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Neoliberal Liberty and the market

December 8, 2019

Complete in itself (I hope) but continuing on from Casual Remarks on Liberty

In the English speaking world, since the late 1970s, both sides of politics seem to have increasingly developed the determination to protect and increase the power of large corporations, establish plutocracy and impinge on the liberty of people in general. The political elite of the Right seems more thorough and overt about this, so I shall primarily discuss Right wing style politics in this and a few subsequent posts. It may need to be said that there are many well intentioned people on both the Right and Left who oppose this move, or who do not appear to have noticed what is happening.

Market Liberty and Hierarchy

The first step taken in the contemporary promotion of plutocracy is the reduction of liberty to action in a market. Liberty of action in a market may indeed be important, but it is not the only factor in making liberty or in guarranteeing the continuance of liberty. Over-emphasis on this factor may be destructive of liberty.

A free market does not mean a free society, it more likely means a “fee society”, in which those with wealth can buy more services, buy more influence, and have much more impact on the market and other people than those who are poor or merely comfortable. These wealthy people also have much more freedom and power to tell others what to do. They become more important, and the market gears itself to serving them and where the greatest profit arises with the least effort. This set up, also means those with wealth can buy privilege as a matter of course; they can purchase access to politicians, lawyers, PR agents, or criminal threat and promote the kind of information, organisation, and distribution of risk, that suits them and not others, and so on.

Where wealth differentials become high enough then the wealthy can buy all forms of power to protect the retention of their wealth, and remove freedom for others from the market and the State. Capitalists suppress unions of workers, but not unions of businesses, (through buying politicians, laws and regulations).

I have previously mentioned the common excuse that the media these people own, can lie to benefit them with impunity, because they own it and have the right to control what it says. Such a position implies they have no resposibility towards truth, only towards ‘selfish’ support of faction and maintaining their power. They are demanding liberty without responsibility.

With, or without, direct control over media, they can support those who work in their favour, and ignore or trouble those who don’t. Society can become snowed by false information, which boosts their power.

While it can sometimes be argued that people have earned this wealth and should be rewarded, it is also common for people to inherit the wealth with little sign of any particular ability. Inherited or not, the wealth was almost always made with the help of others, who did not share in the wealth they produced because of the laws of capitalist privilege. Wealth also gives the ability to network with other wealthy people and team-up for the benefit of that group as opposed to everyone else. This is especially important if the ideology encourages and enforces the idea that less powerful people should act primarily as individuals outside of their place of employment.

The interaction between people with wealth increases their power and impact on others and, in general, power based in wealth appears to deny responsibility towards others (human or otherwise). There are studies which seem to show that wealth encourages behaviour most people would consider immoral, partly because the wealthy can get away with it, and partly because wealth can encourage indifference to, or contempt towards, less wealthy people. This encouraged ‘selfishness’, impacts on the liberty of others.

If it is more profitable to destroy an environment than to preserve it, then it will be destroyed legally. If it is more profitable to poison people than not, then people will be poisoned legally – and enabling free pollution seems to be one of President Trump’s major economic policies (the other being interfering in the free market through tariffs – some say that he gave massive tax concessions to large scale property owners as well). The only thing that is to be protected is the property and liberty of those wealthy enough to defend it in the courts.

For me, the direction of this kind of market liberty was most clearly revealed in conversations with self-proclaimed libertarians who argued that everyone should have the right to sell themselves into slavery. The billionaire with access to all kind of privilege and defense has the same right as the person with no capital, income or shelter and a hungry family to sacrifice their liberty forever in return for a small sum of money and survival. To be concise, in this case, market liberty encourages slavery of the non-privileged.

Reducing liberty to the market, biases liberty towards wealth, and may even remove wealth from those not so fortunate through the conditions of employment and survival.

In actually existing capitalism, it is doubtful that a free market can exist for long. No capitalist wants to keep a market which may unhorse them, when they have the opportunity to team-up to try and use the power of wealth to prevent this from happening.

Liberty vs. Employment

Given that most people can no longer support themselves, by producing their own food, shelter, clothing and so on, then the primary social relationship in the market, is between boss and employee. Employees are expected to be subservient. And although a few employees may be fortunate enough to have the ability to leave what they consider to be oppressive conditions and immediately move into another job without suffering penalty, employees will generally find that employers, as a group, expect obedience. Employers also expect ownership of the results of their employees’ labour and even their employees’ ideas, sometimes even those ideas not generated at work. Some types of work require the employee not to work in the same industry if they leave their job, which further weakens employee power and liberty. In many cases employers attempt to deskill jobs to make employees interchangeable and cheap; this also makes work is largely boring and with little requirement for skill development, and this may well impact on the kind of self-development and understanding needed for real liberty.

Fear of lack of employment in general, and of the consequences arising from standing up to an employer, is likely to be constant, also impinging on employee’s ideas and practices of liberty; their lives become servitude, learning to placate and please their boss. Growing lack of support from the State for periods of unemployment (even hostility to those attempting to find work, as in Australia), and State sponsored hostility to unions (employees organising for group resilience) further weakens the ability of people to freely change employment, or risk challenging their employer. This routine demand for obedience is almost certainly not conducive to a sense of liberty.

One reason for working at a university originally was the amount of freedom you had from this kind of submission. Provided you did your contracted lectures you were free to do whatever you liked, within the criminal law. You could keep your ideas and share and develop them as you chose. With increasing corporatisation (the extension of capitalist modes of organisation to other forms of life) this freedom is completely undermined, by endless paperwork, performance evaluations, demands for results, customer satisfaction surveys, and even university ownership of ideas in scientific disciplines. This extension of corporatisation is all about spreading the demand for worker submission to bosses. In the older days the universities were far less profit oriented, far freer and did not require proportionately much more money from the public.

