By Allen Myers
Despite the Coalition having received only a minority of votes in the federal election, John Howard is claiming that winning a majority of seats in the House of Representatives gives him a "mandate" to introduce a GST.
Howard's claim is absurd, but the debate about mandates can throw some light on what democracy is and what it isn't.
There is a widespread view, encouraged by politicians and the commercial media, that democracy and elections are pretty much the same thing. They aren't, as the present election results should remind us. (This is the fifth time since World War II that an Australian federal government has been elected with a minority of the two-party preferred vote.)
Elections can be one element of a democratic system, but they can also be conducted by quite undemocratic regimes. South Africa under apartheid had regular elections, but it was hardly a democratic country.
In Australia, eligibility to vote or stand for office isn't determined by skin colour, but it is impossible for nearly all ordinary people to be elected to parliament. Anyone can stand, but you don't have a chance without money and the backing of a party that has at least a certain minimum of media coverage.
Moreover, it's necessary to ask how much power elected representatives really have. There have been well-known incidents in Australian history in which elected governments have been sacked by an unelected governor or governor-general.
Other restraints on parliamentary government are less dramatic but even more effective. The constitution strictly limits the powers of parliament, especially in regards to property, as the Chifley Labor government was reminded when it tried to nationalise banks after World War II. The "rules of the game" — written and unwritten — don't allow parliaments to change things fundamentally.
Indeed, far from elections and democracy being identical, there is a definite tension, a contradiction, between them, even when elections are as free and fair as humanly possible. Democracy means rule by the people. But when we vote in elections, we the people don't rule. On the contrary, we select "representatives" to rule in our place.
We may hope — even expect — that these representatives will rule pretty much as we would do it. Even if this happens, however — and there's certainly no guarantee that it will — representative democracy is not the same thing as democracy pure and simple.
Because capitalist representative democracy is not allowed to change anything very fundamental, it can't be justified as an instrument of change. Instead, it tends to be presented as an absolute good, an end in itself. In the view of the US academic Francis Fukuyama, once every country institutionalises US-style elections, that's "the end of history".
A lot of resources are devoted to maintaining the illusion that by voting once every few years the majority are "exercising" democracy, having a say in how their country is run. That is because without a lot of buttressing, that illusion quickly becomes shaky (in many countries, a majority no longer believe that politicians represent their interests), and the credibility of the whole capitalist democratic system may begin to be questioned.
To socialists, by contrast, democracy is a means. It will therefore have different forms and very different results, depending on who is wielding it and for what purposes.
Socialist democracy, unlike the capitalist version, will not be limited to periodic elections of "representatives", but will involve popular control of the economy and work, education, public services and all other aspects of social life.
The goal of socialist democracy is to create the conditions in which there is no longer a conflict between the full development of each individual and society as a whole. Democracy itself will then "wither away".
Democracy, after all, is a system by which the majority imposes its will on a minority. While that is certainly preferable to the reverse (which is what we really have now), the socialist vision is of a future in which there is no imposition of anyone's will on anyone else: society will not need to restrict anyone's actions, because antisocial behaviour will have ceased to exist.
Mired in the dog-eat-dog world of capitalism, it is easy to dismiss such a vision as utopian. But individual antisocial behaviour is a product of the incomplete development of society. Riding on trains without a ticket is an "antisocial" action only while society is unable to provide free train travel.
Once really antisocial actions — like distorting social production and sacrificing the majority of people's well-being for the sake of private greed — are made impossible by socialist democracy, people will live in conditions in which mutual solidarity seems as "natural" as breathing. "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need" will become — not a law, not even a democratic one — but human nature.