[Poem about age-related macular degeneration, of which I have the, so far, 'dry' version. Have now lost central vision in one eye. 'Bong Bong Street' is the actual main street in Bowral, NSW. 'Drusen' is the medical term for the small lipid/protein waste deposits on the macular that are no longer recycled into the retina as in young, healthy eyes and thus accumulate and ultimately impede vision. Photo of Schubert's glasses: 'Through Schubert's Eyes' taken in Vienna by my late friend Chris Donaldson.]
A Maculate Annunciation
first comes as unangelic blur on Bong Bong Street, a glary cloudiness around its opposite side, fine focus, distinctiveness of detail now a memory cruelling
neurons in a white-out of fade and too bright light. There’s a kind of tiredness, a faint eyeball seediness, like an insomniac raising sun-drenched blinds at dawn.
You turn your texts up to two hundred per cent, squint at their shapes, track hieroglyphs of meaning like a doggy scent. Behold: the crisp, immaculate world
has turned maculate unto us. A LED-lit glass hovers over the page, your remaining good eye now a Cyclops with a handle. Faces in certain light are now shadowed cloud banks
emitting words sans subtle dance of mouth and eye. The doctor says drusen deposits have broken off, like weather-caked sand banks crumbling
into indomitable incoming tides, yellow spots of fatty waste have clogged up your worn, weary retina’s central site no longer able to recycle them.
Nice it isn’t bleeding yet, although at least he’s got a needle for that. Powerless, in kindness, he waives his specialist fee, and wishes you a merry Christmas.
[Continues on from previous post. This is an updated version of a post I made four years ago. Image: Gothic rosette window at Notre Dame, Paris]
The Great Awakening
This is a momentous, unprecedented historical shift, the rocky process of a great human liberation. Like all such historical transitions this shift is rife with opportunity and dangers.
The dangers are mainly rooted in fear, a fear of liberation, of freedom and responsibility. Many, and not just power elites, deeply resent the liberation of others they see as ‘inferior’ or ‘beneath’ them. Many are overwhelmed and frightened by cultural modernisation and the weakening or decay of authorities they were taught to believe in. Their old belief systems and thus very identities seem to be under threat. Forty years of neoliberal globalisation and class-warfare from above have badly dented the dream of middle-class affluence for all in our old Western democracies.
The fearful wish to turn the tide, turn the modernising clock back to a time of ‘greatness’, ‘strength’, ‘certainty’. Rigidly authoritarian, they may wish to see some ‘strong’ authority figure, usually male, provide a sense of in-group belonging and certainty by directing their fear and resentment towards outgroups, foreigners, immigrants, unbelievers, liberal elites, blaming scapegoats and dark conspiracies for their woes. Religious fundamentalism and terrorism, right-wing populism and outright fascism are dangerous expressions of such reactionary backlashes and fear of freedom.
At the same time, for those open to it, this Great Awakening is opening the possibility of a new level of Freedom, a new freedom from, and a new freedom to. The freedom from all false authority and oppression. The freedom to a new level of responsibility within our new reality of being One World.
The freedom from all false authority, from other-directedness or heteronomy, is a new level of self-activity, self-management, autonomy. Politically it will take the form of a participatory or deliberative democracy, possibly combining the best of liberal-electoral democracy with the best of direct assembly democracy. Democratic freedom and participation will necessarily have to extend to core economic decision-making.
In contrast to immature, egoic, purely individualistic freedom-as-licence, our mature freedom also means the freedom to be responsible. This new level of responsibility is rooted in an awareness of our freedom, well-being and security being interdependent on the freedom, security and well-being of all others, human and non-human, on this beautiful but ailing planet. Nobody can really be safe and free until all are. The covid-19 pandemic has been a great, albeit generally ignored, teacher in this respect.
