Is It Time to Topple the Neoliberal Order?

Has neoliberalism finally run its course? Are Western countries poised to move their political centre back to the progressive left? What we're seeing underway in Britain may point the way to the future.

Guardian columnist Owen Jones writes that the old Tory order is crumbling:

The political consensus established by Margaret Thatcher’s Tories – neoliberalism, for want of a more sexy word – is disintegrating. It is going the same way as the postwar social democratic consensus established by Clement Attlee, which fell apart in the late 1970s. That model – public ownership, high taxes on the rich, strong trade unions – delivered an unparalleled increase in living standards and economic growth. A surge in oil prices, and the collapse of the Bretton Woods international financial framework, helped bring that era to an end. The death of this political consensus was increasingly obvious at the time: its morbid symptoms were everywhere. Those who wanted to keep it together were powerless against the incoming tide of history. “There are times, perhaps once every 30 years, when there is a sea change in politics,” said Labour’s James Callaghan, days before he was ousted from No 10 by Thatcher. “It then does not matter what you say or what you do. There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves of.”

...

If any episode sums up the collapse of our own neoliberal era, it is surely Grenfell Tower. The right decry the “politicisation” of this human-made disaster, but to avoid talking about the politics of this calamity is like trying to understand rain without discussing weather, or illness without biology.

The Tories are desperately attempting to shore up a system that has engineered the longest squeeze in wages since the Napoleonic wars, with deteriorating public services, mediocre privatised utilities, a NHS plunged into “humanitarian crisis”, and exploding debt. It can’t even provide affordable, comfortable and safe housing for millions of its own citizens. It is incapable of meeting the needs and aspirations of the majority. The right, therefore, is left with a dilemma. It can either double down and make the ideological case for its failings and increasingly rejected system, or it can concede ground. That’s what Labour did 40 years ago. In 1977, Callaghan formally renounced Keynesianism, arguing that the option of “spending our way out of recession no longer existed”, and had only ever worked by “injecting bigger and bigger doses of inflation into the economy”. The Tories may well now try abandoning cuts in favour of investment; but surrendering ground to the enemy didn’t save Labour back then.

...

Nothing scares Britain’s vested interests more than a politicised, mobilised population. Our social order is tottering, but it can continue to disintegrate, with painful consequences, for a long time. A new society intolerant of injustice and inequality can be created. But only the biggest mass movement in Britain’s history can make it so.

But what of Canada where neoliberalism has become the political orthodoxy of all our mainstream parties, the NDP included? Trudeau had an opportunity to wean Canada off neoliberalism by reinstating progressive democracy but instead declared himself a confirmed globalist. Perhaps that explains why his government beat such a shameful retreat from its solemn promise of electoral reform.

For anyone who believes that neoliberalism/globalist free market fundamentalism is some divine wisdom carved in tablets of stone you would do well to read John Ralston Saul's discussion of economic models in his 2005 book, The Collapse of Globalism, demonstrates that the current political-economic order, like all the models before it, is rooted in ideology. Like a religion it is essentially faith based which accounts for neoliberalism's longevity beyond the point of its failure. Even the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization have proclaimed it a failure. So too did its guru, Milton Friedman, prior to his death. Yet its disciples, its true believers, including our current and past prime ministers still cling tenaciously to it.

The Guardian scribe, Owen Jones, is correct. It's going to take a mass movement to topple the high priests of neoliberalism. That's as true for Canada as it is for Britain.