One of the endless complaints of capitalist colonialists was that the conquered people would not work for wages – they were, in the would-be bosses terms, ‘lazy’. At best people would work until they had earned enough for whatever they wanted, and then they would return to self-sufficiency. This liberty had to be prevented, as you cannot run a capitalist business with that kind of freedom and uncertainty. Hence, land would be taken from conquered people, taxes and punishments applied, to get people to engage in wage labour. In the West the formation processes of capitalism had involved people being thrust of the land, self-sufficiency destroyed, and labour forced into low wages. At least according to some sources, wages were often not enough to survive on, but no matter, there were always more laborers. Wage labour could be cheaper than slavery – as the boss did not have to keep their workers alive.

This is the point of the anarchist demand “No State, No Church, No Boss”. ‘Boss’ is usually translated as ‘Master’, which is what bosses where called in nineteenth century Europe. With most people having to submit to bosses to survive there can be little learning of the paths of liberty.

Free market theory on the other hand demands more power for bosses, with less independence for workers. This is likely to be one reason why neoliberals are so hostile to unions, unemployment benefits and social wages, and completely indifferent to the effects of organisations of employers.

Liberty becomes Consumption

While liberty is reduced to freedom to be bossed, the market further transmutes desires and ambitions into the purchase of commodities, rather than self expression through independent creation. ‘Artists’ are judged solely by their ability to sell their art. Companies promote those artists they think will be successful and make the most profit for them and simply sign and ignore the others, and this is not unreasonable given the logic and compulsion of the market. The history of the recording industry is full of accounts of successful artists getting further into debt slavery because of the perfectly legal machinations, and exploitation, of managers and record companies.

Freedom in the market, for most people, comes down to freedom to buy what they can afford (or to go into debt); often having to choose between different brands of product owned by the same company. While freedom to choose what you can purchase is probably good, it is not the complete basis of liberty.

Profit and Liberty

In a neoliberal State, profit is everything, especially the profit of established and powerful business. This is the case, irrespective of whether every activity is best run with profit as the aim. Profit supposedly marks virtue, talent, hard-work, quality and success.

Eliminating costs is the easiest way of increasing profit, as nothing innovative, new or useful has to be thought up or invented. Employees are a cost and a potential trouble, so they need to be eliminated or further controlled, as much as possible (again liberty of employees is unimportant in market liberty, especially low level employees). Lying and misdirection can quickly boost profit and save costs, so it’s buyer beware and making markets and profit primary, corrupts truth. Cleaning pollution is a cost and so polluting is not a problem, and neoliberals work to increase their ability to freely pollute and freely destroy ecologies (with any burden going to other people). The likely reason the Right cannot even talk about dealing with climate change, is that dealing with it might threaten the profits of some established and powerful corporations. Profit is not only inherently good, but more important than survival. Pollution poisons, or potentially poisons, people, that is simply an unimportant side effect of the free market, to be challenged in courts if at all – after all, to neoliberals, the market solves all problems and being hurt by their activity, is your own fault.

In court, the corporation is usually safe without a strong participatory State responding to people, because ordinary people find it hard to overcome the financial and legal imbalance between them and the offending corporation. The class action has developed in an attempt around this corporate dominance. Mostly this makes profit for the lawyers if successful. However neoliberal politicians try and make class actions harder, so individuals are more vulnerable to corporate abuse. Where I live, if the people have a victory, the neoliberals change the law to make sure it can’t happen again – it is clearly the law that is at fault not the corporation – profit and corporate liberty must be protected, whatever the effects on the liberties of others.

The structure of the corporation with its diffusion of resonsibility, means that it is hard to hold its members responsible for corporate crimes, especially if the crmes were profitable. If the shareholders don’t care, or have benefitted enough, then that is the end of it, or some high level executive might get dismissed with a huge bonus. Of course if the crime diminished corporate profitability and was committed by a low level person, the consequences might be different. The corporation gives liberty without resonsibility to its executives and shareholders, and a massive kick to ordinary people; it is inherently a tool of hierarchy and dominance.

The more power and liberty given to the corporation, the less for everyone else.

Neoliberal markets and the Corruption of Truth

Liberty demands an attention to truth, and accuracy of beliefs. You cannot be completely free, or completely able to adapt to reality, if you are routinely misled. In capitalism misleading advertising, PR, obfuscation, fantasy and product hype are normal and intrinsic parts of the system. The general idea is to gain attention in the profitable way, and to provoke excitement and stability of power, rather than the contemplation of truth.

This disinformation stretches into political behaviour and supposed news which become attempts to persuade people to acquiesce to their subordination, or to be distracted from real problems. We are all told capitalists gain their wealth through their superior talents, or the favour of God, rather than because of their crimes, power or connections, and that leaving everything to the market, (that is, big business) will solve all major problems. We do not have to participate, other than by choosing products out of the range we are presented with, and with the dubious information we are given as part of sales practice.

Through these misinformation actions, capitalists create a fantasy world, which eventually clashes so strongly with reality, that crashes of all kinds happen (economic, political, ecological to name a few). Elections simply become spending and disinformation wars between corporations – it is doubtful they are free in any meaningful sense – successful candidates are more likely to be of some pro-corporate party simply because they will not be continually slurred in the corporately owned media and will receive better financing. In this system, elections change more or less nothing. Trump is just another slightly more erratic neoliberal, which is why he has such solid Republican backing, despite his more morally dubious actions.

