by PATRICK O’CONNOR
One of the key factors in these extraordinary events was hostility, on the part of multi-national mining companies, to [Prime Minister Kevin] Rudd’s proposed Resource Super Profits Tax. The Labor Party apparatus is bound to the resource giants by a thousand threads, including campaign donations, personal connections, and employee exchanges. Within a week of Rudd’s ousting, Gillard had met the mining magnates’ deadline for a back down on the new tax, by awarding them a multi-billion dollar windfall through various concessions.
These sordid manoeuvres shed light on where political power really resides within so-called capitalist democracy. Economic and political policies are determined not by the people, expressing their will through democratically elected and accountable representatives, but by powerful corporate and financial interests which act ruthlessly, behind-the-scenes, to impose their demands. Behind the facade of bourgeois parliamentary democracy stands the dictatorship of capital, backed, as Friedrich Engels once explained, by the state—detachments of “armed men and also material adjuncts, prisons, and institutions of coercion of all kinds”.
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