I agree with much of George Monbiot’s critique of neoliberalism here.
I would go much further than this, though, and argue that the problem we face is much more than that of a political ideology masquerading as an economic theory but is endemic to the capital system. Neoliberalism is not the source of our problems; indeed it was itself a reaction to the failures of Keynesianism to resolve the growing crises of the capital system. That is not my concern here, though. Monbiot’s criticisms of neoliberalism as a false necessity and shock doctrine designed to create a chaos which favours the anarchy of the rich and powerful are fundamentally correct.
“The Brexit ultras in government are not just Brexit ultras. They are neoliberal ultras, and Brexit is a highly effective means of promoting this failed ideology. It’s the ultimate shock doctrine, using a public emergency to justify the imposition of policies that wouldn’t be accepted in ordinary times. Whether they really want no deal or not, the threat of it creates the political space in which they can apply their ideas.”
We could see such claims of economic necessity for what they are, as indeed Monbiot does – an ideological claim on the part of those doing the bidding of the rich and powerful. But such people say the same with respect to demands for climate action. In the absence of an authoritative framework, it is not truth which decides these issues but power. Neoliberalism has power on its side. Neoliberalism may well be a failed economic theory, for the reasons Monbiot adumbrates, but it has been a remarkably successful political ideology. In terms of class struggle, neoliberalism has been a triumph, with huge resources being shifted from labour to capital. I note that there is not a single solitary reference to class in Monbiot’s analysis. I said everything Monbiot is saying here, but in much greater detail and depth, in 1995. And I made the dynamics of class struggle at the heart of neoliberalism clear.
The Economics of Peace, Freedom, and Justice, partic chapter 2 Privatisation and Class Struggle
I’ll refer readers to those two works in economics I wrote back in 1995. Here, I continue with George Monbiot, for the reason that Monbiot is popular on the left, often incisive, but is quite deficient in key respects. Monbiot writes:
“Neoliberalism is the ideology developed by people such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. It is not just a set of free-market ideas, but a focused discipline, deliberately applied around the world. It treats competition as humanity’s defining characteristic, sees citizens as consumers and “the market” as society’s organising principle. The market, it claims, sorts us into a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Any attempt by politics to intervene disrupts the discovery of this natural order.
It was embraced by Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and most subsequent governments. They sought to implement the doctrine by cutting taxes, privatising and outsourcing public services, slashing public protections, crushing trade unions and creating markets where markets did not exist before. The doctrine was imposed by central banks, the IMF, the Maastricht treaty and the World Trade Organization. By shutting down political choice, governments and international bodies created a kind of totalitarian capitalism.”
This is a good synopsis of neoliberalism, with which I agree. This is precisely what neoliberalism did and continues to do. It is not merely an economic theory but a political doctrine. The problem is that it makes a mistake that infuriated Marx – it inverts the true relation between economic theory and reality. Such critical comments highlight the failures of economic policy and the fallacies of the theory driving it, but do not call into question the social relations of the capital system itself. To the contrary, the economic categories which are the theoretical expressions of the institutions of capital are presumed and preserved. Indeed, there is ideological obfuscation. Much that Monbiot writes is correct:
“It has failed on its own terms, and in many other ways. Far from creating general prosperity, growth has been slower in the neoliberal era than it was in preceding decades, and most of its fruits have been gathered by the rich. Far from stimulating an enterprise economy, it has created a gilded age for rent-seekers. Far from eliminating bureaucracy, it has created a Kafkaesque system of mad diktats and stifling control. It has fomented ecological, social, political, economic and financial crises, culminating in the 2008 crash.”
