2 days ago
8
The democratic recession does not begin when a far-right party takes office. It begins when a centrist party crushes hope in democracy. When Keir Starmer’s government takes a chainsaw to people’s aspirations for a fairer, greener, kinder country, he cuts off not just faith in the Labour party but faith in politics itself. The almost inevitable result, as countries from the US to the Netherlands, Argentina to Austria, Italy to Sweden show, is to let the far right in.
So what’s the game? Why adopt policies that could scarcely be better calculated to prevent your re-election? Why stick to outdated fiscal rules when projections suggest they’ll make almost everyone worse off, especially those in poverty? Why impose devastating attacks on wellbeing, such as sustaining the two-child benefit cap, freezing local housing allowance and cutting disability benefits?
Why pursue austerity when the country voted so decisively to end it? Why cut and cut when years of experience show this will undermine the government’s primary (and ill-advised) goal, economic growth?
Why taunt, insult and abuse a crucial part of your political base: people who care about life on Earth? Why trash environmental commitments, abandon protections, expand airports and tie down green watchdogs? Why sustain and defend the most extreme anti-protest measures in any nominally democratic country?
Why seek to nix the financial regulations inspired by the 2008 crash, when the likely result is a repeat performance? Why reject a wealth tax, when a 2% levy on assets of over £10m could raise £24bn a year? Why not adopt the measures proposed by Patriotic Millionaires, generating £60bn a year? Or those suggested by political economist Richard Murphy, worth £90bn in tax revenue? Why abandon plans to tax non-doms properly? Why not demand an end to the Bank of England’s destructive quantitative tightening?
Why bury policies that might help restore democracy, such as proportional representation? Why introduce new political funding rules without actually addressing the capture of politics by the rich?
Why adopt Reform’s messages, Reform’s branding and Reform’s cruelty, to compete over who can most brutally beat up asylum seekers? An abundance of evidence shows that when centre-left parties take radical-right positions, they lose more voters on the left than they gain on the right. Adopting far-right messaging helps far-right parties win.
These policies might seem incomprehensible. But there’s a thread running through them. They all arise from the same doctrine: neoliberalism. This ideology, which has dominated the UK since 1979, demands austerity, the privatisation and shrinkage of public services, curtailment of protest and trade unions, deregulation and tax reductions for the rich. Justified as a means of creating an enterprise society, it has instead delivered a new age of rent, as powerful people monopolise crucial assets, from water to housing to social media. It leaves a government with few options but to scapegoat asylum seekers and other vulnerable groups for the problems it fails to address.
Neoliberalism has become an orthodoxy from which parties depart at their peril, exposing themselves to fierce attacks by the media and the Tufton Street junktanks it endlessly platforms. But how did it become so hegemonic that it has turned Labour almost into the opposite of what it once was? It’s hard to understand until you grasp that the purpose of neoliberalism is to break down resistance to capital. This in turn requires a better understanding of capitalism.
Capitalism is constantly confused with commerce. While the two systems are often entangled, capitalism can exist without commerce and commerce without capitalism. Commerce goes back thousands of years. Capitalism is a distinct economic system that arose roughly 600 years ago, founded on colonial looting. It operates on a dynamic, constantly evolving frontier, pushing ever further into our lives, on which both state and powerful private interests use their laws, backed by the threat of violence, to turn shared resources into exclusive property, transforming natural wealth, labour and money into commodities that can be accumulated. You can see what it looks like, when released from democratic constraint, in Donald Trump’s America.
For 150 years, capitalism has sought to undermine or crush its direct antagonist: democracy. It found a highly successful means in fascism, which was bankrolled in the early 20th century by some of the richest people and corporations in Europe and Japan. But in 1945, that solution ran into certain minor difficulties.
Just in time, an alternative arrived. Neoliberalism was first formalised in two books published in 1944, The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek and Bureaucracy by Ludwig von Mises. Both authors opposed fascism, but their ideas were just as useful to capital. By 1947, some of the richest people on Earth were pouring money into it. They soon built an international network of “thinktanks”, academic departments, tame government advisers, editors and journalists. They refined and amplified the messaging until it began to sound like common sense, hammered home so often that Margaret Thatcher was able to proclaim “there is no alternative”.
Neoliberalism is highly effective at destroying democratic hope. As hope evaporates, the far right sweeps into the political void, enabling capital to invest once more in its earlier solution. Neoliberalism, in other words, paves the road to fascism and serfdom.
As the damage to human wellbeing and the living world mounts, parties once on the left, such as UK Labour, the US Democrats and Australian Labor, urgently need to recover their courage. I feel there’s great potential in building a new “politics of belonging”, in which political power and control of local resources are returned to communities.
A large part of politics can be understood as a search for belonging, a fundamental human need. Even fascists seek community and belonging, albeit a version where everyone looks the same, wears the same uniform and chants the same slogans. Steering people away from fascism requires an answer to this need, an answer that can be found in vibrant inclusive neighbourhoods, strengthened by participatory democracy and community ownership of key local assets. A wealth of experience from other nations and other ages shows that disempowerment sets us apart, while shared, equal decision-making brings us together.
I hate to give up on this government, so soon after it has taken office, but defending people from injustice and destitution, keeping out the far right, reviving communities and renewing democracy requires a mindset that seems a thousand miles away. Where we look for resistance and vision, we find a craven appeasement of capital. Labour promised change. Now it must change or die.
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George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
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The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism, by George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison, is published in paperback this week
