I was skeptical of the subtitle before I even opened the book. Secret? Really? The word neoliberal gets thrown around constantly, so how much of a secret can it be? Pretty soon when reading The Invisible Doctrine, it became apparent that it is a secret. Not a secret in the way that it’s unknowable or somehow hidden, but in a way that we just don’t know it.
“Imagine that the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of Communism. That’s more or less where we find ourselves today.”
This is indeed where we are today. Most of us cannot as much as name the ideology that governs our lives, describe its core tenets, or say who built it – let alone question it.
If we don’t interrogate the water we swim in — if we don’t even register that we’re wet — how could we ever question it?
The reason I was skeptical of the ‘secret’ is that I thought I knew this story. I knew of Hayek, Friedman, Thatcher, Reagan, and of the privatise-deregulate-repeat cycles. What I hadn’t fully grasped, until this short and somewhat infuriating book, was the depth of the control, and how deliberately the machinery has been built, how far it had deviated from its origins, and how thoroughly it has captured our ideas of the ‘way things are’.
Monbiot and Hutchison trace the doctrine from its coining in 1938 through Hayek’s Mont Pelerin Society and the industrialists who bankrolled it, to then hiring experts to “create a series of ‘think tanks’ that would refine and promote the doctrine.“ They track the university departments that “presented themselves as independent and objective, but the main effect of their work was to propagate and amplify the ideology.“
The result, which I promptly highlighted:
“The fairy tale that capitalism tells about itself – that you become rich through hard work and enterprise – is the greatest propaganda coup in human history.”
My margin note, in full, reads: yep.
I learned a lot of stuff. I learned of the Pollution Paradox, a term I had not come across earlier: “The dirtiest, most anti-social and damaging companies have the greatest incentive to invest in politics, as they are the ones most likely to face the heaviest regulation.“ So as a result, they outspend everyone else on political influence, and politics comes to be dominated by exactly the industries that most need regulating. One can find several examples of this right here in Australia. Go visit Canberra airport, and look at all the ads that are aimed at politicians there, and you quickly get what the younger generations would call the ‘ick’. Once you are armed with this lens, an alarming amount of our politics snaps into focus: climate inaction, junk food, predatory finance, Grenfell Tower cladding, lax taxing of resources here in Australia, and the list goes on.
I learned of the ISDS, which I either didn’t know existed, or had forgotten existed. In any case, it’s just one of many examples of completely fucked-up systems that somehow we have conjured into existence.
The ISDS (Investor State Dispute Settlement) is an offshore arbitration system in which corporations can sue states for passing laws they dislike. Yes, really. Over 1,100 cases by 2020, and I had never heard of it. Which rather proves the authors’ point about all this fuckery needing a whole lot more sunlight.
It’s not a complete shoe-in, however. The Dutch courts have dismissed the RWE and Uniper claims over the coal phase-out, and TC Energy’s US$15 billion Keystone claim was thrown out weeks after this book went to print. The chilling effect on legislators is real, but the looting has been less lucrative than one might imagine / fear.
Quite a significant amount of this book was preaching to the choir, or at least to a primed surface that was my neural network. It wasn’t all fanclub-stuff though, and I did find myself disagreeing in places. For example, the authors say that social media “can help to fill the void, creating connections that did not exist before.”
Can it now?
I’d very much argue the net result of social media is highly negative, but mostly because the Internet is not the same thing as social media – a difference I feel many people neglect to realize. Connection online is possible without being beholden to the attention economy – just ask any of us who were online in the ‘good old days – and the attention economy is itself a thoroughly neoliberal invention.
Unsurprisingly, book is also quite UK/US-focused. For once, that common failing doesn’t really matter that much; the US is the warning to the rest of us, and Australia is further down the road to copying it than we like to admit. I read part of this book in Queensland, where locals told me, unprompted, that they work to live rather than live to work. On the face of it, that’s lovely. But on the other hand, the town runs on tourist money, so even the escape is funded by the machine.
There is no outside. That’s the point of the title.
I also hoped for more on the “actionable next steps”-side. The Invisible Doctrine diagnoses our ills with excruciating clarity and prescribes with a light touch. The solutions, including participatory budgeting, citizens’ assemblies, a politics of belonging, are as wonderful as they are woefully insufficient.
I fact-checked two initiatives they cite positively; Future Melbourne, which produced a fine city plan, and Finland’s Open Ministry, which produced one marriage-equality law before going quiet.
Meaningful? Yes. System-scale change? Not a chance. To produce a systems change, we need a new story to replace neoliberalism with.
Campaign-finance reform in countries where campaign finance is as fucked as it is in the US as the first and most urgent step? 100% agreed. Limitarianism, Ingrid Robeyns’ term for capping extreme wealth? I like it, and I’d go further.
My favourite model of reigning in political influence remains the Singapore approach: pay politicians extremely well, and make that salary the only money they may touch. To the authors’ credit, they concede they “have produced no new story with which to replace it“, and given the scale of the problem, it is perfectly valid not to have the full answer. I just wish they did.
But let me push a little further. Even with a system as broken as ours, is “systems change” the right ask?
I’m asking because I was born inside a kind of a counterexample. Finland, to meaningful levels of success, filed the neoliberal edges off capitalism with progressive taxation, clean-enough politics, and serious social support through boring, incremental social democracy. No disruption, no assemblies - no new story. If the worst excesses can be curbed by campaign-finance reform, the Singapore clean wage, and Nordic-grade redistribution, then variant change may just be enough, and that variant change can point to existing countries as proof it works-ish.
But these examples don’t come without caveats: Norway runs the model at its most generous, and bankrolls it with oil, which is the embodiment of the pollution paradox. And the Nordic variant answers the book’s political-economy charge, not its ecological one; despite all the enthusiastic recycling going on (there are eight different recycling bins to sort your stuff into), Finns still consume pretty much like the rest of the rich world.
Still, if we’re being optimistic, the state may not need wholesale disruptive replacing. What it unquestionably does need is un-capturing.
The Invisible Doctrine was a short book in terms of page count, and it may read like a screed to some people. But pages 163-214 are references. If this is a screed, it’s one well-researched screed.
You may think that this is all nice and well; we all seem to recognize that to some extent, yes our system’s a bit fucked, but it is what it is, what’s the big deal? Well, the big deal is this:
Soil degradation, freshwater depletion, marine ecological collapse, habitat destruction, species extinction, and the impact of pesticides and other synthetic chemicals – each of these factors may be comparable in scale and effect to climate breakdown. What we are witnessing is the breakdown, at astonishing speed, of our life-support systems – driven by capitalism, accelerated by neoliberalism.
Do we really need to be reminded that if we mess with the life support system enough, we may find ourselves with a planet that can’t support us in ways which are conducive to our survival?
The first step is seeing the water we swim in. The second is jumping out, before the water level – literally – rises higher than we can take.
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Dog-ear index: 15, which I think is a new record
Who is it for: everyone who votes, and especially everyone we vote for. Probably everyone who doesn’t vote, too.
[reminder: I highlight important parts of the books I read, and dog-ear the really important pages. The dog-ear index is simply the average number of dog-eared pages per 100 pages]
Product link for reference only; please support your local bookstore where possible: https://www.amazon.com.au/Invisible-Doctrine-Understanding-Neoliberalism/dp/024163590X