Neoliberalism and Fiscal Restraint

Neoliberals constantly call for fiscal restraint from the State. However, after forty years of such demands, I know of no State which is cheaper to run than it was previously. However, nearly all neoliberal States are less helpful to the populace, and more hostile and persecutory to those they are supposed to help. It possibly could be argued that neoliberalism functions by persecuting people it considers weak outsiders, like the unemployed, refugees, despised ethnic groups or disabled people. This helps ordinary people to feel less suppressed by comparison.

The Reagan Revolution made this clear. There were massive cutbacks in social spending accompanied my massive increases in military spending. Neoliberals did not object to this, probably because military spending goes largely to arms manufacturers, and contractors, rather than to ordinary people. In other words it increased private profit, which is their ultimate goal. Reagan also reduced tax intake from the wealthy, on the grounds that they would now generate more income and pay more tax. Not surprisingly while tax cuts for the wealthy are always popular with the wealthy, they rarely to never increase tax revenue. Revenue fell at the same time as expenditure increased, which lead to more calls for cuts on social spending.

If one really wanted to reduce State debt, then clearly it might be possible to consider a process to make certain that corporations paid at least the same levels of tax on their profits that ordinary people do on incomes, rather than much less, zero, or even negative tax. You also would not put masses of effort into chasing small abuses of public funding when you could put the same effort into pursuing large abuses. Lowering tax evasion and avoidance by the wealthy, could then lower everyone’s tax burden, which is supposed to be the aim of the exercise. However, in neoliberalism, it is considered great if the burden of the State is shifted onto the middle class, and that wealthy people get to pay less and less tax so they increase their wealth and power.

During this period, regulations for the populace and the power of the security state have increased, causing impingements on liberty for normal people. Life has been overtaken by neoliberal form filling, as government departments try to make sure they have not helped non-wealthy people by accident, and that everything has been done as cheaply as possible, with the least encouragement of liberty.

Privatisation (especially of profitable services) increased, but it has rarely cost the government less, although they lose power and income, while it boosts the power and influence of business over people.

Neoliberals also tend to support charitable organisations rather than people’s rights to services, probably because charitable organisations, especially religious ones, have a great tendency to interfere in the lives and liberties of those they are charitable towards, while not impinging on the lives of the wealthy. This history of interference was one of the reasons for the workers’ interest in State provided services as a mode of liberty.

Fiscal responsibility for neoliberals comes down to less money spent by the State helping, or enabling, ordinary people, and more money spent on corporate subsidies, time wasting, and defence of corporate power.

Conclusion

To equate market liberty to full liberty is almost comic. It is reductive, deceptive and only enabling of the power of wealth and corporate organisation – which is why market friendly States tend to give subsidies to the already successful and strip them away from the less fortunate. In practice market liberty proposes that the non-wealthy are inferior and only deserve constraint.

The market, left to itself, enables hierarchy, plutocracy, consumption and obedience rather than liberty. This is why the idea is useful for the promotion, and sacralisation, of corporate power.

These comments continue in: Neoliberal Liberty and the Small State

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Authoritarianism and the Right wing

November 25, 2019

Any argument about authoritarian politics, can depend on how you define left and right wing.

Usually the Right are those people who defend the established power relations and hierarchies, and the Left are those that challenge them by supporting people who have been declared outsiders or unworthy. While Conservatives also tend to support established power relations, it can be useful to distinguish conservatism from contemporary neoliberalism, as Conservatives may be skeptical of the benefits of unconstrained capitalism, and the radical transformations it brings. However, this distinction is not really maintained in this piece, even though it is politically vital…. See: Conservatism as philosophy and the posts referred to there.

The usual story is that the terms came into use during the period around the French Revolution when, in the National Assembly, the supporters of the King and aristocracy sat on the President (or presiding officer’s), right and the anti-royalist anti-aristocratic supporters of the revolution sat on his left.

In keeping with this tradition, those called ‘The Left’ in the English speaking world, tend to fight for workers’s rights, women’s rights, gay rights, minority race rights, refugee rights and so on, and the Right tends to fight against such rights, to declare that outsiders are dangerous and to increase the rights of the current dominant groups of capitalists and wealthy people. By supporting established power relations, the Right can also claim to be conservative – but sometimes by over-intensifying the powers of the dominant elite, it can end up destroying what it is supposed to be conserving.

While it is a customary piece of blather that Hitler and Mussolini where left wing, they opposed the left and were heavily supported by the right and the established hierarchies (capitalists, militarists, and so on); they opposed workers democracy, even in principal, and subordinated everything to the nation state, and the established hierarchy. They started persecuting and killing those they defined as dangerous but inferior outsiders (Jews, gypsies, gays, communists, pacifists, disabled people, etc). Eventually they started to replace the established hierarchy with their own. They were not ever pretending to be libertarian capitalists, of course, but that does not mean they were socialists.

Even nowadays (after it is quite clear what Nazism actually stood for), the mainstream Right seems happier working with, or excusing, neo-nazis and white supremacists, than they do working with or excusing anti-fascists who are trying to defend people against violence. This may not just be because both support hierarchies, but because the Right know there is a large chance the neo-fascists and white supremacists will vote for them.

