En Passant

This vote for the leadership of the Australian Labor Party was a stage managed political fashion parade. Members got to vote on which model of neoliberalism they preferred. The models often held hands as they strutted the catwalk mouthing the same platitudes. Not policies, note, but platitudes.

Capitalist democracy is a compromise between the classes, a concession won generally by workers’ struggles. While democratic rights have to be defended at every turn, they should be seen only as the basis on which we can fight for rule by the people for the people. We could hardly make as big a mess of it as the present mob who rule.

With the notion that Labor is any better than the Liberals on refugees now dispensed with, what else are we left with? A contest between two parties beholden to big business, both equally committed to confronting the end of the mining boom with cutbacks and austerity. Two parties who refuse to take any meaningful action on climate change. Two parties willing to spend whatever it takes on militarism and border protection, but who refuse to provide decent health, education and social welfare

Tiananmen Square was a dress rehearsal for the future. The Chinese working class has a material interest in democracy. It has the strength to overthrow the corrupt and bankrupt butchers in Beijing.

Having done that the Chinese working class will be forced to take the revolution beyond bourgeois political demands and threaten capitalism in China itself. Then and only then can we talk about genuine socialism, the self-emancipation of the working class through its own democratic organs of societal control.

The current Australian Parliament is a good argument for socialism and workers running society democratically through their own institutions.

FOR SOCIALISTS, democracy exists only in name unless it consists of genuine popular control from below. Parliamentary democracy–in which we choose unaccountable misrepresentatives every two, four or six years–has been fairly successful in providing the illusion of real democracy in a society where a small number of very wealthy people and the bureaucrats who serve them make all the important decisions.

When the Sun kings of profit get challenged the ideology of their empires is threatened and the nudity of their worth stands for all ordinary working people to see. So having not lived in the real world of work, of labour, they do what they always do – invent a self serving story.

If the economy worsens or the Greens actually begin to exercise some power instead of being Democrats in waiting, what Palmer said about them will be a small taste of much worse to come as the rich maggots squirm and worm to protect their rotting patches.

That is what I am working for – a truly democratic society in which we workers, the people who produce the wealth of society, decide what will be produced to satisfy human need, not to make a profit. Then neoliberal nobodies like Gillard and Rudd and Abbott would be consigned to the museum of recent history and our really democratic and fulfilling lives could begin.

An erosion of democracy is a normal feature of capitalism in difficulties, argues Tom O’Lincoln.