Hilary Wainwright

Paint Your Town Red clearly maps new forms of democratic collectivism across the UK. We catch glimpses of an alternative strategy beyond inner party struggles and electoral tactics.

For industries to be run by ‘those who spend their lives with them’ means recognising the knowledge drawn from practical experience, which is often tacit rather than codified: an understanding of expertise that opens decision-making to wider popular participation, beyond the private boss or the state bureaucrat.

“Women have been creating a Commons for a long time: the domestic labor and economy is, de facto, an invisible economy”.

It’s as if you have a terrible heart attack and surgery, you’ve just come out of intensive care and the doctor says there’s no need to change anything of your previous life, don’t exercise much and keep up your intake of fatty foods!

Occupy and the direct action movements of today have much in common with the radical movements of the 1960s/70s. Both stress cultural as well as economic and political equality and insist on the possibilities of self-government. Can the new generation move beyond the successes and failures of the past, to develop an alternative political economy?