Another kind of politics is possible

JVL Introduction

There have been radical experiments, in Britain and elsewhere, in which grass-roots movements, against the odds and often against the mainstream parties – often including their own – have developed a different kind of politics at local level.

We’ve carried the odd article highlighting this, such as Taking back control: Preston shows the way where Labour’s radical council, led by Matthew Brown, gave people hope – democratising its public institutions and involving the local community in its decision-making at all levels of the city’s economy.

There are also some catastrophic failures in, for example, in Stoke where you can see Labour locally sleep-walking into disaster – as the Tory council leader put it “Labour being entitled and complacent” and utterly lacking in political imagination, allowing its support to be hollowed out over time

We’ve also carried articles hinting at other models, such Mark Perryman’s A Do-It-Yourself Labour Party which asks us to think about what a genuinely open, plural party would look like: “We need a manner of talking with, not shouting at. Listening to rather than shutting out those we disagree with.”

In this spirit, we post this article about the extremely deprived town of Grigny in the southern suburbs of Paris with its massive unemployment, abandoned housing estates and state of general neglect.

Here, against all the odds, the local Communist Mayor has been able to offer social programmes which have offered hope in what otherwise would have been susceptible to the lure of the far-right Front National.

This article was originally published by Jacobin on Sat 6 Nov 2021. Read the original here.