Our potential new responsible freedom is thus not just political but economic, the latter also an important condition of the former. No freedom or peace without social and climate justice. There is now enough wealth to fulfil basic needs for everybody on the planet if the rich give up unsustainable consumption so that the poor can increase theirs until we both converge at the level of a sustainable fair earth share for all. This national and international ‘contraction and convergence’ is the necessary material basis of a conscious One World, of a good Anthropocene.
Our Great Awakening is slowly emerging, manifesting in both growing numbers of individuals and collectively in progressive social movements. As a species we have, especially in the last fifty or sixty years, been making great progress in our general recognition of universal human rights and equality, our global social and ecological interdependence, animal welfare. Old premodern and new modern stories have been interacting, arguing, synthesising.
Although most of us don’t know it, we are, slowly, painfully, moving towards an emerging One World, the realisation of One Human Family on One (endangered) Earth. Resistance to this dawning realisation is of course enormous, outright denial, ultranationalist-tribalist regression, neo-fascist fear-based violence, irrational lashing-out, xenophobic scapegoating and wars always possible and probable.
Our universal story has now reached the present year of 2025/26, and will conclude here. We all sense we are in pivotal, turning times, times that seem out of joint. Things seem to be shifting on their axis.
Geopolitically, we are now obviously in the middle of a historical transition in global, imperial power structures. Global hegemony is shifting back from west to east, from the Atlantic to the Indo-Pacific, from the US to China and India. Four major nuclear powers are now headed by autocrats dominated by a sense of resentment: Trump, Putin, Xi, Modi. While the US and India still (as of 2025) have democratic remnants, reactionary, xenophobic populist, far-right and neo-fascist forces, expressing a fearful, resentful, violent backlash against accepting the realities of the Great Reckoning and One Earth, are also gathering strength in many still open societies globally.
What is unprecedented in this geopolitical transition is that one ‘emperor’, Trump, is, it would seem, in some way under the influence, or possibly even in the pocket of, another, Putin, and, also through sheer psychopathic stupidity, contributing to the faster demise of US power, while another, Xi, also has a complete stranglehold on the critical rare earths and minerals needed for all military weapons and hi-tech industry. Both Putin and Xi are doubtless thrilled that Trump is President.
However, once all this becomes ever clearer, an irrational lashing out by a cornered ‘loser’ Trump – who already at the beginning of his second term ‘no longer gives a fuck’ (as recently reported by some insiders) and has been given total immunity by the stacked Supreme Court − is also possible, for example by some imperialist aggression as now (2026) in Iran (then Cuba, minerals-rich Greenland?) or even nuclear war against China (e.g. over Taiwan and its globally leading semiconductor industry). The utter catastrophe of such a third world war goes without saying. It would probably mean the end of the world as we know it in every sense and a regression to a new Dark Ages on a contaminated, unlivable hothouse Earth.
What can be done? The usual. Read up, talk with friends, organise for resistance and solidarity across movements and nations, engage in non-violent activism for deep democratisation and structural social change. Avoid self-talk about things you cannot change. Build resilient, directly-democratic communities. Think globally, act locally. Plant trees, flowers, vegetables, rewild cities and landscapes. Financially support all these endeavours. Nourish your mental health with music, art, literature. If you live in a rich country, consume less, drive and fly less, live more.
Above all, perhaps, it seems necessary to find (or be found by) one’s spiritual centre beyond all this, beyond all one’s worries, fears and inner chatter, beyond all the ‘news’ and overwhelm. Enjoy time in nature, a park, a garden. Find the spacious inner peace and stillness, the ever-present ‘stillpoint of the turning world’ (T.S. Eliot). The Great Awakening is also a spiritual one. .
This book ends here, at the end of the first quarter of the twenty-first century, in the easy certainties neither of hope nor of despair. After its fourteen-billion-year journey through and as Matter, Life and Mind, it ends in the conviction that history, evolution, is as unpredictable as our own actions which conceive and shape it, and that Life, grounded in the non-conceptual No-thing of the formless Unmanifest, is a mysterious, immeasurable source of spontaneous surprise and creativity.
