The Invisible Doctrine
The Secret History of Neoliberalism (& How It Came to Control Your Life)
George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison
Having read it
★★★★★
Absolutely brilliant.
Clear, well researched, informative, straight-forward and honest about the crap that neoliberalism and its twisted and unfair control of capitalism (and politics) has offered and corralled society (across, certainly, the Western world and globally as something, bizarrely, to aspire to) since pretty much the 1970s and in today, the early 2020s.
‘Boom, Bust, Quit’ is what capitalism does. The ecological crises it causes, the social crises it causes, the productivity crises it causes are not perverse outcomes of the system. They are the system.
[...]
[...] Capitalism is not, as its defenders insist, a system designed to distribute wealth, but one designed to capture and concentrate it. 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.
Fantastic for its readability and being concise (approximately 160 (small) pages!) and to the point, plus, like Yanis Varoufakis is quoted, it is, The definitive short history of the neoliberal confidence trick
.
Read this book and feel more hopeful that big, meaningful and progressive changes for all of society can be made (and should be). Although, realistically (and even currently) it seems a shame their is no one in the very system that needs changing that’ll change the system, but Caroline Lucas is quoted that, This book is dynamite – shining a spotlight on the evils of neoliberalism, shattering the myth that “there is no alternative”, and laying the foundations for a new politics
, proving every little helps and going Green is a viable and sensible way forward.
Quite a few stars more than five out of five as it really is adding to and hopefully stoking the fires of the revolution needed to change the system(s).
A good passage
Almost inevitably, privatization leads to a decline in both access to, and the quality of, public services. There’s no mystery about why this should be: the owners’ incentive is to extract as much money from the service as possible. They can do this in two ways: charge higher fees or cut corners, diverting money that should otherwise have been invested in improving the service into their own pockets. In privatized public services around the world we have repeatedly witnessed this legalized theft, as money previously used to improve schools, parks, or water-treatment works has instead been siphoned off as dividends.
A second good passage
We talk of ‘the failure of the state’, but the neoliberal state is broken by design. Its failures are engineered, grounded in an insistence that government cannot – and should not – solve our problems. It is not supposed to work.
After forty years of this experiment, it’s become clear that the economic triumph neoliberalism proclaimed is illusory. Although the success of Keynesianism relied upon colonial looting, it generated economic growth, in part, by enhancing the spending power of those at the bottom. Neoliberalism, in contrast, has generated economic growth by pushing workers to the limit, accelerating resource extraction, and inflating asset values and household debt.16 It is an incendiary device – burning through human relationships and the fabric of our planet, faster and more ruthlessly than Keynesianism did.
For while neoliberal capitalism continues to loot the South to enrich the North, it also loots the future to enrich the present.
A third good passage
[...] No one is suggesting this will be easy – far from it – but the process can become self-reinforcing. Enhanced democracy reduces economic inequality; enhanced equality bolsters democracy.
For all the claims of neoliberalism, there is no natural law that dictates the rich should run the world. Their dominance is sustained only by our collective fear, and our failure of political imagination.