"Government 2.0" - Returning Power to the Community

Participatory Democracy: In Venezuela the government of Hugo Chavez has fostered the growth of Consejos Comunales - Communal Councils - in an attempt to bypass the formal, state-run bureaucratic structures responsible for administering (badly) the country's rudimentary welfare system. Western welfare systems might also benefit from the competitive challenge of democratic, community-organised service delivery.

FOR NEARLY THIRTY YEARS NOW, and in every country where it succeeded in constructing one, the Left has struggled to defend the Welfare State. For the most part Leftists have campaigned not for the Welfare State as it is, but for the Welfare State as they meant it to be. It’s been a losing strategy. There is simply no sense in battling for a dream, if it means ignoring an increasingly nightmarish reality. In the end, the urgency of ending the nightmare overwhelms the longing to save the dream.

Just how nightmarish the reality of the modern welfare state has become is clearly evident in the places that were intended to be its most potent and persuasive expression: public housing projects. In the sunny optimism of the early post-war era these municipal- and state-facilitated developments were envisaged as islands of rational planning and design in a sea of privately organised squalor.

In Britain’s "new towns", America’s "projects", and New Zealand’s state-house suburbs there was, to quote the rhapsodic rhetoric of New Zealand’s National Film Unit, "space for sunlight". Seventy years on, the reality is immeasurably darker. Where they still exist (many having been, quite literally, blown-up) these vast experiments in public housing have become by-words for appalling social dysfunction.

Built to free the poor from the rack-renting private landlord, social housing swiftly degenerated into a convenient spatial fix for the problem of how to keep the races and classes separate. By herding the lowest of the low into discrete geographical corrals, and maintaining them out of the public purse, the upwardly mobile sectors of post-war capitalist society (and their rising incomes) were made available to the private sector.

What the architects of the Welfare State had confidently predicted would become the benchmarks for rational and socially uplifting urban living, rapidly degenerated into their opposite. High-rise ghettos for the frail and impecunious; or sprawling internment camps for the immigrant labour which now performed the tasks that "white men" wouldn’t do; it made little difference: public housing was something to flee.

I see it every time I go for a walk around my neighbourhood.

The state-housing developments in the Auckland suburb of Three Kings were among the very first to be constructed, and in their day (the late-1930s) they far outstripped the low-cost efforts of private developers. By the 1960s and 70s, however, Three Kings was characterised colourfully by National Party canvassers as "Tiger Country": one of those places where geography and class combined to render middle-class proselytising next-to-impossible.

It’s a lot easier now. Thanks to National’s 1990s policy of selling-off a significant proportion of the nation’s public housing stock, Three Kings is being transformed. The bleak uniformity of the old publicly-owned subdivision is steadily giving way to the remodelled, repainted and tastefully landscaped effects of state-house gentrification. In the last election, for the first time, National’s Party Vote in the Mt Roskill electorate exceeded Labour’s.

Why did the state fail so spectacularly to live up to the expectations of those optimistic social-democrats (and socialists) who entrusted it with the citizenry’s welfare? The answer lies in what might be described as the "authoritarian personality" of state-run institutions – they are totally obsessed with the exercise of power and control.

This is hardly surprising – given that the state itself is, fundamentally, a coercive political instrument. Regardless of whether it directs the activities of a capitalist, socialist, or "mixed" economy, the state’s coercive instincts render it utterly unwilling to entrust the running of its institutions to the citizens they’re intended to serve. Public housing projects in the Soviet Bloc were as bleak and unresponsive to their tenants aspirations as any London "Council Estate" or New Zealand state-house suburb.

Tim O’Reilly, the founder and CEO of the computer book publisher O’Reilly Media, and the man who, in 2004, coined the expression "Web 2.0", would probably refer to the instrumental state – its basic functioning modelled on the machine – as "Government 1.0".

As he argues in "It’s All About The Platform", a guest posting on the TechCrunch website: "Too often, we think of government as a kind of vending machine. We put in our taxes, and get out services: roads, bridges, hospitals, fire brigades, police protection … And when the vending machine doesn’t give us what we want, we protest. Our idea of citizen engagement has somehow been reduced to shaking the vending machine."

While O’Reilly’s focus is predominantly on the IT aspects of government/citizen interaction, his deep understanding of the architecture of complex computer software has given him a new and very interesting perspective on the political architecture for the state.

"Imagine if the [state] were to re-imagine itself not as a vending machine but as an organising engine for civic action … Can we imagine a new compact between government and the public, in which government puts in place mechanisms for services that are delivered not by government, but by private citizens? In other words, can government become a platform?"

Could this "government-as-platform" idea constitute the kernel of a new left-wing dream? After all, it’s a reasonably straightforward matter these days to set up a commercial company on-line, so why not a community-based organisation dedicated to looking after the more vulnerable individuals and families in one’s neighbourhood – up to and including the construction of pensioner and other specialised housing stock?

The state would provide the basic resources (premises, plant and labour) but subject to the general organisational rules and auditing requirements laid-down by Parliament, the deployment of those resources would be undertaken locally and, most importantly, democratically.

Not surprisingly – when you consider who has been on the receiving end of the welfare nightmare these past fifty years – Maori New Zealanders are already leading the way with this mode of community-based service delivery, but there’s nothing to stop the rest of New Zealand society from joining them. The REACs (Regional Employment & Access Councils) of the late-1980s stand as a tentative (if disappointingly undemocratic) precedent.

Social welfare was supposed to free the citizen from the tutelage of private power, but ended up replacing the limited domination of the boss and the landlord with the absolute authority of the state. "Government 2.0" offers to restore the link between Liberty and Progress. If it was only willing to shake off the nightmare of the authoritarian state, what couldn’t a Libertarian Left dream into existence?

This essay was originally published in The Independent of Thursday, 17 September 2009.