like a hoard of termites being allowed to eat their way into the beams, floors and roof of a house, making living in it like living in a ruin.
Living in Britain just now is like living in a ruin. Its ruling elite, the monarch included, are trying to avoid demolition (in the form of the break-up of the British state and an attempt to start again through the independent nations of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and England).
There were public, democratic alternatives to privatisation—memories of which are relevant for the future. The old public welfare state was not perfect. It could be paternalistic, bureaucratic, restrictive, unresponsive to diverse needs and at worst authoritarian. But the basic principle on which it was founded—the redistribution of private wealth, through taxation, to fund universal public services to meet the good of all—was an experience of ‘from each according to their ability to each according to need’ as Marx put it, but within a predominantly capitalist society.
And here was one of the problems. Social democratic governments who built the welfare state allowed the private market, and with it the relentless drive of private capital to accumulate, untouched. The balance of forces after the Second World War made possible an encroachment into the market, for the public good; and the boom years of recovery enabled labour to increase its bargaining power and social movements to exert pressure to improve and extend public services to meet new more diverse needs. Then came the reaction—a class war against labour. The political victories of Thatcher and Reagan began a concerted political effort to restore profits, get control of or cut public services and create new markets for private provision. Only in the NHS was it even temporarily resisted and blocked. The reason why it was possible for right-wing governments to privatise public services so easily was that democratic public control—beyond minimal, formal parliamentary accountability—was not built into the institutions of the welfare state. The public did not in general feel it was theirs.
But there were alternatives beneath the mainstream radar. Many new ideas and practical experiments were born out of the prefigurative practice of the new social movements that emerged in the 1970s but produced new civic public collaborations in the 1980s. The experience of the women’s liberation movement was especially important, and I will describe its experiments in democratically controlled public provision for women—childcare, women refuges, etc. Another experience was of workplace trade union organisations developing plans for democratising their workplaces—public and private. In addition, ‘People’s Plans’ were drawn up by community movements in localities supported by radical municipalities threatened by corporate property developers.
I will explore what long term alternatives can be developed, learning from these past experiments in popular democracy and from international experiences like participatory budgets in Brazil. Finally, I will end with suggestions for a brainstorm on how we move away from the ruins (not only in the UK) to construct the architecture of democratic public services and state institutions under popular control. This has deep implications for wider strategies of transformation, especially the transformation of production—now made urgent by the present reality and very real threat of climate breakdown.
Hilary Wainwright is a critical and publically active intellectual of the generation of 1968. After study in Oxford University she became an academic researcher at Durham University, the University of Manchester, and the Open University. She has had visiting posts and scholarships at several international universities, including the University of California, Los Angeles; Todai Univerity, Tokyo; and most recently at the Centre of Social Movements Study, Scuola Normale Superiore, Florence. She also worked for 5 years as Deputy Chief Economic Advisor and director of the Popular Planning Unit of the Greater London Council. She has long been an active socialist feminist and co-authored several books, including Reclaim the State: Experiments in Popular Democracy (2003) and Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism (2013). In addition, she is an Associate of the Transnational Institute (based in Amsterdam), a co-editor of Red Pepper magazine and website (www.redpepper.org.uk), and a Senior Research Associate of the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University.