LETTER TO THE EDITOR: The religion of neoliberalism

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This article was published 17/01/2025 (577 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If there were a subcategory of political economy in the National Book Awards, my vote for the 2024 Book of the Year would go to George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison’s Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism. By “invisible” and “secret,” some might suspect another conspiracy theory, before being confronted by the extensive, detailed, documented evidence provided throughout. It certainly fits the category of nonfiction.

Like its unmentioned precursor The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power published in 2003 by American-Canadian law professor Joel Bakan, Invisible Doctrine has also been converted into a documentary film by the same name. And just as The New Corporation: The Unfortunately Necessary Sequel was released in 2020, so too Monbiot and Hutchison may need to release an unfortunately necessary sequel of Invisible Doctrine sooner rather than later. The re-election of Donald Trump and his cadre of billionaires has made the creed now blatantly obvious.

Neoliberalism is “an ideology whose central belief is that competition is the defining feature of humankind, and that greed and selfishness light the path to social improvement.” As eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher and founder of capitalism Adam Smith sermonized, any political state which handcuffs the “invisible hand” of the free market—self-interest engaged in competition—interferes with the “natural order.” As such, humans are primarily consumers, not citizens.

The term neoliberalism—capitalism on steroids—was coined in 1938 and first championed by Austrian-British philosopher Friedrich Hayek in reaction to the welfare state policies of economist John Maynard Keynes in Britian and the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt in America, both designed to survive the 1930s Great Depression.

It later became the 1980s mantra of Thatcherism in Britain and Reaganism in America. Economist Milton Friedman, Hayek’s most famous disciple, served as Reagan’s close advisor while the ultra-rich used their dark money to establish an entire network of “think tanks” to preach neoliberalism, duping average citizens into voting against their own interests.

The essence of neoliberalism is more than the classic liberal removal of restrictions on the production and distribution of goods and services. It is the commodification and privatization of as much of life as possible, deeming all goods and services to be best delivered by for-profit economics, not by public property or responsibility. Neoliberalism also demands wealth tax cuts, if not exemptions, along with deregulation of labour practices, environmental controls, and trade barriers.

As Monbiot and Hutchison explain, contrary to its reputed socially beneficial trickle-down effect, “capitalism is not, as its defenders insist, a system designed to distribute wealth, but one designed to capture and concentrate it.” Indeed, unlimited freedom is always to the advantage of the self-interested, empathy-lacking bully.

The authors devote separate chapters to detailing selected effects of neoliberalism, from personal loneliness to environmental degradation (“let them eat carbon”) to the crisis of democracy. By reducing and restructuring public services to ensure they fail, neoliberalism is the disenchantment and scapegoating of politics by economics, thus necessitating authoritarian neo-fascism—Thatcher’s “there is no alternative” (TINA).

Yet in a brilliant public relations coup, neoliberalism has shifted responsibility for our multiple social crises onto individuals, “blaming ordinary people for the very crises that have been imposed on them.” For example, the micro-solution of avoiding single-use plastics is helpful, but ultimately insufficient.

Nevertheless, Monbiot and Hutchison provide an inspiring macro case study of how America immediately and completely rebuilt its economy during the Second World War when confronted by a military threat. That was still less than the existential threat humanity faces today, but clearly, provided collective political will, systemic transformation is possible.

We need to rebuild society on empathic altruism, not greedy aggression. We need the bridging of communitarianism, not the bonding of neo-fascism. We need long-term, cooperative collective-interest, not short-term, competitive self-interest. We need to activate Lincoln’s “better angels of our nature.”

In response to Canadian-American economist John Kenneth Galbraith’s lament in The Affluent Society of the “private opulence and public squalor” of neoliberalism, Monbiot and Hutchison envision the “private sufficiency and public luxury” of deliberative, participatory, social democracy.

But disastrously, according to British political economist Susan Strange, author of Mad Money, “neoliberalism has become the major world religion, with its dogmatic doctrine, its priesthood, its law-giving institutions and perhaps, most important of all, its hell for heathen and sinners who dare to contest the revealed truth.”