George Monbiot and Chris Hedges on neoliberalism

This is an excellent interview in which Hedges discusses Monbiot’s new book The Invisible Doctrine. As a result of this interview, I read the book and found it likewise excellent.[1]

The Secret History of Neoliberalism (w/ George Monbiot) | The Chris Hedges Report by Chris Hedges (YouTube)

At 05:00

“The three pillars of capitalism—commodified labor, commodified land, and commodified money—all came together simultaneously. And they came together to create this extremely effective and virulent new colonial frontier, which burnt through resources, burnt through human labor, with unprecedented speed, created a great deal of profit, and then ecological collapse, followed by abandonment. And that then became the model which was followed.

“The Portuguese moved from Madiera to Santo, did exactly the same on the coast of Brazil, worked their way up through the ecosystems of coastal Brazil, trashing them one after another, destroying huge numbers of lives through slavery, through murder, moved into the Caribbean, started doing something very similar there, whereupon they’d been joined by other European nations doing the same thing.

“Invisible DoctrineThis is the thing called capitalism. What capitalism is often mistaken for—commerce—which is just buying and selling things, and sure there are elements of commerce in capitalism, but it is absolutely not the same thing. Commerce goes back thousands of years, capitalism goes back hundreds of years, and it is a an extremely coercive, destructive, exploitative mode of economic organization. And then, about 150 years ago, it runs into a problem, which is that larger numbers of adults got the vote.

“And, when adults get the vote, they have the temerity to say, ‘actually we don’t want to just be commodified labor anymore. We’d like to have some labor rights. We want to be able to organize our own labor. We want to get a bigger share of the value that we create. We want outrageous things like the weekend. Oh, and, by the way, we quite like nice homes as well. And we don’t want our air to be polluted and our rivers to be poisoned. We’d like to eat better food.‘

“Whatever it might be—all the demands are inimical to capitalism. So, ever since adults began to get the vote in large numbers, capital’s sought to solve that problem. And one means of solving it is fascism. And fascism can be a highly effective means of solving the problem of democracy. But, then, when fascism collapsed in Europe in 1945, they had to find another means. And that means was neoliberalism. And neoliberalism turns out to be a highly effective way of solving the problem of democracy.”

At 09:00

“Hayek then went on to embrace his new sponsors because that book The Road to Serfdom, I mean, you can see its obvious flaws. I mean, it’s one gigantic, slippery-slope fallacy. It’s effectively saying, you know, if there’s any move towards protecting population as a whole, towards the redistribution of wealth, towards the creation of robust public services and an economic safety net, that will inevitably lead to totalitarianism. You’ll end up with Stalin. You’ll end up with Hitler. I mean, it’s just logical fallacies the whole way through. It’s a philosophical nonsense. But, they were very happy to embrace it, because it served them.

“But then, what was really interesting, was the way that that process happened in reverse, where Hayek then embraced the demands of his super-rich sponsors and, by the time he came to write The Constitution of Liberty, his book published in 1960, his doctrine had really gone from a flawed-if-honest discourse on economics and politics to an absolute confidence trick. It was just a scam. I mean, The Constitution of Liberty is completely mad. I mean, it’s a totally crazy book. You cannot read it without worrying for the guy’s mental state.

“But, actually, what’s happened is not that Hayek had lost it. It is that he was telling these very rich people exactly what they wanted to hear. And what he was saying was, ‘it doesn’t matter how you made your wealth because you are rich. You are a fantastic guy. You are a brilliant person.‘ And the people who have become rich, whether they inherited it, whether they stole it—however they acquired that money—they are the scouts whom the rest of society should follow because, wherever they go, that is going to be a fantastic route to take. And we must go down that path, whatever it may be.

“And he dropped his opposition to things like monopolies. He overtly said, ‘we just got to exploit and destroy the natural world, extract as much money as we can from it, and then reinvest it elsewhere. And it doesn’t matter what damage we do.‘ I mean…crazy proposition after crazy proposition…”

At 30:00

“Chris: What it does, is essentially create monopolies. Silicon Valley, Amazon. And then, these people, the last thing they want is free enterprise.

“George: Yeah, they want total control. And they get it. I mean, two very indicative trends we’ve seen during the neoliberal era is, one, the destruction of antitrust laws, so that we see mergers and acquisitions making companies bigger and bigger and bigger, with very dangerous consequences for society. You know, as we saw in the financial crisis, where banks that were too big fail actually failed. It could be even worse: if food companies go down the same route, because if they go down, well you can’t just create food out of quantitative easing. There’s enormous hazards in this.

“But, at the same time, as they ripped down the antitrust laws, they raised massive intellectual property barriers. So, in other words, they granted to corporations huge and sweeping intellectual property rights—far, far greater than they had before. Now, what’s interesting about that, is that it’s completely against their whole claim to be supporting free-market economics.

“But neoliberalism has got nothing whatever to do with free-market economics. It’s all about monopolization and capture. And sweeping intellectual-property rights is all about monopolization. That’s completely the opposite of freedom.”