BOOKBUSTER REVIEW – The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism
By George Monbiot & Peter Hutchinson
Published by Allan Lane
REVIEW BY TIM BARTON
The first wave of ‘neoliberal’ ideology was influenced by a century-long tradition beginning with Charles Gide, and moving toward the present via Milton Freidman, Hayek and von Mises. The term was first coined in 1938, and has become synonymous with an anti-regulation, anti-tax, anti-welfare, anti-trade union extreme version of capital accumulation, based on an equally extreme ‘conception of liberty: an absence of coercion’. This is fundamentally an unfettered, ‘do as you like, I’m alright Jack, and bugger the consequences’ take on freedom. Under it, devil take the hindmost, red-in-tooth-and-claw definitions of human nature and morality are promoted, an exalted ‘freedom to’ that explicitly does battle with ‘freedom from’. For Hayek, this includes freedom from democracy, when democratic choices include rolling back capitalist fundamentalism.
Back in the Eighties the beginnings of this ideologically ‘American’ economic coup began to roll out across the British economy. Channelling Ayn Rand and Nietzsche as much as the ‘Austrian’ and ‘Chicago’ schools of economics, it came to us via Maggie (Thatcher), and her much vaunted valorisation of Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’. This toxic neoliberal agenda began to invade our hearts and minds, and manifested in small true-believer organisations such as the ridiculously influential lobby group The Adam Smith Institute. Similar ‘think tanks’, such as the Institute of Economic Affairs, are the subversive method by which neoliberal ideology has infected our institutions. Low on accountability, high on influence, and with their claws in deep with the elites that run our country, such organisations are often deeply undemocratic and ideologically out of tune with the electorate.
THAT ‘UNEARNED INCOME’ RENT
George Monbiot and Peter Hutchinson bring us a new analysis of neoliberalism, informing us in some detail, albeit in a short book, ‘how it came to control your life’. Their conceit is that, as per the title, neoliberalism is ‘invisible’ to us mere mortals. As someone who has consistently railed against the concept for over three decades, I dispute that ‘invisibility’, but agree that those promulgating its pernicious values go out of their way to hide its true nature from the public. In this regard, check their chapter ‘Invisible Doctrine – Invisible Backers’, and, later, their section on the ‘Pollution Paradox’.
As the authors note, the economic and political entrenchment of neoliberalism has manifestly done the opposite of what its advocates cynically propagandise. Far from leading to a ‘trickle-down’ that ‘lifts all boats’, neoliberalism has firmly entrenched a growing wealth-gap, whereby wealth ‘has increasingly become concentrated in the hands of those who already possess it.’ Another element is that ‘unearned income’, rent, as the authors explain, something also critiqued in recent reviews here.
THE ANTI-DEMOCRATIC HEART OF CONTEMPORARY CAPITALISM
Re-defining ‘capitalism’ as a vampiric beast ‘founded on colonial looting’, the authors show how neoliberalism is a rocket-powered extension of what went before. Naturally, profit is at the heart of capitalism, but profit based on ecological destruction, and off-loading of many of the costs (in terms of resource depletion, and of waste disposal, for example), as ‘externalities’ not included in corporate cost-benefit analyses. Society, us, and the poorest pay these costs instead: ‘…while neoliberal capitalism continues to loot the South to enrich the North, it also loots the future to enrich the present’. This ‘capitalism on steroids’ model of economics is all too swiftly destroying our very life-support systems, the global ecology itself.
The absolute arse-end of this pernicious economic and political ‘culture’ was exposed to all in the person of Mary ‘Liz’ Truss. The authors quite rightly describe her recent book Britannia Unchained as ‘a semi-literate polemic’, but it is no aberration except in its willingness to be seen in public, in fact I argue it is the Id of the Tory Party (and, at least from Blair onwards, the Labour Party too). In a chapter on the UK free-market playground they address something that has been at least a bit ‘invisible’, freeports. Both these, tax havens, ‘secrecy regimes’, and the anti-democratic heart of contemporary capitalism will be looked at in a future review (of the book Crack-up Capitalism). Monbiot and Hutchinson conclude that ‘we should see Truss’s government as an experiment: what happens when neoliberal ultras, backed and advised by dark-money think tanks, get everything they want? Answer: Economic life falls off a cliff.’
FIGHTING TALK
Margaret Thatcher famously said ‘there is no alternative’, claiming this dangerous ideology to be ‘the natural order’. But this book argues that this is a lie. ‘Catastrophe is not a matter of fate. It’s a matter of choice […] We need a new story.’ Indeed, ‘A New Story’ is the title of chapter 22. The following chapter is titled ‘The Politics of Belonging’, and the next ‘Private Sufficiency, Public Luxury’. Because Monbiot and Hutchinson are here to promote hope and a new narrative. Here, they discuss deliberative democracy, participatory culture, the commons, and the reality that the Hobbesian view of human nature we’ve been sold is a lie, that in fact humans ‘have a remarkable capacity for altruism.’ In promoting a new ‘politics of belonging’ they hope to offer an alternative to that ‘common response to political and societal dysfunction’, ‘fascism’, instead building bridges across and between communities. This is diametrically opposed to Thatcher’s self-serving ‘there’s no such thing as society’, instead seeking to re-weave the fabric of community.
‘We will fight those nefarious forces by building rich, engaging, collaborative, inclusive and generous communities. In doing so, we will restore harmony to the land.’ Now there’s fighting talk for you!
The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism is available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE
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