Anyway, the problem for the left is quite obvious. Leftists aim for an overthrow of established powers; however should they achieve this by revolution, they usually have to impose an order, because the old hierarchy does not give in, other states may support the old hierarchy, they might still need a police force or national guard and so on. The French Revolution faced the threat of firstly the King subverting its aims, then the aristocracy some of whom fled and tried to persuade neighbouring states to invade, and the Church which was trying to preserve its aristocratic allies and their property, by stirring up counter-revolution among the peasantry. Austria, Prussia, Holland, Spain and England all opposed the Revolutionaries, at least partly to stop the idea of anti-hierarchy from spreading, and some of them engaged in open warfare against France. Similarly, the Russians faced deniable invading armies after the revolution who allied with the so called White Russians (who naturally persecuted inferiors), which left them on a war footing even after leaving WWI (which given the country could not afford war was a severe problem).

In imposing their new order, the left tends to become ‘rightists’ supporters of their new hierarchy, oppressors of those that challenge them, and so on. This direction gets reinforced when opportunistic authoritarians succeed in taking over “because it is necessary”, as did Stalin in Russia.

So the left revolution is so busy defending itself that it usually fails to be revolutionary or liberatory. This is a problem, because the regime justifies itself in terms of delivering freedom for ordinary people, when it is probably not doing that at all. People eventually notice the failure, and the best they give the regime is resigned and unenthusiastic tolerance.

Rightist revolutions are usually less troublesome for the winners. Being at home with the existing hierarchies, the right can use them and then fade them out gradually if they so choose. They can support traditional modes of ordering, usually with the same personnel, while making them more intense or militarised. They can free up people, in their old ‘policing’ jobs, to be more aggressive in supporting the establishment and persecuting outsiders – which is usually not very difficult. Their main risk is trying to gain legitimacy by demonstrating their military superiority over inferior types. This can increase problems, if they eventually encounter a better armed less tired force, or supply lines get stretched beyond the capacity to support them. To some extent this happened with the Righteous who supported the second Iraq War in the name of the New American Century, or of maintaining US dominance and oil supplies. However, if they stay within National Borders and pacify and celebrate existing powers, like Franco did in Spain with the support of the Church and the old aristocracy, they can be stable for quite a long while. Mussolini could probably have survived a lot longer than he did, but he went against his original suspicions of Hitler and joined with him in a series of unnecessary, unpopular (with the Italian people) and weakening wars.

This implies support for authority, can become a form of corruption. The Church in Spain for example, might have thought that supporting Franco was support for Spanish values and Church authority, and would lead to salvation for most of Spain, but they learnt to ignore torture and maltreatment of victims, and quite a lot of other Christian values as part of that support. Similarly, people on the right who support free markets as a form of liberty, and who gain power, tend to end up supporting the capitalist elite (because they have money) and end up supporting crony capitalism, state capture, anti-union laws, anti-protest laws and so on, because opposition to these pro-capitalist moves promotes inhibition of the market. They deliver liberty for the capitalist elite, rather than for ordinary people. This arrangement can also be quite stable for a while, although it might be looking precarious at the moment.

There is an argument that neoliberalism (lots of talk of free markets with state support for Capitalist elites) was first tried out in the dictatorship in Chili, and promoted by Hayek and Friedman. It is a complex argument and a lot of neoliberals object to this characterisation, but it rarely seems they are particularly interested in a democracy that threatens capitalist domination, whatever the people might want.

In terms of the Toynbee cycle, both left and right revolutions are trying to solve perceived major challenges to the social order. The Rightist revolution in the contemporary English speaking world quite possibly originated in dealing with the “crisis of democracy“; the fact that the non-revolutionary left had succeeded to such an extent that the elites where threatened by:

  • minorities who now insisted they had a right to self governance, and to overturn the traditions (sexism, genderism, racism etc) which had held them down,
  • the steadily increasing wages of the lower class, and State based social support, which gave them prosperity, freedom to participate in government, lack of fear of unemployment and disobedience to bosses, and
  • the growing success of the environmental movement which threatened wealthy high polluters, environmental destruction for profit, nuclear power and the fossil fuel industry.

To the Right these collective factors promised chaos, and led to the campaign to make markets the supreme virtue and reinforce corporate dominance, while pretending to bring people a lack of governmental interference, or rather a lack of governmental support and an alienation from participation in their own self-government.

This movement has had the probably unintended consequence of accelerating and protecting environmental destruction, and the resultant destabilizing of world orders – which is likely to become a complete destructive crisis in the next ten to twenty years.

The Russian Left faced the problems of a decaying aristocratic government and a small comfortable middle class, both of whom could not see the growing unrest among the peasantry and workers who were seeing the country fall apart, with them being asked to take the burdens. There was also protest against a war that few really believed was in Russia’s interests, and Russia’s lack of an industrial base with which to produce modern armaments. While the Russians did solve the problem of Industrialisation in a very short time, it would be ignorant to deny this came at a great cost.

So, the answer to the question is complicated.

I’d say that by definition the vast majority of authoritarian states are right-wing, but they may not have started out that way, or intended to be so, they just become that way to defend themselves against the disorder that eventuated.

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A Jeremiad: Neoliberalism and Climate Change

November 19, 2019

Plenty of conservatives in the UK and Germany and other countries can recognise climate change is a problem, and a problem that is going to get worse the more we pollute and destroy the environment. The UK, for example, is going to be free of coal relatively soon. That is not enough, but it is a start, and there is little dispute about it.

