Transcription
[Music] Lovely. Very nice. How are you doing? Oh, me? Yeah. Yeah. No, I'm all right. Let's go around everyone individually and find out how we are. Uh, it'll be it'll take too long. That's crazy. Uh, welcome. Really nice to see you again, George. Uh, we talked before lockdown and now it's post-lockdown. Uh, we are going to be talking about um about your book, uh, the invisible doctrine, which you wrote with Peter Hutchinson, and it's also a film, right, as well as a book. Um, uh, the the quote from the film I liked from the trailer of the film in fact was, imagine people in Russia not having heard of communism, which is sort of the the the basis of this book is that we're we're living under a system that most of us haven't heard of.
Um, but probably the place to start with this is actually to talk about what capitalism is, I think, and that's where the book starts. It's sort of more important to just define capitalism and where that began. Yeah. No, I think it's the right place to start because neoliberalism, which we're also going to be talking about, is really a tool used by capitalism. And the purpose of the tool is to defeat democracy. That's what it's there for. There have been two very handy tools used by that neoliberalism. One is fascism, sorry, used by capitalism. One is fascism, one is neoliberalism. But to to understand it and to get behind it, we really need to understand first of all what capitalism is. Yeah. And you can get into endless rows with people about I'm I'm pro-capitalism, I'm anti-capitalism without anyone actually defining what they mean by this thing. And there's this generalized assumption that capitalism well is buying and selling stuff and it's having people working for you and it's having property and stuff. But a lot of that comes under the the ages of commerce. Yeah. And things like that have been happening. Commerce has been happening for thousands of years. But Peter and I see capitalism as as a as a distinct economic system which arose about 600 years ago and following the work of the great geographer Jason Moore who applies Carl Pelani's definition that capitalism involves the commodification of land, labor and money. He traces back the origins of capitalism to about 1450 on the island of MadiRaa.
Yeah, it's very specific. Um, and um and he says this arguably is the first place where land, labor and money were simultaneously commodified. So commodification means the stripping away of social and cultural and historical meaning. It means instrumentalizing that thing so that it has just one purpose, and that purpose is to make money for you. And MadiRaa was struck upon by the Portuguese in 1420, and um they thought, "Oh god, there's a whole there's an island covered in a whole load of trees. Um, it's got lots and lots of Madiraa timber on it, wood. What are we going to call it?" Tough one. You know, it's a classic imagination of the colonist. Oh, we'll call it Madiraa. So, and and Portugal was very short of timber at the time. They'd used it all to build their ships to get to places like Madiraa; they'd run out, um, and then um and so they were delighted to stumble across this place which was a rare example of a genuinely uninhabited land. There were no people living there, and so to begin with they did what they'd been doing at home. They cut down trees. They ran a few cattle and pigs on the land, and then someone realized this was a great place for growing sugar. Sugar was like gold in those days. It was so valuable and it had the right climate, the right soil, and above all it had loads of Madiraa uh because you need about 60 kg of wood to refine a kilogram of sugar in the boilers, right? And so they thought, you know, we could just do this. There's no one stopping us. There's no lord of the manor to say you can't use this land. There's no commoners to say we got rights over this land. We can just do whatever the hell we want on this land. Oh, hang on a moment. We need labor. So, do where do we go? Do we go to local Oh, there aren't any local people. We can't go there. Do we go to Portugal and buy some labor or try to um um force some local lord to to give up some of his surfs? No, we don't need to pay anyone. We can just go and grab labor from wherever it's grabbable. So, they went to the Canary Islands and they they grabbed people to use as slaves. And then when they ran out, they gra went to West Africa and grabbed more people to use as slaves. It was pure commodification of labor alongside this commoditized land. And then they said, "Well, we had to finance this operation." So, where do we go? Again, you'd normally go to your local money lender, your lord of the manor, the rest of it to to to get money. They charge extortionate rates of interest, but hey, we're on Madiraa. We can go wherever the hell we want. So, they