Zohran Mamdani’s election to Mayor of New York has been a badly-needed boost to the confidence of the left in the U.S. and beyond. It has also reignited debate about the strategic choices facing socialists elected to local government, and eventually to national governments, too.
One of the most suggestive contributions to the discussion draws on experiences of participatory democracy in Latin America and elsewhere to build a bottom-up political culture that empowers working people.
In the short term, it enables the social base to keep mobilising, which is vital to sustain a progressive administration that will inevitably be hemmed in by hostile elites and procedural roadblocks, hindering its attempts to implement even its core, immediate, ‘affordability’ policies. In the process of these fights over housing and transport, childcare and the cost of groceries, it also begins to create new structures of power, increasing the capacity of workers to collectively shape the decisions that shape their lives, and to lay the basis for a society beyond capitalism.
Even without the aid of a crystal ball, it is not hard to see how a socialist administration in a Scottish local authority, or even in Holyrood, would confront many of the same obstacles, and need similar solutions, as it sought to seize back the cost-of-living agenda hijacked by Reform in Scotland, or even confront a far-right, Reform government in Westminster.
The key point of assemblies or other forms of mass, participatory democracy, is to change the relationship between the governed and their government, shifting power back to the former. The forms this can take vary greatly. Even within Latin America, the early participatory budgets (PBs) in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in the 1990s and early 2000s were very different from the communal councils and communes developed in Venezuela, or the more sporadic assemblies used in Bolivia, a few years later.
It would be foolish, from so far away, to pretend to offer much of an opinion on exactly what might work best in New York City, it is more important to identify the underlying principles. It is these that will determine whether a given form of assembly democracy can effectively change the relations of power, and whether it really can, or even wants to, open up possible paths to a different kind of society.
The aim is for ordinary people to have real and meaningful opportunities to affect the decisions that shape their lives, rather than participation without influence that breeds cynicism about exercises in participation that are merely consultative. This distinction is important, because many later versions of participatory budgeting were indeed consultations without real power. The original Porto Alegre version, for example, had as core principles that the PB should have sovereign decision-making power and that it should discuss the whole budget, not just a sliver of it. This sounds like a lot more than just ‘affecting’ decisions.
Another of the Porto Alegre core principles was that the PB should be based on direct, universal participation. The basic building block was mass, local assemblies, where all citizens could take part and where they could debate and decide on the main priorities. An elected PB Council would then work out the nuts and bolts. This is the essence of collective action, and it upends the isolation and atomisation that underpins most of our capitalist societies.
The fourth Porto Alegre principle was that the PB process should be self-regulating. Its shape and procedures, its rules, would not be decided by anyone else or laid down in legislation by some other body. The assemblies and their elected council would work out the rules and keep changing them along the way as needed.
It is worth remembering that most of the core group that ‘invented’ the Porto Alegre experience saw themselves as revolutionary socialists. Their conception of the participatory budget, and more broadly of direct, assembly-based democracy, was developed with this in mind. Participatory democracy can be revolutionary if it permanently challenges the existing structures of the bourgeois state. If it ceases to challenge them, if it merely complements or ‘extends’ the processes of existing representative democracy it can easily be co-opted as a block to radical change and in effect a prop for the status quo.
Iain Bruce
Iain Bruce is involved in SfI and is a Your Party member in Glasgow. He is a journalist and film maker who has lived and worked across Latin America.