In correspondence: a discussion of The Invisible Doctrine by George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison
Recently, fellow Substacker,
proposed corresponding and sharing our thoughts on Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism, by Guardian columnist and environmental advocate George Monbiot and filmmaker Peter Hutchison. As an avid reader of Lloyd’s Substack, Carbon Upfront!, I jumped at the chance.An architect from Toronto, Lloyd Alter teaches Sustainable Design at Toronto Metropolitan University. Formerly an editor at treehugger.com, he has authored two books: Living the 1.5 Degree Lifestyle and The Story of Upfront Carbon. His Substack, Carbon Upfront! often concentrates on architecture, design, and the sustainable implications of both. Carbon Upfront is one of the best Substacks out there and is highly recommended.
A brief note on Invisible Doctrine:
In this thin volume—213 pages including notes and index—the two authors recount the history of neoliberalism and its development from a doctrine exposed by fringe economists after WWII into its now almost worldwide dominance. As Monbiot and Hutchins describe neoliberalism, this unrestrained form of capitalism that sees markets and capital as both self-regulating and the ultimate human good has depleted our social services, weakened our infrastructure, upset democratic processes, and left us all with less social cohesion and even robbed us of hope. (I just found out today that Invisible Doctrine has also been made into a film.)
Our correspondence on this topic follows:
Dear Paul,
I love the idea of doing this epistolary exchange of our thoughts about George Monbiot’s new book. I have been a fan of Monbiot for many years, although I suspect Americans do not really know him; back in 2007 I had a huge bun fight with Joe Romm, author of “Hell and High Water”, who dismissed Monbiot’s book “Heat” because Monbiot supported nuclear power. Romm had clearly never heard of him and I accused Romm of doing a drive-by shooting after reviewing the index instead of the book; Monbiot deserved better.
This is not a typical Monbiot book, perhaps because it is co-authored by Peter Hutchison, an American film-maker. It is a short and an easy read, with a powerful message.
It starts off brilliantly; it explains everything about what is happening in politics today, it is a book that makes you want to stand up and scream. By way of background, I live in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, where I have been proud of our socialized medicine, subsidized day care for my grandchildren, and a social safety net that Americans 20 miles south of me can only dream of.
But now we have homeless sleeping in the street due to a lack of housing, a deteriorating health care system, and In our province (equivalent to your state but with even more power) we have a right wing Conservative government that is doing everything it can to destroy this because they have convinced voters that their taxes are too high, and they are likely going to continue winning elections on this platform of corporatizing everything. This is what neoliberalism has wrought.
Every time I go to the USA I wonder how you got into this mess and how lucky I am, and then I see how we are being pushed into the same death spiral. It happened in the UK too, and Monbiot explains how and why.
Neoliberalism is misnamed; it is massively illiberal. Neoliberals want to shred the social safety net because,
“Neoliberals argue that an active state seeking to change social outcomes through public spending and social programs rewards failure, fuels dependency, and subsidizes the losers. It creates an unenterprising society, run by bureaucrats, who stifle innovation and discourage risk-taking, to the impoverishment of us all. Any attempt to interfere with the market’s allocation of rewards—to redistribute wealth and improve the condition of the poor through political action—impedes the emergence of the natural order, in which enterprise and creativity are rightly rewarded.”
Dear Lloyd,
First of all, thanks for initiating this exchange. I very much appreciate it.
Having lived through the neoliberal era in the U.S., I have seen great quakes and shocks, as when factories close and move offshore. When I was a child, my hometown in Appalachia had six glass factories. I knew men to work in them. One closed down, then another. Over 20 or 30 years, they all left. Senator Robert Byrd (D WV), when he was still alive, infused federal dollars into the region and had a large FBI facility built there, but the town is a shadow of what it once was, almost a ghost town.
These past four decades have also been a time of slow crumbling. We’re not building new bridges and updating infrastructure. (The Inflation Reduction Act is supposed to turn this around, but we’ll see.) Things folks relied on the government for now have reduced funding. The college degree for which I paid scant tuition now costs young adults tens of thousands of dollars.
The U.S. government does less. I just mentioned the Inflation Reduction Act. This climate change legislation works largely through tax credits and other incentives. It is unlike the U.S. government achievements such as the Civil Rights Act or the Endangered Species Act, legislation based on real laws, not just incentives.
It’s no coincidence that all of this happened in the U.S. during the rise of right-wing talk radio and Fox News. While Sean Hannity and the late Rush Limbaugh distracted people with critical race theory and transexual immigrants, the real work of enriching the rich goes forward. Psychologically, this is a feedback loop. As jobs dry up and people grow more frustrated at the ever-diminishing services of our government, they become susceptible to the rantings of demagogues.
I imagine it may have seemed that Canada was immune from the neoliberal politics of the U.S., but I guess that’s changing.
Dear Paul,
One of the themes in the book that resonated was the notion that “no part of the neoliberal program can succeed without the stifling of hope.”
“Governments repeatedly seek to persuade us that they are incapable of action, unable to govern, that their hands are tied, that their uselessness is baked in. They can’t address poverty. They can’t ensure that the elderly, or the sick, or the addicted are properly looked after. They can’t prevent the collapse of roads, bridges, or school buildings, let alone of ecosystems. It’s all beyond their control. Instead, they teach us to be hopeless and to expect no relief—accelerating the diseases of despair, the eco-anxiety, the nihilism, and the apathy to which so many people understandably succumb.”
This is rampant in the USA, with Trump claiming everything is falling apart and you can’t cross the street without being stabbed, or in Canada when Poilievre says “everything is broken” when it’s not. In my recent post on politics I wondered who was subsidizing this elaborate conspiracy campaign, and yet now I realize it fits perfectly with the neoliberal agenda as laid out in this book: it accelerates despair and anxiety.
