There is a widening chasm between our democratic promises and our economic reality. We are witnessing the morbid symptoms of a plutonomy, an economy where growth is powered by and consumed almost exclusively by a tiny elite.
In my years working across policy, advocacy, and political campaigning, I’ve seen how this plays out: while we argue over management styles, policy proposals, and email subject lines, the structural inequality remains untouched.
When economic power concentrates, political power follows.
As thinkers like Thomas Piketty have demonstrated, without intervention, capital accumulates faster than the economy grows. This has re-created a hereditary ruling class that has captured the state (as Grace Blakeley’s Vulture Capitalism points out).
The morbid symptoms are also clearly visible with the decay of essential public services. This isn’t a natural weather event. Years of choices by successive governments at local, state and federal levels have prioritised capital accumulation, billionaires and financial markets over social stability.
The hard truth is that neoliberalism convinced us that “the market” is democratic and neutral. It isn’t.
The state has become structurally dependent on corporate investment, effectively holding our democracy hostage to business confidence. This leads to what Chantal Mouffe calls the “post-political” consensus. We are offered consumer choices — Coke vs. Pepsi politics — rather than genuine alternatives that challenge the status quo.
To fix this, we must stop treating democracy as a polite procedural ritual and start treating it as a struggle for material power between oligarchs vs everyone else.
We need to aggressively and proactively defend and more importantly expand public service. Housing, health, energy, education, and transport, but also importantly we need more public finance options.
When these are guaranteed rights (a “universal basic service” right) rather than commodities to be bought and sold, we reduce the coercive power of the market. Strengthening the public good is a major defence against oligarchy.
And we need to stop pretending that the interests of a corporate oligarchy and the general public can always be aligned. They often can’t. The interests of fossil fuel barons are not compatible with continued human civilisation, for example.
Ultimately, the plutocrats understand this. From a political values and principles perspective, democracy itself is conflictual. It requires clear, healthy conflict that acknowledges that neat triangulation is not always possible or desirable.
These frontiers of political contestation — the battlelines as Tony Abbott called them — are where we must focus our efforts.
If we refuse conflict because we are afraid of being “divisive,” we in effect surrender to the oligarchs.
We cannot have a functioning democracy with massive inequality. We have to choose.