788 research outputs found
Finding a Way Forward. Lessons from the Corbyn Project in the UK (James Schneider interviewed by Hilary Wainwright)
No full textWithin hours of Jeremy Corbyn becoming leader of the British Labour Party, the gloves were off. The Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), the mainstream media (assisted by much of the Labour Party’s administrative apparatus) and the British capitalist class were all intensely hostile and launched a relentless attack that constantly stymied Corbyn’s project of a transformative socialist government, culminating in the party’s heavy defeat in the general election of December in 2019, in which the right-wing populist project of ‘Brexit’ (leaving the European Union) split Labour’s members and its electoral base. Corbyn and his supporters were quickly marginalized, as the right wing reasserted its grip under the new leader, Keir Starmer.
James Schneider not only had a ringside seat at all these events, but was sufficiently part of the team to feel keenly the moments of exhilaration, sweat and pain of the five-year struggle, while all the time knowing, from his year as Momentum’s National Organizer, the vast untapped potential for movement initiative and mobilizations that lay beyond the ‘tyranny of the immediate’ which dominated life in the Leader’s office in Westminster. In this interview, he assesses the strengths and weaknesses of the extra-parliamentary forces that backed Corbyn, from the low ebb of trade union organization when Corbyn first became leader to the limited but important ways in which the new leadership of the Labour Party revalidated trade unions, and the positive legacy of the Corbyn leadership in encouraging popular self-confidence and politicization. At a time when many on the left are leaving or considering leaving the Labour Party, Schneider urges a strategy which transcends the ‘inside the party or out of it’ dichotomy which has constantly exhausted left thinking in the UK. Instead, he outlines the idea of a hybrid movement rooted primarily in communities and workplaces while at the same time, without compromising its mobilizing and campaigning energies, continuing the struggle for democratic control of the Labour Party.
Schneider is interviewed in May 2021 by Hilary Wainwright, editor of Red Pepper and contributing editor to the Socialist Register, and author of numerous books on the politics of the left. Wainwright has long been an advocate of the need for the left across Europe to experiment in ‘parties of a new kind’ that would break from both traditional social democracy and the vanguard party models of the far left
Municipalism and feminism then and now: Hilary Wainwright talks to Jo Littler
No full textHilary Wainwright discusses municipalism and its relationship to feminism, past and present. She discusses how the women's liberation movement and in particular its creation of collective childcare produced a form of prefigurative politics which also opened up the possibilities of women being more active. She also discusses her involvement in the Greater London Council in the 1980s and its particular form of municipal politics, which included empowering communities, supporting co-operatives, an alternative industrial strategy and a progressive procurement policy. All these examples of 'power as transformative capacity' rather than 'power-over', are related to contemporary forms of municipalism, from Preston to Barcelona, and point to the necessity of local government as a necessary space of engagement in the wake of the 2020 general election.</jats:p
Hilary Wainwright, Arguments for a New Left. Answering the Free Market Right, Oxford, Blackwell, 1994
No full textLöwy Michael. Hilary Wainwright, Arguments for a New Left. Answering the Free Market Right, Oxford, Blackwell, 1994. In: L'Homme et la société, N. 115, 1995. Les passions de la recherche. pp. 150-151
Hilary Wainwright, Arguments for a New Left. Answering the Free Market Right, Oxford, Blackwell, 1994
No full textLöwy Michael. Hilary Wainwright, Arguments for a New Left. Answering the Free Market Right, Oxford, Blackwell, 1994. In: L'Homme et la société, N. 115, 1995. Les passions de la recherche. pp. 150-151
Civil Society, Democracy and Power: Global Connections
No full textNoThe term global civil society is hotly contested, admit the editors, who offer their own definition. Of the three editor-contributors and 11 additional contributors, nine are affiliated either with the Centre for the Study of Global Governance, LSE, or the UCLA Center for Civil Society. Contributions to this annually updated yearbook tackle the debate on definitions; NGOs; multiculturalism; the Arab perspective; oil and activism; globalism, democracy, and democratic power; prominent individuals behind the global civil society; and methodologies for measuring and analyzing it, among other issues. The last section gives a chronology of events. Of interest to social and political scientists, activists, students, journalists and policy makers. Editor of Red Pepper, Hilary Wainwright, identifies the conditions in which global civil society can reinvigorate or hinder the development of local democracy with examples from China, Brazil and Guatemala
Feminism and ‘the S-Word’
No full textA roundtable discussion on socialism and feminism, chaired by Jo Littler, with Mandy Merck, Hilary Wainwright, Nira Yuval-Davis and Deborah Grayson
A set of nine principles for distributed-design information storing
No full textThe issues of distributed working are many, with problems relating to information access and information acquisition the most common (Crabtree et al., 1997). Keeping track of project and team information is becoming more complex as design is increasingly being carried out collaboratively by geographically dispersed design teams across different time zones. The literature notes that little prescription or guidance exists on information management for designers (Culley et al., 1999) and Hicks (2007) highlights a relative lack of overall principles for improving information management. Additionally, evidence from earlier studies by the author into ‘How information is stored in distributed design project work’ reinforces the need for guidance, particularly in a distributed context (Grierson, 2008). Distributed information collections were found to be unorganised, contained unclear information and lacked context. Storing and sharing of distributed information was often time consuming and the tools awkward to use. This can lead to poor project progress and can impact directly on the quality and success of project outcomes (Grierson et al., 2004, 2006). This paper seeks to address these issues by presenting the development, implementation and evaluation of a set of Principles and a Framework to support distributed design information storing in the context of a Global Design class. Through both quantitative and qualitative evaluation methods the Principles were found to help in a number of ways – with the easy access of information; the structuring and organising of information; the creation of an information strategy; the making of information clear and concise; the supporting of documentation during project work; and the strengthening of team work; all helping teams to work towards project outcomes
Reclaim the State: Experiments in Popular Democracy.
No full textNoThe anticapitalist protests at Seattle and Genoa are dramatic symbols of a growing collective anger about the of a few multinational corporations. But there is more to anticapitalism 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 Blair¿s 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 privatization 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
Socialists, Social Movements and the Labour Party: A Reply to Hilary Wainwright
No full textIn assessing the prospects for an independent socialist party in Britain in the 1995 Socialist Register, Hilary Wainwright draws on her long and extensive experience of left politics. She has set herself an exacting task: to update Ralph Miliband\u27s review of the progress made in creating a new political formation between 1956 and 1976. He envisaged a left-wing party \u27able to attract a substantial measure of support and hold out genuine promise of further growth\u27, but he concluded that after twenty years there was still nothing to show for it. In contrast, Hilary examines the last two decades and claims that the prospects for a new party are now promising. My counter argument rests on the open acknowledgement that the socialist movement is in crisis - and insists that this crisis is as severe for those outside the Labour Party as it is for those who belong to it. Although the humanitarian case for socialism is stronger than ever and even though opportunities are emerging, the dramatic demise of Communism and the more prosaic decline of social democracy have seriously damaged the whole of the left. This is true whether we agreed with either of these dominant traditions or whether our political lives have been spent contesting some of the harm that they have done
Apprenticeship policy in England: increasing skills versus boosting young people’s job prospects.
No full textSuccessive British governments have committed substantial public resources to apprentice training, but far too few young people benefit and not enough high value skills have been developed. That is the central conclusion of a new report published by the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP). The report’s author, Dr Hilary Steedman, who has nearly 30 years of research experience in this field, calls for a change in the country’s apprenticeship model.
- …
