Financial
meltdown, environmental disaster and even the rise of Donald Trump –
neoliberalism has played its part in them all. Why has the left
failed to come up with an alternative?
by George
Monbiot
PART 4
Like
communism, neoliberalism is the God that failed. But the zombie
doctrine staggers on, and one of the reasons is its anonymity. Or
rather, a cluster of anonymities.
The
invisible doctrine of the invisible hand is promoted by invisible
backers. Slowly, very slowly, we have begun to discover the names of
a few of them. We find that the Institute of Economic Affairs, which
has argued forcefully in the media against the further regulation of
the tobacco industry, has been secretly funded by British American
Tobacco since 1963. We discover that Charles and David Koch, two of
the richest men in the world, founded the institute that set up the
Tea Party movement. We find that Charles Koch, in establishing one of
his thinktanks, noted that “in order to avoid undesirable
criticism, how the organisation is controlled and directed should not
be widely advertised”.
The words
used by neoliberalism often conceal more than they elucidate. “The
market” sounds like a natural system that might bear upon us
equally, like gravity or atmospheric pressure. But it is fraught with
power relations. What “the market wants” tends to mean what
corporations and their bosses want. “Investment”, as Sayer notes,
means two quite different things. One is the funding of productive
and socially useful activities, the other is the purchase of existing
assets to milk them for rent, interest, dividends and capital gains.
Using the same word for different activities “camouflages the
sources of wealth”, leading us to confuse wealth extraction with
wealth creation.
A century
ago, the nouveau riche were disparaged by those who had inherited
their money. Entrepreneurs sought social acceptance by passing
themselves off as rentiers. Today, the relationship has been
reversed: the rentiers and inheritors style themselves entre
preneurs. They claim to have earned their unearned income.
These
anonymities and confusions mesh with the namelessness and
placelessness of modern capitalism: the franchise model which ensures
that workers do not know for whom they toil; the companies registered
through a network of offshore secrecy regimes so complex that even
the police cannot discover the beneficial owners; the tax
arrangements that bamboozle governments; the financial products no
one understands.
The
anonymity of neoliberalism is fiercely guarded. Those who are
influenced by Hayek, Mises and Friedman tend to reject the term,
maintaining – with some justice – that it is used today only
pejoratively. But they offer us no substitute. Some describe
themselves as classical liberals or libertarians, but these
descriptions are both misleading and curiously self-effacing, as they
suggest that there is nothing novel about The Road to Serfdom,
Bureaucracy or Friedman’s classic work, Capitalism and Freedom.
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