Another world - but only with capital's permission! (continued)

by Hilary Wainwright | Socialist Resistance no9 | page 22-23

This is scanned newsprint, not web text. The original PDFs carried no text layer at all, so every word here was read off the page by OCR. Expect dropped opening letters, run-together words and wrong characters. There was no contents page to cut the paper up by, so the articles were found from the size of their headlines: a headline may carry its kicker, and where an article ran beside a boxed panel a few lines of the neighbour can appear. The scanned issue is the authority; this text is here so the words can be found at all.

alone democracy

The participatory budgets in Brazil have recently been the focus of dozens of books and debates, and socialists within the Democracia Socialist (DS) tendency of the Workers Party (PT) have been central to their implementation.

As the example of the GLC and Lula's pension reforms makes clear, what can be given by capitalism with one hand can easily be taken away with the other. As Socialist Resistance readers will already know, we have initiated a petition against the expulsion from the PT of those who oppose the pension reforms, which has gained 700 signatures. Hilary has not so far put her name

Nevertheless, Reclaim the State is an interesting contribution to the debates within the anti-capitalist movement around the question of whether reformism is the way to transform society. Ultimately, the examples Hilary uses, such as the PT, prove that reformism has its limits; those arising from capitalism itself.

page 23 of the scan

Ice September 2003 27 Letters/ Socialist Resistance