The alternative to rage: how finding your power can help save democracy

Extract from The Guardian

Australian politics

With diminishing trust in politics, communities are reaching across divides to find a common purpose – to get things done in other ways

Celina Ribeiro

Sat 2 Nov 2019 06.00 AEDT Last modified on Sat 2 Nov 2019 06.02 AEDT

Demonstrators clash with police during a protest against the International Mining and Resources Conference at Melbourne Exhibition and Convention Centre on Tuesday. Photograph: James Ross/EPA

Marc Stears is congenial as he lays out some of the critical threats to liberal democracy in the 21st century. “Normal people have had enough,” he says, and our politicians are complacent. “It’s a gigantic mistake, because the more distrust grows, the more dangerous it becomes.”
The director of Sydney University’s Social Policy Lab is taking time out during a weeklong meeting of activists, researchers and community leaders from around the world to discuss how to affect change. The group gathers in a week where yet another multibillion-dollar company admits to large-scale underpayment of workers, as numerous Australians face a potentially blistering summer unsure of how they’ll afford to pay their energy bills, people from Hong Kong to Latin America take to their streets against their regimes, and against a backdrop of record low trust not only in politicians in Australia but in democracy itself.
“Liberal democratic states depend on parties being responsive to the population, and largely speaking for the 20th century that was structured around class lines,” Stears says. “Now all sorts of things are fractured and parties here [in Australia] no longer reflect those stable social compositions, but nevertheless they carry on as if they did.”

Marc Stears, director of the Sydney Policy Lab at Sydney University. Photograph: Stefanie Zingsheim

People do not see their concerns or experiences reflected in debate from Madrid to Washington to Canberra, he says, and that is breeding a deep dissatisfaction with the prevailing political order. It is this frustration that has led to developments such as Brexit, the election of Donald Trump and rise of the far right.
The unifying characteristic of this distrust and discontent around the world? Powerlessness. “People increasingly feel like things are getting harder for them and the people they care about, and they can’t think of a way to change that,” Stears says.
“They feel a sense of frustration that despite all their personal effort, they can’t make it better. I think that’s causing a lot of the rage. It is a global phenomenon of people saying politics as normal are not responding to our needs. We need to try something else.”

In western Sydney, ethnically diverse and lower socio-economic communities are feeling that discontent. Thuy Nguyen, of the Sydney Alliance, a coalition of diverse communities, says that individuals in the region have no faith in politicians, and feel their concerns are neither heard nor understood.

“Western Sydney feels like the periphery,” she says. “It feels like we are on the margins of the centre where people actually have the power and agency to change their lot in life. I think there is some anger.
“When you feel that anger and you feel alone, that’s when you look to someone on the TV, the strongman to solve your problem. But if you are able in public to tell the stories of your private pain, and someone next to you says ‘I’ve experienced the same thing’, and to do that across diverse groups, it’s a recognition that all of us are experiencing the same injustices. And we can’t blame each other. That’s the antidote to that rage.”

‘The solution to powerlessness is to find power’

Nguyen, like many meeting at the Sydney Policy Lab, is facilitating community resistance and activism to intractable problems such as a lack of affordable housing, energy, and a labour market in which, for many people, work is becoming increasingly insecure and low-paid. “People have woken up to the fact that the solution to powerlessness is to find more power,” Stears says.
Here are three examples of global communities finding their power:

ENERGY: Voices for Power, Sydney


Thuy Nguyen of Sydney Alliance. Photograph: Sydney Policy Lab

Nguyen leads the Voices for Power campaign that brings together seven different community groups in western Sydney around the issue of access to affordable, sustainable power. Working with each community within that group’s language and culture, they then convene leaders who set agendas for lobbying for things such as better energy-efficiency standards in rental accommodation and help these often disempowered communities to navigate the energy market.

“Every time we meet a political leader, we show up in power … That’s 14, up to 20 community leaders meeting the politician in a room,” Nguyen says. “They’re diverse, they’re well organised, they’ve got an agenda they’ve agreed on. Politicians are not used to meeting these constituents.”

