Australian "democracy"? Young people aren't convinced

Vanguard August 2013 p. 7
Louisa L.

The Lowy Institute's 2013 poll shows less than half of Australians aged 18-26 say they favour democracy, according to Guardian Australia's Helen Davidson.

Lowy Institute executive director Michael Fullilove said it showed "a disturbing complacency when one looks at the other forms of government that exist in other countries."

But is it complacency or cynicism about a system loaded against the people? Cynicism is dangerous and leads to passivity. But it's understandable.

Rejecting the best of a bad lot

Democracy has class content: it's either power for the people or for the ruling class. And the ruling class are the giant foreign-owned corporations.

That class presents the right to vote in elections as the core of democracy.

This right was won here in bitter struggles. But loosely paraphrasing Lenin, capitalist 'democracy' is the right, every three or four years, to choose which section of the ruling class will hammer you.

Parliament isn't the answer to people's problems, and over 50% of young people sense it. They mightn't know the way to overcome it. Many might be cynical, some might be immersed in capitalist trivia or able to be manipulated into the fascist alternatives that Fullilove is right to be concerned about. But capitalist democracy just doesn't cut it for them.

Winning lost ground
          

Democracy for the people means having power in our daily lives.

As a young high school teacher 30 years ago, I was amazed that my head teacher was there to support me, unlike the factory foremen or charge hands I'd worked under, who squeezed more profit from me.

This support in schools didn't come from thin air. It came from the collective strength built in struggles, particularly from the late sixties, after the O'Shea victory unleashed the organised working class.

In 1980's Australian schools, workload was manageable. Most teachers felt empowered to speak out in lively staff meetings. Many decisions were democratically voted on. Autocratic principals sometimes found themselves isolated and their decisions overturned by industrial threats. Of course these democratic rights were uneven, stronger in some places than others.

But capitalism itself was never challenged. The capitalist class still held state power and their agents continued to wage a systematic campaign to win back lost ground, aiming foremost at the working class.

Beyond the spontaneous

Analysis of the attacks on teachers and public schools has often been covered in Vanguard. But there's a dangerous, less visible, undercurrent.

Insecure work has increased. Workload creeps higher each term, so people are often too busy to reflect and act. Staff meetings where people speak up or vote about educational issues were a training ground for activism. They're disappearing. Instead 'professional development' powerpoints and team meetings disempower or break unity. Key decisions are often made by smaller groups of people and imposed after so-called consultation. It's nationwide, well-planned though still uneven, and aims to promote compliance. It illustrates a trend across all sectors in Australia.

Different electoral results do affect our ability to fight. Abbott's sledgehammer will be bigger than Rudd's.

But more people understand that the only way we can protect ourselves is to organise and fight, no matter which of the two main parliamentary parties wins office. While our ability to do so has been undermined, people haven't caved in. They search for the way forward and are learning that no right is ever secure under capitalism.

 
Communists must organise to sharpen these ideas into theory that lifts struggle beyond the spontaneous. New times require detailed understanding and new methods of battle. But behind it all, our people are still under the heel of giant foreign corporations. 

Working people still have chains to break, and a country and a world to win.