One of the themes in the book that resonated was the notion that “no part of the neoliberal program can succeed without the stifling of hope.”
Dear Lloyd,
Yes. For me, the big change in the U.S., and I think Hutchison and Monbiot would agree, was Ronald Reagan. Famously (or infamously) he said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’” That sentiment has been echoed through the decades by right-wing talk show hosts and GOP politicians.
One of the big targets of this message has been schools and education. The right-wing answer to underperforming schools is not more resources, or better teachers, or more funding, but less! They want to treat a governmental function and a public good—the ideal of universal education—like a marketplace, in which there are winners and losers.
You mention neoliberals succeeding as they stifle the hopes of everyone else. That is true. It is part of the theme of “everything is falling apart and we can’t do anything about it.” Further, as services dwindle and wages haven’t kept pace, even as the social fabric has been torn asunder by neoliberalism, people know something is wrong, but neoliberals are effective at creating what Hutchison and Monbiot call “conspiracy fictions” to point the finger at and distract from the harms they are doing. They would have us admire the entrepreneur who moves his factory from Tennessee to Cambodia, yet the think tanks and radio talks shows they support will whip up anger over the immigrants that threaten to take our jobs. Or they might even get behind a lectern and say of immigrants, “They’re eating the dogs!”
The book is a screed, an angry one. And while I didn’t expect the authors to scream EAT THE BILLIONAIRES!!! in the call to action that takes up the final chapters, I was expecting something a little more concrete than what they offered. It’s true, as Hutchison and Monbiot write, we can begin to emphasize the parts of our humanity that capitalism diminishes—our capacity for caring and belonging—yet I don’t see much changing without great amounts of civic engagement. Remember what we are up against. Big business has the PR firms. They run the media. In the U.S. they have a lock on both political parties.
An answer to, an alternative to, the exploitation of capitalism is imaginable. I think of human beings living simpler lives in small, active communities. The difficulty lies in getting there. I don’t have the answer for this.
Dear Paul,
I am glad we agree the final chapters which I considered to be a letdown.
The authors call for “private sufficiency, public luxury.” Having written two books on the theme of sufficiency, I might point out that it is a tough sell, proposing a world where everyone has enough but nobody has more than they need. The authors acknowledge that the answer to this is a big honking wealth tax, and a reorganizing of our political system around “citizens assemblies” which unfortunately is what the authoritarian right wing is also calling for.
They also mention the successful war on smoking, which had three fronts: legal, with continually more restrictive bans, social, making smokers pariahs, and financial, through increased taxation. The authors suggest the war on smoking was won quickly and easily, but in fact it took decades, with industry and big money fighting it all the way. We don’t have forty years.
The authors never mention the words “degrowth” or “socialism” because they are scary, but you can’t build a sufficiency economy with endless growth, and you can’t have public luxury without a little socialism. In the end, I think they chicken out because the solutions are just too daunting and difficult.
But we certainly have to dump the Chicago school of economists, the Hayeks and Friedmans, and have more Keynes and Galbraith.
Dear Lloyd,
You’re right about the anti-smoking campaign. It’s been very successful, but it took a long time. Mothers Against Drunk Drivers (MADD) may have been a better example. Formed in 1980, this organization worked grassroots campaigns and achieved great success. In 16 years, drunk-driving laws were made stricter in all 50 states. In Canada, MADD has sought even stricter legislation. They also changed people’s attitudes. Drinking and driving is no longer acceptable.
As far as private sufficiency, public luxury, the closest the U.S. has come to this ideal was during and after WWII, when income taxes were as high as 90 percent on the highest incomes. What occurred is probably far from what Hutchison and Monbiot envision for our future. People still got fabulously wealthy. It was also a time when average people gained a lot of material well-being and material excess. The automobile, previously a plaything of the rich, was in reach of the average worker and then became a necessity for just about everybody.
Yet this was also a time when there were investments in public luxury, I think a good example of this is the municipal pool. There used to be lot of them in the U.S. They were most often segregated, but they were still the result of cities and towns creating something for communities (OK, mostly white communities).
I read the short bit on citizen assemblies. I think it was about a page, so I didn’t get a very good sense of what the authors were explaining. I think there are a few things folks can do in the U.S. The first is to end gerrymandering. They recently had success doing that in Michigan, which had previously been gerrymandered by the GOP. No matter which party does the gerrymandering, it makes Congressional seats uncompetitive, hence congresspersons don’t have to be as responsive to their constituents.
The next thing to remember is what Howard Zinn said: “What matters most is not who is sitting in the White House, but ‘who is sitting in’ and who is marching outside the White House, pushing for change.” From what I remember from the women’s movement, the civil rights movement, and others, is that things changed, but only after a lot of people marched in the streets, wrote their representatives, ad otherwise raised a ruckus.
"Neoliberalism is misnamed"
It really is not. Even a passing knowledge of the history of liberalism, such as one might get from reading the Encyclopedia Britannica article on liberalism, shows that neoliberalism is a direct line continuation of classical liberalism.
The problem is that the original meaning of "liberal" has been obscured. Liberalism, especially in the USA, has become synonymous with *bleeding heart liberalism*.
The actual liberals were the original proponents of small government (deregulation), low taxation (hands off our profits!), zero-sum competition, laissez faire capitalism, social Darwinism, and utilitarianism - all the same attitudes we associate with neoliberalism and with the British Empire.
The moralising and melioristic aspects of liberalism are adventitious. The bleeding heart liberals also embraced the dog-eat-dog aspects of capitalism. The difference is that they felt bad about the effects of it on the poor.
I really like this format of a conversation. It's got me thinking.