Communities in Control

The proposals announced by the Government today in “Communities in Control” contain some useful ideas on paper. See:Communities in Control

The idea that democracy should be participatory, and built from the ground up is one that socialists should support. The idea also that communities should be given control over their own neighbourhoods, and the facilities within them is also one that socialists should support, and one I have proposed for some time. Socialists will also welcome the proposal to remove the sold “Widdicombe Rules” introduced by the Thatcher Government which removed the human rights of Local Government workers by preventing them over a given salary scale level from being able to participate in Party politics – as though most of the top Civil Servants, and Local Government Officers weren’t themselves Tories, and representatives of the ruling class. The proposals to make the top Local Government Chiefs more accountable to communities by giving people the right to drag them before local panels to be questioned should also be welcomed.

However, some caution is clearly warranted. As the Liberals spokesperson said, often farming out local assets such as Community Centres has been done by local Councils as a means of shifting off their books services which are unprofitable, and a drain on Council resources. If such assets are to be transferred to local communities then those communities need to have the Council’s books opened to them so that they can see what they are taking on. If taking on such an asset saves the Council money then Council Tax payers in that area should receive a rebate on their Council Tax, or else the Council should provide an annual rebate to the Community for running the facility. It is one thing for local Communities to voluntarily establish at their own initiative co-operative ventures to control immediate aspects of their lives, such as ownership and management of housing estates, and facilities, it is another for those communities to have things foisted on them from above, even if it is made to look like something they have agreed to.

We have lots of examples of how co-operative ventures are more efficient, more equitable, and more democratic than capitalist enterprise either of the private or state variety, but simply because some enterprise or activity is organised on co-operative lines does not of itself guarantee that it is so. Only, if such ventures are genuinely the initiative of workers, created from the bottom up, are well planned, organised and run – not to mention effectively capitalised – can they offer the kind of example, and inspiration that Marx and other socialists said they could be. Moreoever, such co-operative ventures can only provide that level of efficiency and so on if they are developed on a wide scale bringing together a number of co-operative ventures, and integrating their activities. A good start would be to utilise the resources of the Co-op itself both financial and administrative to train local community workers leaders to act as a vanguard in establishing such ventures. Branch LP’s could also act as a means of igniting and organising such activity, but of course there is no indication from Blear’s speech that such is proposed, because to do so would imply that there is a connection between consistent democracy and working class political activity.

Indeed, having said in her Parliamentary speech that her proposals follow in the footsteps of those throughout history that had insisted on the right of greater participation, having wrapped the proposals, correctly, in the clothes of an extension of participatory democracy, in reply to a Question from a Tory backbencher, she said that the proposals were not intended to weaken but to enhance representative democracy. That is a collapse right at the beginning. Representative democracy is bourgeois democracy, it is the form of democracy established by the capitalist class as the best means of it retaining real control, whilst giving the veneer of popular control over the central and local state. If local bourgeois representative democracy is to remain dominant then any participatory democracy, and proposals for handing over ownership and control of community assets will be a fraud. At the end of the day it will be that representative democracy that will override any direct democratic decisions made by local communities.

Ultimately, control is a function of ownership. If workers want control over the enterprises they work in, or the communities they live in, that can only come from ownership of those enterprises and communities. Some short term control might be exercised in exceptional conditions, but the capitalists will ultimately reassert their control. Only real workers ownership through the creation of co-operative forms at the real instigation of workers can avoid that problem, as a stage toward as Marx proposed the extension of such forms on a national basis, and that only as a transitional stage on the way to the establishment of a Workers State, which can complete the process of transforming property relations and secure power in the hands of the working class. That is the task Marxists have to set themselves. If Blear’s proposals can be utilised to assist in that process all very well.