Capitalism’s driving force detailed in brief volume

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/07/2024 (475 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If you’ve ever wondered why your local public swimming pool is being closed, why you can’t find a family doctor, why you have to wait months for surgery, why your favourite rivers and lakes are polluted, why massive wildfires are regular occurrences, why some of your fellow citizens are living in tents and bus shelters or even why your commute to work is through an obstacle course of potholes, this could be the book for you.

Environmental campaigner George Monbiot and filmmaker Peter Hutchison have written a relatively short and clear guide to the dominant ideology of our times: neoliberalism.

“Neo-what?” you may well ask. The authors say that our ignorance of even the word neoliberalism is as if the people of the old Soviet Union had never heard of communism.

We generally identify our economic system as capitalism, a system of private ownership based on sellers and buyers that creates wealth by providing whatever goods we need or want. It supposedly works best when entrepreneurs are allowed freedom from state control so they can create the wealth that enhances everybody’s lives.

This benevolent definition is a myth. Capitalism, in fact, is driven by neoliberalism, a term popularized by the economist Friedrich Hayek, a refugee from the Nazis. In 1944 Hayek wrote a book, The Road to Serfdom, arguing that social safety nets like the American New Deal and Britain’s emerging welfare state would diminish individual rights and inevitably lead to totalitarianism of the Nazi or Soviet kind.

Freedom from coercion is the ultimate aim. Only if the economic elite are free to gain as much money as they want and spend it as they wish can the world make progress.

This was a gift to wealthy business people who saw it as a justification for abolishing taxes, regulations and labour unions. Unsurprisingly, this idea was not universally popular. In the decades following the Second World War, governments in North America and Western Europe were using tax revenues to fund popular social services like subsidized transportation and free health care and education, often to the post-secondary level.

Nevertheless, America’s richest businesses, including DuPont, General Electric and Koch Industries, spent millions creating think tanks like the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute to spread Hayek’s ideas while pretending to be impartial. By the 1980s, billionaire money was supporting almost 500 neo-liberal think tanks in over 90 countries.

Thus, neo-liberals were well prepared when, in the 1970s, the abandonment of fixed exchange rates, the Middle East oil crisis and the Vietnam War lead to a combination of high inflation, high unemployment and a decline in productivity. Buoyed by years of think tank propaganda, apostles of economic freedom such as Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Brian Mulroney emerged, deregulating financial markets, slashing taxes on the rich, crushing trade unions, eroding public housing and privatizing public services.

Desperate to please the financial markets and media oligarchs, social democratic parties — the Democrats in the U.S., Labour in the U.K. and the New Democratic Party in Canada — adopted covert neo-liberal policies under the guise of the “Third Way.”

After 40 years of neoliberalism creating a world where the only value is profit, competition is the only organizing principle for human activity and greed is the greatest good, wages have stagnated, growth has slowed and fabulous wealth inexorably flows to the few at the top. Worst of all is neoliberalism’s implacable hunger for endless growth, aggressively extracting diminishing planetary resources to the ultimate detriment of our life-support systems.

If there is any hope, Monbiot and Hutchison find it in their belief that the majority of people, regardless of their politics, value altruism, community and the pursuit of a just and more equitable world. The essential step in reaching those ends is to tear down the cloak of invisibility that shields the true nature of neoliberalism and capitalism from the public view.

Winnipegger John K. Collins is sure that freedom for the sharks means catastrophe for the dolphins.