The anticapitalist 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 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.

“An extremely valuable contribution to the debate about concrete alternatives to neo-liberalism.” — Naomi Klein

“Hilary Wainwright draws on successful innovations in popular participation from throughout the world to make a convincing case for the viability of a genuine third way between the dead ends of liberal democracy and social democracy. This book is likely to become the intellectual flagship of the new politics movement.” — Walden Bello

“Intelligent, well-written and painstakingly researched, it is a crucial contribution to the Left agenda.” — Gary Younge

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.

224 pages

Cloth
1 85984 689 0
US$22 / £15 / CAN$30