Reclaim the State

Reclaim the State: Experiments in Popular Democracy. Published by Verso.

The anti-capitalist protests at Seattle and Genoa are dramatic symbols of a growing collective anger about the globalising power of a few multinational corporations. But there is more to anti-capitalism than demonstrations: concepts like participatory democracy and economic solidarity form the heart of alternative but equally compelling visions.

Hilary Wainwright, writer and long-time political activist, set out on a quest to find out how people are putting such concepts into practice locally and taking control over public power. Her journey starts at home, in east Manchester, where local community groups are testing Tony Blairs commitment to community-led regeneration by getting involved in the way government money is spent. In Newcastle, she joins a meeting of homecare workers and their clients to challenge the threat of privatisation of homecare services in that city.

In Los Angeles she talks to the people behind the community-union coalitions that have had major successes in improving the impoverished bus system and in winning a living wage for employees of firms contracted by the city. And in Porto Alegre she discovers the wider democratic potential of the participatory budget, the basis of investment decisions in many Brazilian cities. Local democracy and "people power," it turns out, provided the foundations for a global alternative, as her visit to the World Social Forum reveals.

Intelligent, well-written and painstakingly researched, it is a crucial contribution to the Left agenda. Hilary Wainwright is the editor of red pepper as well as a writer and broadcaster. She is a research fellow of the International Labour Studies Centre at Manchester University, the Centre for Global Governance at the London School of Economics and of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. Her previous books include Arguments for a New Left, Labour: A Tale of Two Parties and, with others, Beyond the Fragments. The Red Pepper magzine was a partner in founding the ethical shop Get Ethical.

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