Steering away from neoliberalism

DERMOT ROANTREE :: Two monumental global crises in the past twenty years have given us all the warning we should need that if we don’t acknowledge our shared vulnerability and the necessity for mutual care, collective action, and worldwide solidarity, we will pay a devastating price.
The first of these was the financial crisis of 2007-8. Many public intellectuals at the time read the crisis as conclusively undermining neoliberal faith in deregulated markets, financialisation, and individualism. Contra Thatcher, they argued, there is such a thing as society, and without a balance between the role of markets and that of government and of nonmarket and nongovernmental institutions, that society will crumble. You’d have 2008 all over again: millions of people losing their homes, their jobs, and their savings, or living constantly under the threat of losing them, and tens of millions falling into poverty. We had a choice. ‘If we make the right decisions,’ Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz wrote,
[…] we will not only make another crisis less likely, but perhaps even accelerate the kinds of real innovations that would improve the lives of people around the world. If we make the wrong decisions, we will emerge with a society more divided and an economy more vulnerable to another crisis and less well equipped to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century’.
And then, ten years later, Covid-19 struck. Once again, the verdict of the commentators was unequivocal: the pandemic had stripped away the illusions of individualism and self-sufficiency and revealed the fragility of human life on the planet; if we were to survive it, we had to choose solidarity over nationalist isolation. For Mariana Mazzucato, Covid-19 demonstrated the need for strong public institutions, more dynamic public sector capabilities, and collective investments in public health. It was a wake-up call, she said, for societies that relied too much on market-based solutions. Yuval Noah Harari stressed the need for a global plan: to meet a global crisis, there must be an openness to share information and expertise, to pool resources, and to create structures for global economic cooperation that are not hampered by insular or xenophobic attitudes.
One thing seemed clear: there was no going back to the way things were before. The pandemic was ‘a portal’, Arundhati Roy said – ‘a gateway between one world and the next’. But what would the world on the other side of the portal look like? That would come down to the choices we made. Would we take the route of global solidarity, or would we fall back into narrow nationalist isolation? Would we invest power in communities and in bodies that could effectively address issues of social and environmental justice, or would we allow it to become ever more concentrated in the hands of tech billionaires and autocrats?
Perhaps nobody sounded the alarm more frequently and more volubly on this issue than Pope Francis. Though there were some positive signs, he noted, ultimately the pandemic exposed our false securities and showed our inability to work together. ‘For all our hyper-connectivity,’ he wrote in Fratelli Tutti, ‘we witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all.’ The root cause was clear. In a general audience he said: ‘When the obsession to possess and dominate excludes millions of persons from having primary goods; when economic and technological inequality are such that the social fabric is torn; and when dependence on unlimited material progress threatens our common home, then we cannot stand by and watch.’ Love, justice and solidarity, he declared, is the only path.
Sadly, in many parts of the world another path was taken – the one Naomi Wolf warned about in her Shock Doctrine, the path of disaster capitalism. That is, the exploitation of public vulnerability so as to push through a neoliberal agenda of reduced regulation, the privatisation of public services, and the concentration of power in the hands of a small plutocratic elite. And at the same time, illiberal democracy and ethnocentric nationalism flourished. They continue to do so; hopes of greater solidarity seem to have come to nothing – even as we face, in climate change, a far greater existential threat than any we have already met. Despite multiple warnings on the ecological front, we have still failed to remove the boundaries that inhibit collective action. Time has run out. The horrifying floods and the catastrophic loss of life and livelihood in Valencia, Spain, at the end of October makes one thing clear: the crisis is already upon us, and change is urgently needed even just to mitigate its effects.
Klein quotes Milton Friedman: ‘Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around’. But those ideas need not be Friedman’s free-market capitalist ideas. Other ideas are available. Pope Francis proposes the primacy of the person, the recognition of everyone’s right to live with dignity and to develop integrally, an attitude of service and solidarity, an acknowledgement of the social role of property, respect for the natural environment, and so on – ‘a new vision of fraternity and social friendship’. Such a thing is possible, but it must of course be expressed concretely. Vigilance, therefore, is needed in relation to the public policies and economic doctrines that govern the lives of our nations.
On Ireland, how is it the case that ‘such a rich country could have such deficient social provision and services in so many areas’? Ireland’s development model grew up under the dominance of foreign direct investment. As the essays in the winter 2024 issue of Studies make clear, ‘this is structurally at odds with the urgent need to foster social wellbeing in so many forms, all within the boundaries of what the planet can carry’. We need to chart a better course.