Here is a riddle for you; what is invisible, yet also all around us? According to George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison the answer is neoliberalism, a doctrine, which is all-pervading after 45 years of dominance in the economic sphere and yet is hardly talked about or even given a name.
Neoliberalism
In this short but important book Monbiot and Hutchison take the reader on a journey through the many failures of neoliberalism as it has been carried out by western governments in the last 45 years. It is explained how the free markets are nothing of the sort, how neoliberalism was developed following Roosevelt’s New Deal and the Second World War and perhaps most importantly how it was developed to a sufficient point that it could become the dominant economic ideology when Keynesianism hit choppy waters, due to the oil crisis of the 1970s.
Monbiot and Hutchison explain what in their view neoliberalism really is and how it has been maintained as the dominant ideology for all these years. In so doing they expose the tactics of the super wealthy, who have had most to gain from neoliberalism including the use of conspiracy theories and as the authors themselves put it “lying through their teeth”.
It is also demonstrated clearly how neoliberalism has really come to the end of the road but is continuing to dominate economic thought across much of the world including the treasury in the UK, even as it becomes little more than a zombie ideology.
The sadly all too valid point is made that while the right wing had a ready made philosophy and economic system, however flawed and damaging it has been, to take over from Keynesianism, once it had hit those choppy waters in the 1970s, the left has been singularly unable to develop a similarly convincing philosophy to replace the dying creed of neoliberalism.
This in turn has caused the rise of right-wing populism, including the Brexit vote, the rise of Trump in America and the success of far right parties across mainland Europe. However, to their credit the authors do not only point out that the left is missing an overarching philosophy through which its aims of greater fairness and tolerance can be achieved, but they also suggest what such a philosophy could look like.
This would include a new politics of belonging. This the authors say would require an answer to the need for belonging: “fascism seeks a bonding network: one that brings together people from a homogeneous group. Its antithesis is the bridging network, one that brings together people from different groups. Only through building sufficiently rich and vibrant reaching communities can we hope to thwart people’s urge to burrow into the security of a bonding community defending themselves against the Other’.”
Commentary
Much of what Monbiot and Hutchison say in this book rings true for me. The time in which I was born and grew up as a child was, I believe, a golden era for what might be described as ordinary people in Western countries. After the struggles of the Depression in the 1930s and the horrors of the Second World War in the 1940s, this was our time.
But of course, the wealthy elites never went away and through the writings of people such as Hayek and Friedman, they were able to develop a philosophy which they could sell to the general public, and which they could also use to claw back all the advantages that they lost in the 30 or so years after 1945.
Although policies such as the sale of council houses enabled Thatcher to sell her policies as being on the side of working people, we can now with hindsight, see the true nature of those policies, as a huge housing crisis envelops the country and the gap between rich and poor grows ever wider. It is surely no coincidence that the year when the gap between rich and poor was at its lowest was 1979, the year Thatcher came to power. It is also perhaps no coincidence that growth over the last 45 years has been slower than it was in the 30 years between 1945 and 1975.
Despite claims by Tory politicians that their policies encourage hard work and can deliver economic growth, the opposite has tended to happen. Again, surely this is no wonder, when one considers how working people have seen through the injustices of the economic situation in which they find themselves, leading to productivity issues in the UK.
When it becomes more and more obvious that if you work hard at work the real benefits are going to go elsewhere to rich shareholders and owners of companies and not into your pocket, that it is no surprise that productivity is not what it could be.This problem is of course, also exacerbated by a tax system, which is more geared to taxing unearned wealth than earned income.
A new system
Monbiot and Hutchison are completely correct to point out that the left has been found wanting in terms of having a ready-made replacement philosophy that it could sell to the public in the UK and in the wider West, which would be both popular and radical in the sense that it would be aiming to lessen the inequality in society unto support poor and the marginalised.
They also are correct to pinpoint the need for a left of centre philosophy which is based on a sense of belonging. It is clear that one of the effects of neoliberalism has been to create more fragmented societies. We can see that only too well here in the Northeast where traditionally strong communities based around common enterprises such as coal mines and shipyards have begun to fracture.
There can be little doubt that the current wave of right-wing populism sweeping across the western world, while having no answers for many of its supporters, who are poor and feel disempowered, is a product of both the neoliberal system and its many failures. The fragmentation of society and the fearful divisiveness which has accompanied it has understandably left many people bereft of the social anchors which used to reassure them and they are now desperately looking for a sense of belonging.
As was shown in the early 1930s in Germany, this is of course fertile breeding ground for the far-right. They can claim to be the saviours of people, who feel lost and abandoned, by appealing to a sense of tribalism, which creates a sense of belonging, and security, even though in reality, they have no answers at all to the problems facing ordinary people today.
We must create a new inclusive philosophy which will mean largely abandoning identity politics in favour of a simple search for a just society, where everybody can thrive. This would mean for example supporting human rights for both minorities and asylum seekers, but also for the wider public as a whole regardless of gender, race or creed.
The idea that Monbiot and Hutchison put forward about a bridging network which can bring people together would seem to fit this ideal. We need to find ways of bringing people together through common enterprises and while the traditional commercial enterprises such as coal mines and shipyards are gone, I believe these can be found by people working together in areas that concern all of humanity, search ask house education not least the environment.
Summary
This is an important book. It not only tells us how we got to where we are today, with a failed ideology. Leading in many cases to the rise of the far-right, but also signposts away out of the morass in which we find ourselves. It is essential reading for anybody seeking to understand how we have ended up where we are and how we can defeat the far-right and move forward as one society.
The Invisible Doctrine; the Secret History of Neoliberalism by George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison is available from Penguin Books and is available to buy here.
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