Those people who call themselves “Conservatives” but who pretend climate change is not real, are not conservative in the sense of conserving things like land, tradition, virtue or stability. They are more likely to be radical neoliberals, wolves dressed as sheep, who believe that everything must be sacrificed to keep the market going. They seem to believe that markets are more important than natural ecologies, and that ecologies can be disposed of in the name of profit without harm to land, tradition, stability or virtue.

For some reason they wish to impose their vision of endless pollution and destruction upon the rest of the world. They want pro-corporate government throughout the world, for whom profit is the only thing that matters.

To fulfil this aim, they suppress research and free speech, and try to shut down science, slander scientists, prevent public servants from talking about climate change, taking down public websites, they try to take the subject out of the public domain. They shout a lot in the media, and endlessly abuse those who think there is a problem. They pretend it is likely that scientists are left wing conspirators, when scientists can hardly agree on anything other than climate change being real, and deliberately ignore the power of wealth and the long standing reputations oil, and coal companies have for political suppression and corruption. They pretend they can predict that the future will be ok, and so ignore the complexity of the world.

When defending their support of destruction, they try to argue that if we act to diminish the effects of climate change then we inevitably will support more taxes, more government, socialism and the destruction of ‘the economy’. Apparently this is obviously worse than widespread, calamitous ecological collapse.

But would a truly working and functional economy poison the ecologies it depends on? And, how bad were the 1950s and 60s with their high tax rates, government interference in economy, stronger unions, greater social mobility and high levels of home ownership? Not that bad really. Quite possibly more hopeful for most people than nowadays.

By eagerly defending the current economy, neoliberals are not defending real ‘free markets’, ‘open markets’, or a ‘beneficial economy’, but just those wealthy groups who have successfully bought special rights, captured regulatory bodies, and co-opted the State for their own interests.

Neoliberals reduce all virtue and intelligence to selfishness, the acquisition of money, and obedience to wealth. They may dress this in the tatters of religion, but this too is about making money, obedience to the existing hierarchy, and cultivating hatred for others. They may pretend that this hatred shows the love of God, but their love requires those others to become like them, so it supports a withered uniformity and frightened acquiescence.

This neoliberal religion is, in short, the worship of Mammon. Nature only exists to be overcome, extracted from, despoiled and turned into profit. All that is shared, or common, the real gifts of God, are valueless to Mammon and his worshipers, everything must be privately owned, with others excluded unless they can pay. Everything is to be subject to the neoliberal will; there is no freedom, only the drive for money, and punishment for the sin of non-possession.

Perhaps Neoliberals think capitalism cannot survive without endless despoliation? Perhaps they just want to side with the powerful. I don’t know, but it seems that way. In either case, none of us can avoid the agonizing consequences of their destructive actions and enforcement of ignorance, either economically or politically.

Real Conservatives do not have to pretend reality is the way they would like it to be, and can face up to unpleasant facts. We need more real conservatives, and others prepared to stand against Mammon. Otherwise the consequences are dire: destruction, flood, fire and famine.

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Neoliberalism, Climate and Fire…

November 14, 2019

The public service association of NSW has said that National Parks and Wildlife Service has been gutted of staff by the Coalition, especially of experienced fire managers. The number of experienced staff was cut from 289 to 193. The government appears to have assumed, as neoliberals do, that all workers are interchangeable, and replaced knowledge and experience with basic entry level people, and they have pretended this makes no difference.

The chief of the Department of Planning, Industry and Environment, told their staff this month that Treasury (actually the government hiding under another name as usual) had ordered savings of $81.4 million by July 2020, and that despite their best efforts this would result in further cuts to the National Parks service and to the Energy and Science division.

The government has tried to blame previous governments of many years ago for a perceived lack of hazard reduction fires in the present, but the National parks service actually exceeded the Government’s own targets, despite the shorter season in which is safe to do hazard reduction (due to climate change)…. So as usual the only people to blame are the Coalition themselves.

The government also claims that the number of trained fire fighting staff as been increased, but it has actually fallen from 1349 to 1060. The Coalition’s own “Labour Expense Cap” means that $20m a year has to be cut from wages budgets by the fire service, which means even fewer experienced fire fighters.

The problem here needs to emphasised, because the volunteer fire services have been stretched to exhaustion already and summer is yet to come. Firefighters will die. I guess the neoliberal attitude is that you can always buy another.

Former NSW Fire Chief, Greg Mullins tried to organize a meeting of fire chiefs with the Federal Coalition to discuss responses to climate change earlier in the year, and was rejected twice.

Structurally, we would like to actually go back to being retired and not to have to speak out. We would like the doors to be open to the current chiefs, and allow them to utter the words “climate change”. They are not allowed to, at the moment.

The Guardian 14 Nov 2019 11:17

On a slightly different note, workers from the NSW Department of Planning, Industry and Environment who were attending an AdaptNSW forum on showcasing best practice in reducing the impacts of climate change on communities, received an email stating “Public Affairs has issued advice [to you] not to discuss the link between climate change and bushfires.” The next day, the minister said this was a mistake, but it was a mistake entirely in keeping with Coalition policy, and it had its effect.

The government does not appear to recognise that Climate change, and increased ecological destruction causes any problems for NSW that cannot be solved by taxcuts, taxpayer funded gifts to developers, destruction of knowledge, misinformation, suppression of disagreement, denial of responsibility, silence and sacking workers.

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Problems of Transition 07: Neoliberalism and Developmentalism

November 9, 2019

Continuing the series from the previous post….

Of these two political and economic movements (Neoliberalism and Developmentalism), Developmentalism is the oldest, but has since the 1980s been blended with Neoliberalism. As powerful movements and ideas, they can form obstacles to transition.

