richard-day-gramsci-is-dead

Conclusion: Utopian Socialism Again and Again 207or creating, a critical mass in a limited space. Porto Alegre is oneof five major cities that are governed by the socialist Partido dosTrabalhadores (Workers’ Party), and has become famous for initiatinga participatory budget programme based upon neighbourhoodmeetings that set priorities for capital expenditure on items suchas sanitation, street paving and parks. Central to this approach isthe commitment to giving priority to the poorest inhabitants ratherthan the richest. Since its inception in the 1990s the programmehas been expanded to include the entire city budget, and councilshave been created to discuss other issues, such as housing, health,culture and the environment. The idea has also spread, with varyingdegrees of success, to over 100 Brazilian cities (Abers 2002). TarsoGenro, the former mayor of Porto Alegre, sees participatory budgetingas part of the creation of a ‘new non-state public space’, which itundoubtedly is. However, this is a space based on what he calls a‘hegemonic consensus’; in typical Gramscian terms, it is in fact partof a ‘new state with two spheres’, one composed of ‘managers’ (thestate) and the other of ‘citizens’ organizations’ (civil society) (Genro2003, Thesis 15).A similar model is behind the experiment inaugurated in the stateof Kerala, India in 1996. Here the opportunity for increased localcontrol was created, paradoxically, by a nation-wide devolution ofpower under India’s ninth Five Year Plan. The national governmentrequired all states to delegate certain of their functions to lower levelsof government, but did not specify the way in which this had to bedone. The socialist government in Kerala opted for a total inversion ofthe usual planning process and set out to create a bottom-up systembased on democratic participation at the village and neighbourhoodlevels. This process proceeded over several years and involvedmeetings at various levels of delegation, facilitated by the trainingof thousands of activists. It culminated in the submission of over150,000 project proposals, about half of which were funded (Frankeand Chasin 1998). As in the Brazilian experiments, the participatorydemocratic process here existed only to produce suggestions for stateaction, rather than to find ways to proceed outside of the state’spurview. Thus, in both of these cases, the degree of departure fromhegemonic practices is small. But, since the work of defining prioritiesparticular to various levels of interaction is what would have to bedone in a truly non-statist federalism, these experiments do provideimportant guideposts as to what can be accomplished within andagainst liberal-democratic institutions.