HOUSING: Reclaim the City, Cape Town

Nkosikhona Swartbooi of Reclaim the City in Cape Town. Photograph: Sydney Policy Lab

In Cape Town a physical segregation of white and black continues, with black South Africans relegated to under-serviced and distant townships, says Nkosikhona Swartbooi of Ndifuna Ukwazi, which supports Reclaim the City.
Facing the sale of public land to private developers in the centre of the city, Reclaim the City uses litigation and direct-action occupation of public buildings to demand social housing in central Cape Town, enabling black people to live in the city in which they work. They have so far managed to get 11 sites in the city released for public housing.
“The principle is ‘public land for public good’,” Swartbooi says. “You must realise land for its social value, as opposed to commodifying land and housing, therefore perpetuating the spatial inequality that you see in Cape Town.”

WAGES: Living Wage Campaign, London

"There was a simplicity and a moral clarity to the demand."

Stefan Baskerville on the Living Wage Campaign

Since the beginning of the Living Wage Campaign in 2001, more than 1bn pounds (A$1.9bn) in extra wages has been secured for low-paid workers. Starting in London with a coalition of unions, faith groups and educational institutions, Stefan Baskerville, now of the UK’s New Economics Foundation, says the success of the campaign was due to broad-base coalition, willingness to confront employers not paying workers enough to live on, and then making allies of those which reformed. But there was also something more fundamental about the campaign.

“There was a simplicity and a moral clarity to the demand,” he says. “How can it be right that you sit at the top of an organisation, and the person who cleans the carpet under your feet doesn’t have enough to live on?”

‘NGOs are not the messiah’

The shape of modern-day activism and community organisation is not necessarily flat and leaderless. Some kind of institution and distributed leadership is necessary to sustain effort and develop strategy, argue those meeting at Sydney Policy Lab.
“You do see these vast protests which evolve into nothing because there’s no organisation behind them, and everyone thinks they’ve done their bit,” Stears says. “What you really need is people who can sustain months and months of action. Unless you do that, you’re not going to make concrete changes.”
But in order to counteract the discontent caused by voicelessness and powerlessness, those at the lab agree, these movements and organisations do and must act as a springboard for people, not as their saviours.
“It is not meant for NGOs to be the messiahs of their communities,” Swartbooi says. “It’s building people’s power through educating them to know their rights, and making sure the skills and knowledge we have is transferred to communities.”

Marc Stears says ‘if you want to have a campaign about coal in Australia, you have to have people from coal communities as part of the relationship’. Photograph: Dave Hunt/AAP

And in a society increasingly marked by division and distrust, listening is critical.
“If you want to have a campaign about coal in Australia, you have to have people from coal communities as part of the relationship,” Stears says. “You have to know what they’ll think, what they’re worried about.

“We’ve got into a habit of not doing that. We get outraged by an issue, so shout about it, but haven’t built the relationships with people that are needed in the coalition. So you’ve got to slow it down, even though it’s urgent.”

‘Don’t wait for your Brexit moment’

Baskerville, the grandson of Jewish refugees who fled Nazi Germany, is acutely aware of what can happen when economic systems no longer work for people.
“The dark thing about what is happening now politically is that it is polarising,” he says. “You’re seeing the rise of authoritarianism in places which are supposed to be the strongholds of democracy.
“There is a critical mission before us to sustain democracy, and it rests not just on voting, it rests on people having agency and power, having the habits of relating to each other across difference.”
Stears says it is difficult to discern whether we are at a tipping point, or if a tipping point is about to come.
“There’s just no doubt that people are beside themselves, not just with anger but with fear. There’s a sense that just awful things are already happening and worse things might happen unless we make some change.”

But both that sense of overwhelming powerlessness, and anger over things like the state of jobs, housing, climate, can be solved, he says, if people can organise and think through these problems imaginatively. The Brit warns Australia: “Don’t wait for your Brexit moment.”