Developmentalism

Developmentalism can be argued to have its origin in the UK with coal-powered industrialisation and mass steel manufacture, which formed a reinforcing positive feedback loop; steel manufacture helped implement industrialization and also increased military capacity to allow plunder of resources from colonies. Industrialization helped increase demand for steel. Fossil fuel energy was cheap with a high Energy Return on Energy Input. This loop provided a model for the ‘development’ of other countries, partially to protect themselves from possible British incursion.

While the UK’s development was developed alongside and with capitalism, capitalism was not essential for development, as was shown by developmentalism elsewhere. The earliest deliberate developmentalism was probably in Bismark’s Germany, followed by Meiji Japan, neither of which were capitalist in any orthodox sense. Japan rapidly became a major military power defeating both Russia and China. Revolutionary Russia also pursued developmentalism, and after the second world war developmentalism took off in the ex-colonial world becoming the more or less universal model for progress, or movement into the future, and flourished in many formally different economic systems.

During the 1980s, but especially with the collapse of European Communism, and the birth of the so-called ‘Washington Consensus’, developmentalism became more strongly tied to international capitalism, and especially neoliberal capitalism. We can call this ‘neoliberal developmentalism’.

Neoliberalism 1

As I have argued elsewhere, neoliberalism is the set of policies whose holders argue in favour of liberty in free markets, but who (if having to make a choice), nearly always support established corporate plutocracy and appear to aim to destroy all political threats to that plutocracy.

Developmentalism and ecology

Developmentalism was built on fossil fuel use, and economic growth through cheap pollution and cheap ecological destruction. It also often involved large scale sacrifice of poorer people, who were generally considered backward and expendable in the quest for national greatness. Sometimes it is said that in the future succesful development will mean less poisoning, destruction and sacrifice, but the beautiful future may be continually postponed, as it was with communism.

Developmentalism was also often ruthlessly competative in relationship to other states and the pursuit of cheap resources. Developing countries often blame developed countries for their poverty, and this may well be historically true, as their resources were often taken elsewhere for little benefit to their Nation. Many developing countries also argue that they have the right to catch up with the developed world, through the methods the developed world used in the past. It is their turn to pollute and destroy. If this idea is criticised, then it usually becomes seen an attempt to keep them poverty ridden and to preserve the developed world’s power.

Developmentalism is related to neoliberal capitalism via the idea that you have to have continuing economic growth to have social progress, and that social progress is measured in consumerism and accumulated possessions. However, after a point neoliberalism is about the wealthy accumulating possessions, it does not mind other people loosing possessions if that is a consequence of its policy. Both the developing and developed world have developed hierarchies which tend to be plutocratic – development tends to benefit some more than others.

After the 1980s with the birth of neoliberal developmentalism, the idea of State supported welfare and development for the people was largely destroyed as developing States could not borrow money without ‘cutting back’ on what was decreed to be ‘non-essential’ spending. The amount of environmental destruction, pollution and greenhouse gas emissions also rocketed from that period onwards, despite the knowledge of the dangers of climate change and ecological destruction. The market became a governing trope of development, as it was of neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism 2: The theory of Free Markets

In theory, ‘free markets’ are mechanisms of efficiently allocating resources and reducing all needs and values to price, or messages about price.

Theory does not always work, because large-scale markets are nearly always political systems rather than natural or impersonal systems.

Big or successful players in the market nearly always attempt to structure the market in their favour. Wealth grants access to all other forms of power such as violence, communicative, informational, legal, ethical, organisational, religious and so on. If there is no State, then successful players will found one to protect their interests and property. If there is a State they will collaborate with others to take it over to further protect their interests and property.

Everything that diminishes profit, especially profit for established power, is to be attacked as a corruption of the market and therefore immoral and to be suppressed. If people protest at not having food, or at being poisoned by industry, they are clearly immoral and not working hard enough. Political movements which oppose the plutocracy or its consequences may have their means of operation closed down, or find it difficult to communicate their ideas accurately through the corporate owned media. The market ends up being patterned by these politics.

For example, neoliberal free markets always seem to allow employers to team up to keep wages down, as that increases profit, and render Union action difficult as that impedes the market.

While these actions may not always have the desired consequences, the market, at best, becomes efficient in delivering profits, but only rarely in delivering other values. Thus people without money are unlikely to have food, or good food, delivered to them. Indeed those people may well be sacrificed to efficiently feed others who have both more than enough food and more disposable wealth, and hence who make more profits for the sellers.

Through these processes, there is an ongoing transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, increased by the power relations of plutocracy.

In plutocracies, it is normal to think that the poor are clearly stupid or not worth while, rather than they have lost a political battle, or been unfortunate.

Neoliberalism and ecology

If it is profitable to transfer the costs of ecological destruction onto the less powerful, and less wealthy, public then it will be done as with other costs. The cost and consequences of destruction will not be factored into the process, and this will give greater profit.

Even, leaving the natural world in a state in which it can regenerate becomes counted as a cost. If it is cheaper to destroy and move on, most businesses will do this, especially the more mobile wealth becomes. For example, I was told yesterday that on some Pacific Islands, overseas fishing companies bought fishing rights to sea cucumbers (which are extremely valuable given the prices I saw in some shops). They took all the sea cucumbers they could, threw the smallest onto the beach to die, and moved on, leaving the area more or less empty. They had no ties to the place, or to the regeneration of local ecologies. The whole ecology of the islands could collapse as a result of this profit taking, but only the Islanders suffer in the short term.

