CanaryPod EP2: know your enemy

In the second of an occasional series of joint podcasts between the Canary’s Ed Sykes and Collective’s Sean Halsall – leader of Southport Community Independents (SCI) – we discuss the nature of neoliberalism, the damage it has caused, and how to replace it. Welcome to CanaryPod: the Canary’s podcast is back. You can listen below:

CanaryPod: episode 2

Late London School of Economics professor David Graeber once insisted that neoliberalism is:

when you claim the markets will solve all problems so you create even more bureaucracy to “unleash market forces” on everyone but the rich

As the Canary has reported, neoliberalism is very much the modern machine for class warfare, and it has been for decades (particularly since Margaret Thatcher’s time in power, in Britain). It’s all about austerity (cutting public spending), privatising public resources, freeing companies from regulations, and turning citizens into competitors rather than communities. Even many mainstream economists have condemned it as a failed economic model that deepens inequality, undermines democracy, slashes living standards (especially for the poorest people and younger generations) while only serving the interests of the richest.

In our podcast, Halsall stressed that:

We’ve given over control of our life to this machine… that no longer puts human life above profit.

He added that neoliberalism is:

about complete freedom for these businesses to run rampant and exploit us [and] the planet

It’s an utterly brutal ideology, he said, precisely because:

they’ve given themselves carte blanche to ignore any moral argument. And that leads down some very, very dark paths, when the only thing that matters is generating money.

Neoliberalism and the far right

The rise of the far right in recent years has largely been a result of growing frustration in the wake of the 2007/8 capitalist crisis and the new neoliberal assault that followed. The areas austerity hit the hardest also tended to mirror the areas that voted Brexit in 2016 – highlighting the anti-establishment frustration that government policies fostered. And the far right exploited the anger of some people neoliberalism had screwed over and managed to twist it towards minority communities, rather than the billionaires and millionaires siphoning money out of their pockets and into offshore bank accounts.

As Halsall insisted:

It’s class war, but one side of that war is invisible, is cloaked, you can’t see them, you can’t find them, you don’t know who your enemy is anymore. And the other side is left completely powerless, and without the institutions to get the political education to understand why their material condition is the way it is.

This is why millionaires like Nigel Farage are able to:

just do a bait and switch like ‘look over there, it’s those brown people in a hotel’ rather than ‘it’s these billionaires who’ve been exploiting us for a long time’. If you’ve not got the basic understanding of how economic systems work, then those stories and lies they tell make sense, because no one’s telling the other side of that story. No one’s saying, ‘as working-class people, we don’t own anything anymore’.

He highlighted the importance of people focusing their attention on the real enemy – the people getting richer and richer thanks to neoliberalism. And he stressed:

they’re stealing your life from you. How long do you spend at work instead of being with your kids and families? We don’t get very many years on this earth. We should probably be spending less of it making money for other people, and more of it being human, enjoying interactions, and building community again.

Neoliberalism has sought to turn us as humans into products where “we’re only as valuable as the money we can make for someone else”, he said. But there’s hope, he argued, because:

I think, as a species, we can do so much better.

This, he asserted, means building a sense of community again, showing solidarity with each other, and empowering people via democratic ownership of workplaces.

Featured image via the Canary