George Monbiot at Aye Write!
"It’s as if the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of communism," says George Monbiot in his Aye Write! event How Did We Get Into This Mess?, opening an hour-long run down on how neoliberalism has soaked into every aspect of our society. We see the impacts of neoliberalism everywhere: the 2008 financial crisis, the housing crisis, the environmental crisis, and so on – but these crises are never connected to the ideology that underpins them. And it’s that anonymity, Monbiot argues, that gives the ideology such power.
Monbiot is an exceptionally good speaker. Fluent and logical, far-reaching and precise: he covers more ground in 40 minutes than many would in double that. He speaks without notes, and without doubling back – his sentences come fully-formed. He speaks exactly as he writes.
Perhaps his most interesting observation is about how neoliberalism achieves such success. It relies on the idea of competition and a free market, while making sure that all the odds are stacked greatly in favour of the rich. It values enterprise, but does nothing about inheritance and private education – two things that are deeply uncompetitive. Neoliberal economies shift the focus from employment to inflation. Big business is in the driving seat, presenting the market as an invisible force and disguising how much work it does to design all of those market forces. Think tanks advise on policy, but never declare their funding. So you have the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) producing a study that says that eliminating cigarette packaging has no effect on reducing smoking – but who funds the IEA? Phillip Morris, one of America’s largest tobacco companies.
And so the right solidifies its position, thriving on the false competition that props up the system. Meanwhile, the left flounders, demonstrating how destructive internal competition and a lack of unifying ideology can be. There’s been no new idea to unite the left since Keynes – and all the drivers of Keynesian economics (growth and consumption, for instance) might save us from an economic crisis, but will only accelerate us into an environmental one.
So what’s Monbiot’s answer? Well, he doesn’t really have one – although he "knows some people who are working hard on one." We can only hope that he’ll be their hypeman when it comes.
George Monbiot's new collection of essays, How Did we Get into this Mess? – Politics, Equality, Nature, is out now, published by Verso
George Monbiot spoke at Aye Write on Tues 15 Mar