Likewise spewing poison is good for business as it is cheaper than preventing it. Neoliberal governments will support or even encourage powerful pollutors, if they are established members of the plutocracy, as President Trump is demonstrating nearly every day. These pollutors and destroyers have wealth and can buy both government support and politicians in general. They can pay for campaigns and propaganda. They can promise easy well paid jobs in their industry, and those people who were politicians and are now in the industry demonstrate the benefits of this position and are persuasive. Within neoliberalism, with wealth as the prime marker of success, the destructive business people are also considered virtuous and superior people, so the destruction they produce must also be virtuous.

In this situation, objecting to cheap ecological destruction, or proposing ways of preventing such destruction becomes seen as an attack on the powerful and on morality of the system in general.

One of my friends who studies neoliberalism, seems to be coming to the view that neoliberalism’s first political success came about in the 1970s through opposing the idea of Limits to Growth, and supporting ideas of capitalist expansion through endless technological innovation and creativity. This movement assumes that (within capitalism) desired, or needed, technological innovation will always occur, and be implemented, with no dangerous unintended consequences. This seems unlikely to always be true, and to be primarily based in fantasy and wish-fulfillment. It was also probably more attractive to voters than voluntary austerity. It allowed the continuance of ‘development’.

If this is the case, then neoliberals (rather than Conservatives) have been implicated in anti-ecological thinking from the begining.

The UK and Germany actually have Conservative parts in the mainstream Right, and they seem relatively happy with moving from coal into renewables – so we are not talking about every form of capitalism being equally destructive.

In Australia, neoliberalism is reinforced by the learnt dependence of the official economy on resources exports – whether agricultural or mineral, both of which have tended to destroy or strain Australian ecologies. Most Australians think mining is much more important to the economy than it is, expecially after all the subsidies and royalty and tax evasions are factored in. This visions of success implies that destruction is probably acceptable. Australia is big after all, and most people never see the sites of destruction, even if they have large scale consequences.

These processes have lead to a power imbalance in Australia, in which the mining sector calls the shots, and boasts of its power to remove prime ministers. It not only creates loyalty, but also terror.

Renewables, less cheap pollution, less cheap destruction of ecologies, less poisoning, are threats to established ways of ‘developing’, and to be hindered, even if they are ‘economically’ preferable, or succesful in the market.

In this situation, it is perfectly natural that other forms of economy, or activities which could potentially restructure the economy and disrupt the plutocracy, should be stiffled by any means available. In this case, this includes increasing regulation on renewable energy, suggesting that more subsidies will be given to new fossil fuel power, and increasing penalties for protesting against those supporting, or profiting from, fossil fuels.

In Australia, Labor is rarely much better than the Coalition in this space, as the fuss after the last election has clearly shown. It is being said that they failed because they did not support coal or the aspirations of voters to succeed in plutocracy, and they vaguely supported unacceptable ‘progressive’ politics.

Neoliberalism as immortality project

This constant favouring of established wealth, leads to the situation in which people with wealth think they will be largely immune to problems if they maintain their wealth (and by implication shuffle the problems onto poorer people).

At the best it seems to be thought that wealthy people are so much smarter than everyone else, that they can deal with the problems, and this success with problems might trickle down to everyone else. Thus wealth has to be protected.

These factors make the plutocracy even more inward looking. Rather than observing the crumbling world, the wealthy are incentivised to start extracting more from their companies and the taxpayers, to keep them safe. They become even more prone to fantasy and to ignore realities.

Conclusion

Developmentalism and Neoliberalism constitute the major forms of policy dominating world governance, and visions of the future.

In the English speaking world neoliberalism dominates. We have more totalitarian neoliberals (Republicans, Liberals, Nationals) and more humanitarian neoliberals (Democrats, Labour etc).

In the rest of the world, developmentalism can occasionally dominate over neoliberalism (ie in China), but the idea of economic expansion and a degree of emulation of the supposed economic success of the ‘West’ remains a primary aim.

Developmentalism and Neoliberalism both establish and protect ecological destruction for wealth generation and are among the main social obstacles to a transition to renewables.

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Energy Transitions in India, Germany and Australia

September 16, 2019

I am participating in a project with other researchers from UTS, the University of Sydney and elsewhere, which compares the trajectories of energy transition in three countries; India, Germany and Australia. This is a preliminary set of arguments. It should not be assumed to express the consensus, conclusions, or more detailed knowledge of my colleagues, who are far better informed than myself.

We can begin with the simple observation that, greenhouse gas emissions are, at best, above targeted reductions (Germany), and, at worse, are steadily increasing (Australia and India). So the socio-political systems in place to reduce emissions and help the transition to renewable energies are not working very well.

All these countries seem to be encouraging what we might call neoliberal transition, where ‘neoliberal’ is defined as State encouragement of (largely big and established) business, the judging of acceptability by monetary profit or cheapness, and the provision of taxpayers’ money to protect those established businesses. Neoliberalism officially proclaims that the ‘free market’ provides the best solution to every problem, while not being ashamed to subsidise and protect favoured and influential market players (even while policy makers are claiming they are after a level playing field). The rhetorical point of neoliberalism is to posit business as the only, or most, important element in society, and profit-taking as the prime motivation for action. That helps explain why business interests are prioritized over all other interests. Neoliberalism, expresses the State as captured by capitalism, or specific corporate players.

Neoliberalism aims at maximizing profits and cheapness of production. Neither of which may always guarantee quality, or that the company works with local people in the local peoples’ interest. In Australia, the heavily neoliberal Federal government is talking of taxpayer subsidy of coal fired energy and is attempting to prolong the life of uneconomic coal based energy stations.

