In the 19th century, man has seen some of the most revolutionary ideas in human history. These ideas have not only shaped the way we live our lives, but they have completely changed the way we view ourselves and the world around us. Significant new ideas have come by way of science, philosophy and religion, psychology, and sociology. Perhaps the most significant idea of the 19th century was that of Charles Darwin. His Theory of Evolution had major implications on the scientific thinking, religious thinking, and social thinking of the 19th century. Georg Hegel (1770-1831) was responsible for introducing a significant alternative way to view the course of human history. He saw it as a dialectical, in other words, history progressed through a series of contradictions followed by solutions to those contradictions. The struggle that Hegel envisioned is the great tension between ‘is’ and ‘ought,’ between the way things are and the way they ought to be.
Richard Hofstadter devoted an entire chapter of Social Darwinism in American Thought (1955) to Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), arguing that Herbert Spencer’s unfortunate vogue in late nineteenth-century America inspired Andrew Carnegie and William Graham Sumner’s visions of unbridled and unrepentant capitalism. The Gospel of Wealth, an article written by American steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie in 1889, argues that the wealthy can undermine social protest by donating to worthy causes. Carnegie rejected demands to raise wages and living standards because that would cut into profits. During the Victorian period, Spencer urged the importance of examining social phenomena in a scientific way. He developed the concept that eventually was identified as social Darwinism. He believed that natural selection applies to human societies, social classes and individual as well as to biological species developing over geological time. These ideas promote unfettered competition between individuals, and the gradual improvement of society through the survival of the fittest.
Against the backdrop totalitarianism and the Second World War, Hayek wrote what is arguably his most famous book: The Road to Serfdom. The title itself was inspired by Alexis de Tocqueville, and it was immediately very popular when it was first published in Britain in 1944. It has been lauded as such by prominent thinkers and economists like Milton Friedman: “This book has become a true classic: essential reading for everyone who is seriously interested in politics in the broadest and least partisan sense.” Hayek supported (at the time of the writing of The Road to Serfdom) at least work-hour regulation and some degree or form of social welfare. However, this is not necessarily the position that those who cite Hayek as an influence take and this seemingly moderate stance is perhaps somewhat at odds with the legacy he has left.
After Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan took power in the 1980s, the rest of the package soon followed: massive tax cuts for the rich, the crushing of trade unions, deregulation, privatization, outsourcing and competition in public services. Through the IMF, the World Bank, the Maastricht treaty and the World Trade Organization, neoliberal policies were imposed – often without democratic consent – on much of the world. Freedom from trade unions and collective bargaining means the freedom to suppress wages. Freedom from regulation means the freedom to poison rivers, endanger workers, charge iniquitous rates of interest and design exotic financial instruments. Freedom from tax means freedom from the distribution of wealth that lifts people out of poverty. Neoliberalism was not conceived as a self-serving racket, but it rapidly became one. Economic growth has been markedly slower in the neoliberal era (since 1980 in Britain and the US) than it was in the preceding decades; but not for the very rich.
The words used by neoliberalism often conceal more than they elucidate. “The market” sounds like a natural system that might bear upon us equally, like gravity or atmospheric pressure. But it is fraught with power relations. What “the market wants” tends to mean what corporations and their bosses want. “Investment”, as Andrew Sayer notes, means two quite different things. One is the funding of productive and socially useful activities, the other is the purchase of existing assets to milk them for rent, interest, dividends and capital gains. Using the same word for different activities “camouflages the sources of wealth”, leading us to confuse wealth extraction with wealth creation. Perhaps the most dangerous impact of neoliberalism is not the economic crises it has caused, but the political crisis. As the domain of the state is reduced, our ability to change the course of our lives through voting also contracts.1
Neoliberals support only the mechanisms by which wealth is created – that is, ‘open competitive markets’ and limits to protectionism – inevitably leading to the manifestation of extreme personal greed. The propensity for Western governments to deviate toward neoliberal principles of economic management played a central role in building up to what is the biggest economic crisis in our hands. ‘The salient failure of the current financial crisis is that it was not caused by some external shock … the crisis was generated by the system itself’, observes George Soros. Popular resistance to neoliberalism has mounted since the financial crisis of 2008, exposing the flaws of deregulation. Staring objectively at the events of the US, Britain and Europe, it is not difficult to see that the entire structure of neoliberal thought is built upon the demands of the wealthy and powerful, all of which have been dressed up as sophisticated economic theory and applied without consideration of the outcome.
The modern environmental movement differed from an early form of environmentalism that flourished in the first decades of the 20th century, usually called conservationism. Led by such figures as Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, the conservationists focused on the wise and efficient use of natural resources. Modern environmentalism arose not out of a productionist concern for managing natural resources for future development, but as a consumer movement that demanded a clean, safe, and beautiful environment as part of a higher standard of living. Although the environment is usually discussed within the context of sustainability, it is equally important for an individual’s quality of life: Indeed, environmental conditions not only affect human health and well-being directly, but also indirectly, as they may have adverse effects on ecosystems, biodiversity, or even more extreme consequences such as natural disasters or industrial accidents. Alexander De Heijer observes, “When a flower doesn’t bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower.”
This environmental degradation is starting to reverberate and affect economic growth. If unchecked, there is a real risk of serious impacts on financial stability and the welfare of people around the world. In the past, many viewed environmental quality as a trade-off with economic growth: Any increase in environmental quality came at a cost or slow-down in economic development prospects. As new clean technologies have emerged and their costs plummeted, it has been increasingly clear that many green alternatives can be cost-competitive. We can have both a clean environment and robust growth. More recently, evidence has shown that sustained growth is, in fact, dependent on environmental protection, and the two must go together. The challenge now, without any doubt, is to accelerate the transformation to a better, more inclusive, sustainable economy. This is especially urgent in emerging economies, where growth is advancing most rapidly.
The Environmental Revolution resembles the Industrial Revolution in that each is dependent on the shift to a new energy source. And like the earlier revolution, the Environmental Revolution will affect the entire world. No sector of the global economy will be untouched by the Environmental Revolution. In this new economy, some companies will be winners and some will be losers. There has not been an investment situation like this before. By 2017 governments were subsidizing oil extraction to the tune of $400 billion per year, which could be spent on energy in the eco-economy. One difference between the investments in fossil fuels and those in wind power, solar cells, and geothermal energy is that the latter are not depletable. Those who participate in building the new economy will be the winners. Those who cling to the past risk becoming part of it.2
The thrust of neoliberal ideology is to privatize everything, taking common resources (even those built at public expense) and commodifying them so as to be able to realize a profit from their use. This then leads to economic inequality. Now, as we wake up to the clear and present threat to public goods that have sustained us, we can better appreciate their value to us. With this increased consciousness, we may now be better able to press for an expansion of public goods. A caring society is a compelling alternative to the present neoliberal order. But we need to make the ethics of caring concrete by outlining how it can be institutionalized. We need to institutionalize it in an expansion of commons that embody the ethics of caring. These revolutionary ideas must not only deal with the economic crisis, but the present political crisis.
1 George Monbiot. (15/April/2016) Neoliberals – the ideology at the root of all our problems. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot
2 Lester Brown (29/Jan/2007) The Environmental Revolution. https://www.treehugger.com/corporate-responsibility/the-environmental-revolution.html