Welcome back. In Episode 1 we talked about liberal ideology, and in Episode 2 we talked
about the joint history of liberalism and capitalism.
In this, Episode 3, we're gonna be learning about the most important
idea you've never heard of - neoliberalism. And I wanna acknowledge right at the start
that I think neoliberalism is a garbage idea for garbage humans and that is abhorrent by almost
every theoretical and moral standard. So I'm gonna try and present what are supposedly the positives
but by all means take today's video with a pinch of salt.
Remember in Episode 2 we talked about the link between liberalism and capitalism? Well
neoliberalism is like the twisted lovechild of the two. It likes finance, it likes low government spending, and it likes low taxes. It does not like
regulation; it does not like welfare; it does not like trade unions.
Neoliberalism is a capitalist ideology, so it likes free markets, but it doesn't just
step back and let markets get on with it; neoliberals actually uses the state to create new markets,
sometimes by privatising public services, or just creating them where previously there
weren't any, like carbon trading which allows countries to purchase the "right" to pollute
the atmosphere.
Like liberalism, neoliberalism loves the individual: once the welfare state is eroded away nobody's
gonna write you a welfare cheque, you gotta take some "personal responsibility." You gotta
build the dream with your own two hands and your own hard work. If you had things like welfare,
neoliberals say, then you would get lazy and dependent on handouts!
Remember in Episode 1 I said that liberalism loves freedom? And that
every ideology loves freedom, but the devil is in who's allowed to have that freedom and what exactly it amounts to?
Well neoliberalism loves freedom too, of a kind. For neoliberals, freedom for humans
means freedom of the market. When markets are free consumers can choose how to spend
their wages, and that, neoliberals say, is what human freedom is all about.
Neoliberalism is very popular. It's an ideology held by just about every US President, even
Presidential candidate and every UK Prime Minister since the 80s, as well
as large parts of the EU including the European Central Bank. So, a pretty influential ideology.
It emerged like a xenomorph in the UK under Thatcher, and in the US under Reagan. Interestingly,
Bill Clinton brought neoliberalism to the Democrats and Tony Blair brought it to the
British Labour Party, so both sides of traditional two party systems started agreeing on an awful lot.
Neoliberalism became "common sense" - Thatcher famously said, "There's no alternative."
- so much so that it came as a big shock when politicians like Jeremy Corbyn came along
and pointed out that it's awful.
Neoliberalism's love of deregulation contributed to the 2008 financial crisis. Neoliberalism
also led to austerity: the cuts to public services and wages and tax breaks for the
very wealthy, which the United Nations says has led to human rights violations in my country.
It's also been noted that since austerity began there's been a spike in the number
of preventable deaths and suicides, which some researchers have said may be partly due
to cuts to the health service and social care. Caps on public sector pay and cuts to local
authority budgets have also been blamed for events like the Grenfell fire; while cuts
to social security have been blamed for the massive increase in the numbers of people
having to use food banks. Though to be fair, the statistics on issues like this is often
quite murky and lags behind the real-world effects. That's why it's important to
listen not just to the stats, but also to the lived experience of people living with
disabilities and on the poverty line since neoliberalism became the norm.
In response to the charge of causing thousands of deaths, neoliberals say that it's quite a good way to create jobs: if you start giving
businesses things like regulations and requiring them to pay people wages that they can actually survive on, then they're just gonnna
take the jobs elsewhere. That's what neoliberals say, anyway: many would actually disagree. Because neoliberalism,
like Liberalism classic, assumes capitalism as a given, it's quite unwilling to consider job creation
methods that are not capitalist. You might also have some reservations about whether human
lives can really be measured against "economic benefit" like that, especially when nowadays "economic
benefit" basically just means rich people getting richer and everyone else working harder.
A good case study for neoliberalism is Iraq, because we forcibly imposed it when we invaded
in 2003: what that looks like is all the public services were privatised, the banks were placed
under foreign control, and the rights to strike and form unions were heavily restricted in
order to create the conditions for the US and UK to siphon money out of the country
once we'd finished bombing the sh*t out of it. Neoliberalism is very good at making
rich people richer: since the 80s, according to the IMF, more and more wealth has been
concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.
Neoliberals love free markets because they assume that a free market means competition, and they further assume that competition means
quality is kept high, prices are kept low, and it drives innovation, and distributes resources efficiently to the people who want them the most.
But it's not entirely clear that all of those assumptions are true, or at least simply true without qualification. For instance, have free markets resulted in a lot
of competition everywhere, or have some markets actually become dominated by a very small number of
companies? Are resources as efficiently distributed as they could be? And do they always go to the people who want them the most? Is the innovation
that's happening always useful, and is it allowed to benefit all of humankind when it is? Maybe to a certain
extent. But maybe also to a certain extent kinda not?
But really, the big trouble with this individualistic, market-based "personal responsibility"
outlook is that some people can't navigate markets, particularly the job market, as effectively
as everybody else. If you find it more difficult to obtain or stay in employment because of something like your
race, your gender or your ability, or if you can find employment but it doesn't pay as much because there's a wage gap, or you face
more workplace violence or discrimination, or you're in a group that it just costs
more to be in because you've got, for instance, medical bills, well, neoliberalism has
no solutions to any of that.
Because of the individualist focus it inherits from Liberalism classic, neoliberalis
distils the privileges of race, gender, and ability into class privilege,
And this whole personal responsibility schtick ignores the fact that at some point
in every human being's life we require care - we require something we need that is just
freely given. Maybe that's the care of a parent, or a friend,
or maybe it's a nurse, or a doctor, or a waiter going above and beyond just
what they're paid to do in order to just freely make your life that little bit better. Care is unselfish.
And trying to ground something that is definitionally unselfish in market systems that reward
being selfish is just not gonna work. The study of care and what it means for our political
and economic systems is its own branch of philosophy, it's called Care Ethics, and neoliberalism's just has nothing to say about that.
Neoliberals assume that freedom means "consuming products in a way that maximises profit for
business and financial capital." Maybe you can think of some other ways in which you might like to be free?
This quote from Helene Shugart summarises neoliberalism nicely, and more dispassionately
than I can: "Neoliberalism ascribes virtually all responsibility for personal and social
welfare to the individual, which is further articulated as crucial to individual liberty
under the auspices of choice... Importantly, this individual choice is tightly linked with
consumption to the extent that individuals are expected to choose with their dollars...
Under this framework the practical role of government is to facilitate the market; moreover
government intervention at any level - in the form of social services, for instance;
or with respect to regulation of industry - is represented as cultivating and enabling dependence."
Things have started taking on a more critical tone, so in the fourth and final part of this
series we're gonna be looking at the big problems with liberalism. In this episode we've learned
about liberalism and capitalism's latest incarnation, neoliberalism, and how it's an UTTERLY TERRIBLE IDE/
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