After blaming renewables for the steady increase in electricity prices (a point which is contested), the Australian government is attempting to force lower prices for electricity, which may harm smaller suppliers, and leave companies with less capital for investment in new energy sources. In the Hunter Valley in Australia, this move has involved a well-publicised fight against the closure of the Liddell power station, which its owners AGL, consider uneconomical, dangerous and fully replaceable with renewables.

The Government is also encouraging the opening of massive new coal mines, the expansion of old mines (primarily for export) and fracking, in the name of economic well-being.

Through these actions, the government appears to be putting the welfare of fossil fuel companies above everyone else.

In Germany, looking after established corporations has required a lot of taxpayers money in payouts and tax breaks. According to reports from the Federal Agency for Nature Conservation, Germany gives 55 billion euros ($61 billion US) in tax breaks to its biggest polluting industries, through exemptions from levies on kerosene, diesel and other sources of energy. Large corporations such as BASF SE and Thyssenkrupp AG benefit from exemptions from the Erneuerbare-Energien-Gesetz, surcharge which are offered to companies with very high levels of electricity consumption. This obviously undermines the function of the Emissions Trading Scheme, or any other economic factors in persuading companies not to use fossil fuels, or become energy efficient. In the neoliberal regime, these companies can simply point out that if they do pay the cost for not using low emissions energy, they can simply go elsewhere. And this must be morally right given neoliberalism.

Looking after established corporations in this way, has also helped lessen any beneficial effects from the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, which was initially weakened by the over-issuing of tradeable certificates so the scheme would not hurt big and powerful polluters. State protection of big business, while talking of free markets, is neoliberalism at work.

In India both coal and renewables are being boosted for ‘development’, which increases total emissions levels. While the official target is for a total of 175 gigawatts (GW) of renewables by 2022, a Brooking’s institute report claims that in India:

approximately 65 GW of [coal based] power plants are under some stage of construction, with about 50 GW progressed beyond paper plans

This is clearly on top of the already existing coal fired energy plants, which according to some sources amounts to 220GW.

In all these countries, expansion of coalmines and destruction of villages and fertile land continues to be a source of struggle – although this may be coming to a foreseeable end in Germany.

Community energy seems to be being discouraged. Indeed in Germany and India rates of community participation in the transformation seem to be declining, due to the reverse auction process (where players bid for a lowest price to provide electricity) in Germany, and the availability of the grid requiring locally generated power to be destroyed in India. In Australia, community energy may often depend on local Councils deciding to interact with their communities and support such participation, and is thus difficult in areas in which Councils are not supportive. This does not mean there are no community energy projects, but there are few formal guidelines, especially in Australia. In NSW, regulations appear to frequently prevent sharing of locally generated power with specific other local people, thus preventing the construction of microgrids, other than on the one property. This probably comes about because of the neoliberal benefits of privatising the grid, and the need to keep grid companies profitable.

Neoliberal methods, by definition, tend to cut out popular participation and community control. Neoliberal consultations are often cursory and private, or ‘commercial in-confidence’; as good consultations are costly and slow, and can be considered interferences in the flow of the established market. Neoliberal methods can also lead to the destruction of land rendering it unsuitable for agricultural purposes, or which change land use, and changes of people’s relationships to the land, through rigorous application of property rights which define property as disposable. The production of solar panels may also be heavily polluting, and the concrete bases used for field based renewables, both solar and wind, also emit greenhouse gases and possibly decreases the mass of soil fertility. This does not mean that renewables may not have far less disastrous effect than coal, but that renewables are not inherently without unpleasant environmental and social consequences, and neoliberal, or commercial, policies do nothing to discourage this.

All of this sets up the paradox that we are trying to reconnect people to the necessity of maintaining ecologies, by disrupting their relationships to the ecology (pleasurable and otherwise).

Cutting out community based renewables, with input from local players, may leave people open to being used to resist the transition completely, as when politicians, media and astro-turf groups appear to encourage ideas of wind turbine syndrome and normally ignorable environmental destruction, in a “by all means have renewables, but not here” move. In Germany, increasing resistance to land based wind farms, and above ground power cables going through the countryside, has already helped slow down the transformation, and similar signs are present in Australia.

One reason for supporting neoliberal transitions is that it could be relatively quick, and relatively free of financial risk to tax-payers.

However, Neoliberal transition can mean diverting money to established companies who are not engaging in transition, or supporting established companies effectively sabotaging the transition by refusing to co-operate with competitors, or refusing to build the necessary, and resilient, grid infrastructure.

A problem with community based energy democracy, is lack of co-ordination and lack of speed, as it takes time to raise money and get people on board. However, locally based renewable power grids may, as well as being more considerate to the local people and landscapes, may also be less prone to wide scale disruption from storm events, which are likely to increase with climate change.

This may suggest another paradox: energy democracy may not have the speed to produce the transformation in time, but if we do produce the transformation in time it may be alienating for most people, put in place without proper consultation or participation, and generate protest and disruption.

If all goes well, then Germany might reach its targets but, without radical changes, India and Australia will carry on increasing their emissions. This continues to suggest that the procedures of transition in all three countries require modification.

The most obvious suggestion is to stop expecting companies to do it all, to stop actively inhibiting those companies who are engaged in change, and to make it easier and clearer for local communities (rural and city based) to set up their own renewable microgrids and complexes.

But this may not be enough.

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