Anti-racism movement: young people can change the world
By Allen Myers
The reaction of the establishment and its media to the secondary students' movement against racism has been divided.
Some, especially supporters of One Nation and reactionaries of the talkback radio variety, have been angry and frightened — like Bill Feldman, One Nation's parliamentary leader in Queensland, who compared young anti-racist demonstrators to the Nazi Brownshirts of the 1930s and called for them to be "stamped out".
On the other side, the media have also featured articles like that by Frances Whiting in the August 2 Brisbane Sunday Mail. Headed "We must let the young be heard", it argued that "protesting about something" is simply "a wonderful rite of passage".
For all the real differences between these positions, they also have something very important in common. They share the belief that it's not up to young people to make major changes in the world.
The reactionaries fear that young people are going to change things, and grow hysterical at the prospect. The liberals reply to them: "Take it easy. They're just kids going through a phase. They don't want to change things in a big way, and even if they did, they wouldn't be able to."
There is another view, however. The socialist view contradicts both reactionaries and liberals. It says that young people (and not only young people) should try to change the world for the better. And it says that they can succeed.
Is it really necessary to change the world? It is only in a relative handful of countries, among a small minority of the human race, that such a question can even be debated. For a big majority of humanity, there's no question that the world needs changing: they live in conditions that the lucky minority in the developed capitalist countries would find intolerable.
Defenders of the present order like to pretend that conditions for the poor in the Third World are improving. Of course, small improvements can and do occur, but how insecure these are is indicated by the spectacular collapse in Asian economies in the past year. In Indonesia, something like one-fourth of the entire population has been thrown back into poverty in the space of a few months.
Nor does a longer term view support the notion that capitalism can more gradually overcome poverty. For example, the number of people in the world today who live in what the United Nations defines as "absolute poverty" is greater than the entire population of the human race at the start of World War II. It's hard to find much "progress" in statistics like that.
And it's not only the Third World, and not only poverty. While poverty is increasing in the developed countries, there are many other aspects of life in capitalist society which also demand change and which are not being solved: environmental destruction, global warming being a particularly urgent problem; unemployment; sexism; homophobia; alienation; destruction of public education; and of course racism.
There's really very little argument that the world ought to be a better place. The real question is whether it can be made better — and, if so, how.
Here the liberals and reactionaries completely agree: it can't be done. In fact, they tried it in the '70s or the '60s or maybe even in the '30s, but they soon learned the error of their ways: the world will always be the way it is, and the most we can do is tinker around the edges.
What this argument really boils down to is that the world hasn't changed into what it should be yet — and we already know that. If a previous generation had succeeded in solving the world's problems, we wouldn't be trying to cope with them now.
That's not to say, however, that previous generations were total failures. The generation of the '30s and '40s defeated a rising fascism — no small achievement. The generation of the '60s and '70s helped to defeat the US war in Vietnam and won social gains that reactionaries like John Howard and Pauline Hanson are still trying to take back.
Changing the world isn't something that happens once and for all: it's an ongoing struggle between those who see the need for change and those who are happy with the way things are.
The people who pose as "older but wiser" in order to belittle earlier efforts are lying to themselves. It's not wisdom in their outlook, but tiredness and compromise. The system survives, despite all its faults, mainly by wearing people down.
That's one of the main reasons that young people are always in the forefront of struggles for change: they are less likely to have been worn down or bought off with the crumbs that can be spared by those at the top.
The young people now taking up the struggle against racism can change the world if they have sufficient determination and set about it in the right way. They have already set out on the best way to achieve their goals by uniting in the anti-racist walkouts in July and on August 28.
That kind of visible, independent action is the most effective way to win new adherents and build a progressive cause like the anti-racist movement. It takes advantage of the greatest strength of those whose interests are served by changing the world: the fact that we are the vast majority.
The politicians who claim that we can defeat racism, or any other evil, by ignoring it, or by voting for them, are lying. If you want things changed, you have to do it for yourself. Together, organised, we have the numbers, and therefore the strength, to do it.
It's true that young people as such have no specific power to force changes in the way society functions: a walkout by secondary or university students doesn't hit the pockets of big business like a walkout by workers does, for example, even though it does set an example and does exert a great moral force on the broader population. The category "young people" includes people who will move into all different sectors of society.
But that fact gives young people an enormous potential influence. Today's "powerless" young are tomorrow's industrial workers, farmers, public servants, professionals, soldiers and so on. They will take with them the attitudes and ideas they are learning today, and can therefore profoundly affect the entire society.
This spread of radical ideas from young people, mainly students, into much broader sections of the population, occurred in Australia and many other countries during the 1960s and '70s. The possibility of its repetition today is a nagging fear of the powers that be (which, in turn, largely explains the media interest in the secondary student walkouts).
There are no guarantees, of course, that another radicalisation like that of the '60s is around the corner. Touching off such a development is not at all the intention of the big majority of those who have walked out of their schools to protest against racism.
But racism in this society is not isolated or accidental. It serves a function for the people who rule, just as sexism and unemployment and environmental destruction and all the other evils of capitalism serve a function. In taking up the fight against one evil, individuals and groups can quickly become aware of the way in which many evils are part of a system.
When enough people realise that, anything can happen. In May 1968, French students who became aware of the need to change the world coined the slogan, "Be realistic: do the impossible". It's that kind of realism that today's anti-racist young people need in order to succeed.