But note Monbiot’s reference to the higher ‘growth’ recorded in periods before neoliberalism. In the more precise Marxist idiom, this growth is capital accumulation. It doesn’t augur well that those concerned with ending the growth economy and implementing degrowth are shy of identifying the accumulative dynamic which defines and drives the capital system. The great weakness of such criticisms of neoliberalism is that it implicitly accepts the categories and institutions of the capitalist economy. This has profoundly deleterious consequences when it comes to understanding and transforming the prevailing economic system. Note this line: “By shutting down political choice, governments and international bodies created a kind of totalitarian capitalism.” This is a profound error which inverts the truth. The truth is the other way round. It is capital itself which engenders the most totalising system of control that the world has ever seen. This is a system of external control imposed by accumulative imperatives falling on economic activity. Monbiot makes the classic liberal mistake of identifying coercion or ‘totalitarian’ control with political institutions, instead of seeing these correctly as capital’s second order mediations, attempts to ensure unity and order in a fundamentally anarchic system of production. My criticism may seem pettifogging and scholastic, but failure to understand true relations here not only renders criticism politically ineffective, for want of locating the true source of the problem, but risks the misfiring of transformative efforts.
I have consistently argued that bad systems, like bad theories, hang around until they are replaced by better ones. Monbiot seems to say some such thing:
“Yet, perhaps because its opponents have not produced a new, compelling story of their own, it still dominates our lives.”
But hold on, here. I think the Marxist critique of the capital system is cogent and compelling. The problem is that the likes of George Monbiot has often rejected Marx and Marxism, and he has done so in terms which reproduce the familiar tropes of post-modernism. Read the section on Marx’s critique of Max Stirner in my Ethics, Essence, and Immanence, and you will see that Monbiot’s criticisms of Marxism here – like his inversion of economic theory and reality, politics and capital above – are grounded in a typically liberal understanding of the world.
Such criticisms, therefore, remain firmly within the relations and logic of the capital system. In other words, such critics eternalize and dehistoricize capitalist economic categories, conflating them with the economic as such. That was the basis of Marx’s repudiation of Proudhon:
We may well feel astonished at the cleverness of Proudhon who would abolish capitalist property—by enforcing the eternal laws of property which are themselves based on commodity production!
Marx 1976: 734
Monbiot’s view, in fine, is liberal and shuns the essential analysis of class and capital. His criticisms note the surface details of capitalist crisis, which are apparent to most people, but fail to grasp the contradictory dynamics driving these crisis tendencies. We have, I would suggest, developed a coherent alternative. It’s just not one that those wedded to liberal conceptions find compelling. For that reason, we are forever writing the obituary of the dying system whilst doing nothing to birth the new one.
I note the title of Monbiot’s article, ‘the insidious ideology.’ For Marx, ideology was a critical concept, referring not merely to a theory, doctrine, or system of ideas, but to a set of ideas that serves to conceal and preserve existing power relations. The problem is not one of a mistaken economic theory to be replaced by a new economic theory, but of the contradictory dynamics of capital accumulation. I analyse it in much greater depth in the two works on economics I cite above. They are from nearly a quarter of a century ago now. Read them. I go to the heart of the current crisis. That crisis is the product of much more than an insidious economic theory. To occlude the contradictory dynamics of the capital system resting on class exploitation by making an economic theory the main source of our ills indicates an insidious ideology indeed.
Paul Mason is smack on. Chaos is being normalized as part of a pernicious plan.
“One of the most dangerous factors in this situation is the incomprehension of Britain’s technocratic elites. At Eton they might ask pupils to write the imaginary speech they would give while leading a military coup, but on the philosophy, politics and economics course at Oxford, it is generally assumed you are heading for a career in the governance of a stable democracy.
Few are prepared to address the material roots and class dynamics of this crisis, because nobody taught them to do so. But they are clear.”
“The liberal establishment – found in the corporate boardrooms, among the masters of Oxbridge colleges, in law and medicine and among the old-money landowners – does not know what to do. Meanwhile the working class is more divided culturally than at any point since Oswald Mosley tried to march down Cable Street.”
Read the rest of the article. It’s precisely what I have been trying to din into the heads of those who persist in thinking sweet reason, cooperation, and fact will prevail in what is now overtly a class struggle.
Paul Mason, socialist, Wiganer, Marxist economist, northern soul boy, and kindred spirit. Here is the cogent and compelling alternative. Check Mason’s works. He even quotes Erich Fromm in this article, a thinker who has exerted a strong influence on my own work.
Let’s stop being so damned confused intellectually and evasive politically.