went to Genua, they went to Flanders, and there were no social relations tied up with that money. It was just money for the use of money. And then when they brought these three elements together in what Jason Moore argues is a unique combination, hadn't been done before, extraordinary things happened. First of all, within about 30 years, Madiraa became the world's primary source of sugar. Even though it's a tiny island in the Atlantic, it was just like woof this massive explosion in production. But then almost overnight, the production collapsed. Within 10 20 years it it lost 80% of of of of productivity, and the reason for that was that Madiraa ran out of easily accessible sources of Madiraa; they they had to go further; slaves had to go further and further to obtain wood for the boilers because they cut down all the forests, and so their productivity of labor collapsed, and so boom and bust which turn out to be two intrinsic elements of capitalism, but then the third one was they looked around and said, "Well, this place is Wonder how that happened. Let's clear off and go and find another place, right? Quit." So, they went to Santo and they did exactly the same to Santo, but even quicker. And and they burnt through that. They literally burnt through it. And by this time, Columbus had cleared off across the Atlantic, said, "Oh, this place looks nice." Um, and so they were then able after they buggered up Santom to to to go over to the coast of Brazil where they worked their way up the coast of Brazil um, enslaving the indigenous people, murdering them in vast numbers, felling the forests, exhausting the soil and then moving on to the next place. Boom, bust, quit was what this new system did. It moved into the Caribbean by which time the English had joined them, the Spanish, the the Dutch, the French people were cottoning on to this new way of doing business. And and and capitalism is a firefront. It's it's an economic system founded on colonial looting which constantly expands and consumes its own frontier and it pushes that frontier further and further into our lives ecologically, socially um in of course economically, politically um going ever further to grab more and more resources through violence and turns um common resources into private property. Property which can then be traded and so it it then feeds back into commerce and eventually overtakes commerce. But capitalism can exist without commerce, and commerce can exist without capitalism.
Yeah. I mean, is there not I mean the world I suppose just seemed so big that it didn't feel like they needed to plant some more trees, but wouldn't it just made sense to to make half of MadiRaa some wood again and replant it? It's just it's just the greed of moving on quickly. Well, I mean, you're just always looking for the low-hanging fruit, you know, the most accessible resources. And as you exhaust those, you have to push the frontier ever further and further out. Um, so you have to go and drill for oil in the Arctic or in the deep ocean or look for minerals in the deep ocean and your fish populations ever further and further away. You're extracting less and less from more and more as as you exhaust resources. And now they're looking at mining asteroids or other planets. And I can see where it's going as Elon Elon Musk heads for Mars going, What can we what can we take out of there? There's not many trees there. Unfortunately, Elon, if you're going to try and do this.
Um, so neoliberalism is is relatively new compared to capitalism. It's sort of a sort of post-war Yeah. invention. So, so, so I mentioned before that, you know, capitalism's for the past 150 years or so has had this problem which is people voting, and when people vote, they have the tmerity to ask for things like more wages and shorter working hours and not having their arms ripped off by machinery and um and having houses with roofs on and having breathable air and clean water and unadulterated food and stuff like this. And capitalism does not want to give this to people because that erodes the profit margin. And so capitalism has been trying to solve this problem of democracy ever since it it reared its head. Um, and it found a highly effective means of solving this in the form of fascism. It's not that capitalism invented fascism, but as it came along, it thought, "Oh, this is useful. This is great. This crushes the aspirations of the working people." Um, and this basically sweeps away all that democracy nonsense and replaces it with a central authority which we can effectively control, you know, and and behind the fascist movements in Europe was some very big bucks. Um, and some of the richest industrialists um in Europe and in Japan supported fascist movements for for that reason. But in 1945, that solution ran into a certain minor difficulty.
