Break the hold of the US on the Australian state

Written by: John G. on 2 September 2026

Australia is a capitalist country. It has developed to a point where capitalism in Australia is characterised by each sector of industry and commerce being dominated by a few big monopoly companies. There are 4 big retail banks, 2 major supermarket chains, 3 phone networks (Telstra, Optus, Vodaphone), 5 Big Tech monopolies (Amazon, Apple, Meta, Google, Microsoft), a handful of retail oil companies, 1 dominant hardware chain, 2 corporate management Software monopolies (Oracle, SAP), a handful of legacy media companies, 2 steel producers, 4 iron ore mining companies, a handful of big oil and gas production companies, and it goes on and on.

It is a society rent with increasing cost-of-living burdens and difficulties for working people, professionals and small and medium business people. Meeting basic needs like housing for all, decent health care and bright futures for ordinary people become mirages disappearing as peoples’ hopes fade while big monopoly capitalists make super-profits, often without paying tax, and of such a quantity that it is hard to believe. 

The Australian state is a product of the process by which this came about while it has also facilitated and overseen the path to this society.

Capitalism in Australia is the system of a group of monopoly capitalists exploiting and oppressing workers, and subordinating small and medium capitalists, subcontractors, and professionals (self-employed and salaried) to their system, pumping greater accumulations of capital to their massive holdings.    

The Australia state is the state of the group of monopoly capitalists at Australia’s economic system’s heart, the political, administrative, legal and military arm of Australia’s capitalist economic system.

These capitalists use the machinery of the state (its laws, its courts, its police, its senior bureaucrats and politicians) to strive to restrain workers’ struggles for economic benefits and reforms that improve workers’ bargaining position.  They try to restrict our struggle to improve our economic and political position, and to restrict it within the system of exploitation. Their effort to narrow workers’ struggles from taking up all cases of capitalist oppression and exploitation, to stand against their state, police abuses, hardships and difficulties imposed on people from every section of society, to lead the struggle against monopoly capitalists, is constant and many faceted.

Established in pre-Federation times and centralised and strengthened thereafter, the state first served British colonial and imperialist interests. It imposed and abetted the force and violence by which the invasion of the lands of the First Peoples was carried out. From a prison settlement, to expanded settler colonialist development of Australian capitalism onto the agricultural, mining and industrial development of the mid-late 19th Century, the state in Australia, consisting of branches of the British state under British Governors, facilitated British investment and according to Brian Fitzpatrick, returns to Britain from the 3m people in the Australasian colonies of 10.5m pounds per annum, more than doubled the return of 5m pounds from the 4.5m people of the Dominion of Canada and comparable to the 13m pounds exploited from the 250 million people of their Indian, Sri Lankan and Malayan colonies

During the 1930s Depression, the fight between NSW Premier Lang and the controllers of British finance capital exposed the role of the Australian state machine to be facilitating British capitalists’ accumulation of capital in Australia and, in the conditions of British crisis, facilitating the export of capital to prop up those British bank capitalists under pressure in the Depression, whatever the cost to Australian working people and small business.

Today, the controlling imperialist power in Australia is the US.  It controls our economy, and it has us enmeshed in a web of political, cultural, diplomatic, military and “intelligence” subordination. 

The era of finance capital in the hands of tiny groups of capitalists linked together in big monopoly corporations sees them dominate the economic life of countries under their control. Those groups of capitalists form national state groups for the subordination of small and weak countries and to struggle with rival national state groups of financiers over division of the world: domination over other countries, sources of raw materials, markets and sources of labour. 

A handful of the richest and most powerful nations strive for domination as an aspect of exploiting large numbers of small or weak nations, as Lenin noted. 
State action to subordinate small and weak countries is action for particular groups of monopoly capitalists. It is vital to understand who are those monopoly capitalists whose interests are served by the actions of the Australian state, in order to identify if the state is a proxy for the imperialist superpower state of foreign capitalists, or an independent state of a local group of monopoly capitalists.  

The core group of monopoly capitalists gaining advantages from the actions of the Australian state internationally and locally are foreign capitalists, mainly US capitalists. In 2003 an international controversy flared up as to whether Australia was deputy sheriff to the US in the Pacific. It went as far as questions to then US President George W Bush. It resonated through news output for weeks because it put the position fairly clearly.  Time has only made this clearer.

The Australian state is a state of a tiny group of monopoly capitalists overseas. It protects their exploitation and oppression of the people, increasing workers’ burdens and exploitation of the country’s resources, destroying the environment and further dispossessing and oppressing First Peoples. They amass immense profits at the people’s and country’s expense. They have some collaborators here but really relatively few. 

There are millions of us and we stand up to look after ourselves, the people and the country as a whole, 

We will break the hold of US imperialism on the Australia state.

Print Version - new window Email article

-----