All the main political parties say they want to give people power. But they often don’t start with a clear understanding about the causes of powerlessness.
People can be disempowered if society discriminates against them, if the market impoverishes them, and if the state bullies them – and often by a combination of all three. So people need to be powerful in respect of each, and protected from the overpowering potential of all.
That is much harder to do if, like the Conservatives seem to be, you are confused about the state, indifferent about markets and wishful about society. You end up proposing largely biographical solutions to highly socially-constructed problems.
For Labour, a reluctance to act at the source of market-created problems means it has relied more and more on the central state to alleviate their symptoms. It has been too hands-off with the market – requiring it to be too hands-on with the state.
One consequence has been that the space for an autonomous, independent society capable of balancing the power of the state and resisting the power of the market has been squeezed.
The solution for Labour lies in the distinctiveness of its own tradition. This starts from a belief that most of what is best in life is relational – whether family, love, work, culture or friendship – and that those relationships work best when they are reciprocal.
Organisation is how we take empowerment out of the seminar room. It makes power real. Power is not a means to an end, it is the end. The process is the goal: to create powerful people, through organisation and action. That is how society is strengthened – not by being a client of the state or a consumer of the market, but by having its own strength, through association.
This doesn’t mean, as David Cameron envisages, that society would magically get stronger if only the state would get out of the way. We need the state for society, not the state or society. This is because the conditions for a strong, reciprocal society are demanding. They require political action, not its absence.
First, the democratic state needs to constrain the unaccountable market from swamping society. So we should put a cap on the cost of credit and guarantee work for those at risk of long-term unemployed. And second, the empowering state needs to equip people with the capabilities to flourish. So we must abolish child poverty and tackle corrosive disadvantages.
In short we need to create the conditions for people to act together to improve society, which in the end, depends on us and our relationships with each other. Government must share the task of governing with the people.
Graeme Cooke is head of the Open Left project at Demos and co-author of We mean power: ideas for the future of the Left