Um, but just in the nick of time, 1944, two books had been published, one called the road to serfdom by Friedrich Hayek and one called bureaucracy by Ludvig von Mises, and they opposed they opposed fascism. They they, you know, they weren't in any way people who were keen on totalitarianism or even authoritarianism. They believed that they had struck upon a formula for human freedom, and they said the state is the great oppressor of freedom. You know, if you look at um Stalinism, if you look at Nazism, you'll see this centralized authority is destroying freedom. They were completely right about that, of course. Um, and so the answer is to remove the state from our lives as much as possible. Release the spirit of enterprise and in doing so discover a kind of natural order of the worthy and the unworthy. They were quite Calvinist in their approach. You can tell who the worthy are because they've got the money. You can tell who the unworthy are because they haven't got the money, and any interference by things like taxing the rich, um, spending money into public services, the welfare state, heaven forbid, trade unions, protest movements, regulations, any of those things will interfere with the discovery of the natural order and the wrong people will come out on top and the right people will be cast down and and they won't achieve their their natural position of economic dominance. So um and and it wasn't like they were trying deliberately to serve capital. That wasn't in the first instance their intent, though it later did become Friedrich Hayek's intent in a very clear way. But capital saw this in the form of some of literally the richest people on earth. They saw this and thought, who fantastic. Just as the old system is failing, the old solution is failing; a new one comes along. And in 1947 they set up something called the Mont Pelerin Society, which they poured money into, vast amounts of money. And out of that came what has been described as the neoliberal international. You know, a bit like the Marxist international, but neoliberal international. In this case, not powered by the proletariat but powered by money. And they set up this international network of these so-called think tanks, junk tanks as I prefer to call them. Uh, who are basically lobby groups for oligarchs and corporations. Um, they set up new academic departments. Uh, they recruited tame journalists, government advisors, um all all sorts of influential people around the world. And because there was so much money, they could afford to recruit the cleverest people who and their task was to spin what was basically an outrageous and obnoxious doctrine which most people who came across it absolutely hated into something which seemed publicly acceptable. And you have to remember, you know, this was right at the beginning of what the French call the trente glorieuses, the 30 glorious years, 1945 to 1975, when there was what economists call the great compression, a massive reduction of inequality, a massive redistribution of wealth because the power of the ruling classes had to a large extent been smashed by the Second World War. They had lost a lot of their property. Um, stuff had been requisitioned. They u there was rationing systems. There are all sorts of ways in which they could no longer keep accumulating. I mean, there was a 98% top rate of income tax in the UK, 94% in the US, there was a 100% luxury goods tax. You know, this this really destroyed the power of of the ruling economic class. And so, they were in a very weak position, you know, the few remaining plutocrats. And um, you know, Japan, they've been swept away completely by MacArthur, who instituted what he later about 5 years down the line, oh my god, is this socialism? You know, having having completely destroyed the the the sort of the capitalist class and and built up trade unions and done land reform and community ownership and stuff is suddenly Oh, hang on a moment. Uh, what have we done here? Anyway, um the the are we the good guys now? So, so um um and so they're in a weak position, but they because they recruited these clever people, they could be very strategic. And as one of their recruits, Milton Friedman said, you know, we realized we had to wait a generation for this stuff to come to pass. Uh, but we could prepare ourselves. We could get ready. We could marshal the arguments. We could hone them. We could focus group them. We could see what played with people, what didn't play with people. We could develop a narrative. They were, you know, there was a lot for all of us to learn in what they did in their very strategic approach. And he later said when the time came, and this was in the late 1970s, when Keynesian social democracy ran into trouble, when the great compression began to crumble, when the time came, we could step right in. They had this ready-made solution and they could say, "Uh, yeah, well that Keynesianism nonsense, all that social democracy, well, that's gone to hasn't it?" And look, we've got the answer. And and people, you know, they look around say, who's got an answer to this the trouble that we're in? You know, there was all there was stagflation. There had been the oil crisis. There were all sorts of massive issues. Keynesianism had partly been ripped down by um capitalists destroying capital controls, foreign exchange controls in which Keynesianism was dependent. Um, and they um and and here's someone saying, "We got a complete story here, a complete answer." And so it was just lapped up. People were ready.