Australian democracy is almost entirely trapped by the corporate power of foreign mining companies, supermarket duopoly, the big banks, US defence interests and global financial elites. Voting every three years does little to challenge the corporate power of this billionaire class.

To genuinely break free, we need a radical democracy — more direct democracy by everyday people, everywhere, as much as possible. Real democracy is how we take back real control.

To escape the current limits of the billionaires’ enclosures, we must understand how liberalism restricts real democracy.

Historically, nineteenth-century liberals consistently opposed real democracy. They feared that mass influence would allow the working classes, black people, women, to oppress the wealthy and threaten property rights.

Look at how liberalism spread through the UK and the USA — the two countries most influential to Australia.

The original UK liberal expansions of voting for example excluded workers (and women, of course), and the giants liberalism in the 20th century argued that democracy must be restricted if it threatened property rights or free trade. UK liberals in the 1920s spoke glowingly of Mussolini for example, who at the start of his regime enforced brutal austerity and crushed unions.

The United States maintained a restrictive white male franchise alongside brutal racial and gendered limitations on voting well into the twentieth century. And of course the conservatives in US politics and the Supreme Court are intent on reverting back to that situation where only the wealthy have rights.

And of course the colonial history of Australia shows how liberal protection of private property rights was a central tool for the dispossession of indigenous Australians.

The willingness of liberal regimes through history to work with, prop up and create illiberal, despotic governments if they allowed for the extraction of resources and protection of colonial property interests speaks volumes — this collaboration of course continues today.

The liberal concept of the individual was always centred on white male property owners. Others, non-whites, were dependents who were by definition unfit for self-governance. Women, who were mostly excluded from owning property or were legally dependent on their husbands or fathers were considered not deserving of a vote.

This conception of class, race and gender was integral to the liberalism that created the modern nation states of the USA, UK and Australia.

The core ideological project of liberalism was and is to establish an order that facilitates and protects private property and capitalist development. Liberalism intentionally depoliticises structural inequality by creating and perpetuating the myth of market neutrality. It does this by framing “freedom” to be the right of property owners to engage in individual market exchange.

This myth is pervasive and treats the capitalist market as a naturally self-organising and objective, non-political system.

The consequence of this myth is that economic decisions are depoliticised. It changes significant social challenges — poverty, unemployment, discrimination — into mere technical problems of efficiency. It turns citizens into consumers and entrepreneurial actors. It reduces important collective democratic decisions — do we want clean air, do we want war or peace, do we want our every action monitored and tracked online — into isolated questions of individual choice.

Even the much defended liberal institution of proportional representation was originally a liberal tactic to limit democracy and prevent workers from taking the reigns of state power.

Proportional voting was introduced in the UK after WWI because the liberal and conservative elites feared socialists and Labour would win large majorities in elections when mass franchise was won. To counter this threat, the UK liberals and conservatives implemented proportional voting systems to prevent working-class parties from winning large majorities through first past the post voting systems. The financial elites in other Western countries did likewise. For example, in Germany, conservatives and liberals collaborated to introduce proportional voting at local and state levels exactly where socialists were dominating representation, primarily to weaken the left.

The Australian introduction of proportional representation is generally thought to be a move by Chifley to ensure Labor would not be entirely wiped out after the expected loss to Menzies in 1949, rather than a high-minded democratic move.

Rather than expanding democratic control, proportional representation was used as a strategic institutional tool to undermine and reduce working-class power and to protect the capital order. This is not to argue that today, Australia should abandon proportional representation, although we must be aware that it is not automatically a structural tool that benefits democracy.

The myth of market neutrality and the hidden coercive power of the capital order is why, to paraphrase Ralph Miliband, holding office and holding power are not the same. Electing a progressive government merely changes who occupies positions but does not change the capitalist status quo.

This is why the state is often called the “committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie”. Benn understood that true power is the ability to change society in favour of labour and against capital.

The excessive power of the mining companies, big banks, and supermarket duopolies is the manifestation of Australia’s role in the global division of labour. Our historic role is as a resource extraction hub for the imperial core (the US, and previously the UK) and a stable node for global finance.

Liberalism serves as the legal-ideological “superstructure” that keeps decisions about real power off-limits to the ballot box. This is why Labor governments that have tried to reform the banks (e.g. under Chifley) or mining (under Rudd) have faced fierce, extreme backlash from local and global capital.

Even today, liberalism insists on handing over democratic power to unelected technocrats. Giving the “independent” Reserve Bank massive powers over the economy is presented as neutral and removed from the democratic sphere. Likewise small-l liberal politicians want more and more decisions taken away from politicians and given to judges and unelected, unaccountable “experts”. No wonder there’s a backlash! Our society is being enclosed.

Historically, all genuine, lasting social progress has come from below — almost always from working people in unions — not from top-down.

Without a mobilised working class applying overwhelming counter-pressure from outside the halls of parliament, politicians lack the power to force the establishment — the capitalist “deep state” — to concede to their demands.

Australian political history is almost entirely comprised of these examples — with only a few exceptions the major social reforms like Medicare, superannuation, annual leave, work safety laws, the minimum wage, paid domestic violence leave, etc, have all been achieved through this mass mobilisation and social organisation led by unions.

To achieve real democracy, we must build mass-member institutions. Unions obviously — larger, stronger, more active unions — but also civic groups such as tenant unions, co-ops and neighbourhood mutual aid associations with dues-paying members, without significant reliance on government or philanthropic funding. Institutions where collective identities are created and sustained from the grassroots, and decisions are made through democratic participation.

These organisations must stretch deeply into society, forming organic links with environmental, Indigenous, feminist, and anti-racist struggles to create shared genuine solidarity across identities, genders and ethnicities.

We cannot rely on billionaire-owned media or algorithm-driven digital platforms to build and educate our communities. To break free and win real democracy, we must build our own independent democratic communications networks and news sources.

Historically, every successful radical democratic movement possessed its own news sources to shape the narrative from the bottom up, communicate between activists, and challenge the common sense of elite opinion. Up until the late 1980s and 1990s for example, unions owned radio stations and published widely read and distributed newspapers.

One of the central, critical reasons for building strong, mass-member civic institutions is to free ourselves of reliance on the market.

Liberal democracy and especially neoliberal democracy tries to marketise every aspect our lives. Consequently, we must build alternative systems of living, feeding, housing, and caring for each other. This means developing alternative means of producing and distributing necessities like food, housing, and healthcare.

Co-operatives and mutual aid societies are central institutions for doing this. Co-operatives are difficult, messy and largely unsupported by our legal and financial systems. However, these structures meet human needs where the neoliberal markets and governments fail, building the capacity for complex democratic administration.

Radical democracy must be anchored locally. To the greatest extent possible, we should demand participatory budgeting and genuine local control over Australian local councils, and up the chain to state and even federal governments. Participation in budgeting means that everyday people have a direct, real say in how money from the public purse are spent.

Our immediate demands must be to take back the public realm and reject market solutions that are constantly presented as “neutral” and “natural”. We must fight to de-commodify housing, healthcare, and education, placing these essential services under the direct, democratic control of the workers who run them and the people who use them.

Capitalists constantly use racism and arbitrary borders to divide us. A truly radical Australian democracy must be universalist, actively fighting against the oppression of minorities and migrants to forge multi-ethnic solidarity.

The transition to democratic structural power requires all of us to accept that democracy — allowing all of us to have a real say in decisions — is hard, complex and often frustrating.

The crisis of Australian democracy will only end when we organise outside the permitted lines and build our own institutions capable of stepping up and governing.