So perhaps it’s time to bring in the poets again …
Victorian High-Modern poet Alfred Tennyson had a view on some of this in his poem ‘Locksley Hall, 60 Years After’, written when he was eighty and published in 1908:
Chaos, Cosmos! Cosmos, Chaos! Who can tell how all will end?
Read the wide world’s annals, you, and take their wisdom for your friend. […]
Forward, backward, backward, forward, in the immeasurable sea, Sway’d by vaster ebbs and flows than can be known to you or me. […]
Evolution ever climbing after some ideal good, And Reversion ever dragging Evolution in the mud. […]
Forward then, but still remember how the course of Time will swerve,
Crook and turn upon itself in many a backward streaming curve.
[An attempt to frame our turbulent times within a wider world-historical perspective as of 2025. From the conclusion of my unpublished big history book You Are Here, and We Are It. In two parts.]
The Energy Transition Continues: Beginning of the Post-Carbon Era of the Anthropocene. Like our previous industrial revolutions, our Biocybernetic Fourth Industrial Revolution of course also depends on vast amounts of energy. Now in 2025 we can see that the end not only of the US Empire but of the fossil-fuel basis of our energy-intensive industrial civilisation is increasingly within sight, with enormous economic, technological, political and socio-psychological ramifications.
While our global conventional oil production has been in decline since 2006, global oil supply from both conventional and non-conventional sources could possibly decline from 2020, perhaps 2025. Global natural gas supply, including shale gas, could start declining from around 2030, and global coal production from around 2030-35, possibly sooner. At the same time, financial capital, unchecked by any regulation, continues to pump trillions into financing global ecocide and civilisational collapse: since the 2015 Paris agreement on climate change the world’s 60 largest global investment banks had pumped $3.8 trillion into fossil fuel companies by 2021. Governments everywhere continue to subsidise fossil fuels and climate collapse with billions of public money.
Nevertheless, while fossil-fuel availability projections are contested, debatable and subject to unforeseeable real-world technological, financial and political contingencies, the beginning of a general decline in fossil fuel primary energy supply around 2025-30 is highly probable, and the transition to our post-carbon era underway…
Are we experiencing breakdown and/or breakthrough? The Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that has provided an annual barometer on the threatened status of our world throughout our story of the Anthropocene is now at 89 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been to Armageddon. The risks cited are increasing aggressiveness and nationalism of the great powers, nuclear war, climate crisis, potential misuse of biotechnology and generalised use of AI without adequate controls. Must there be more enormous suffering before our cooperative, democratic, egalitarian, sustainable One World Civilisation is finally born?
With or without Doomsday Clocks, we all now feel the increasing intensity of our total human crisis. Many layers of crisis are interacting, intersecting, reinforcing each other. Climate emergency and extreme weather events, species extinctions, pandemic, economic de-globalisation and breaking supply chains, energy and food insecurity, wars and mounting inter-imperial conflict threatening World War Three, weakening of democracies and increasing autocracies, strengthening neo-fascisms etc.
Things seem to be hotting up, literally and figuratively. How can one keep a cool head in the heat, not be overwhelmed by the shifting avalanche of cascading details, get a handle on what is happening by focusing on the bigger picture? I here suggest two connected general ideas for framing our turbulent times: the Great Reckoning and the Great Awakening.
Apocalypse and the Great Reckoning
Perhaps we can speak of our current world situation as an apocalypse. For the word ‘apocalypse’ in Greek means not just doom and chaos but, literally, an un-veiling, uncovering, a revealing, a revelation and re-evaluation. The veils, blankets and curtains are being pulled back on things long ignored, denied, suppressed. There is an upwelling, a re-surfacing, a resurgence out of the deep and dark of past and present.
Freud spoke of a psychological ‘return of the repressed’, both symptomatic of, and the beginning of the healing of, neurosis. This may be our cultural neurosis moment. Our common language speaks of chickens coming home to roost, or of ‘what goes around, comes around’. We can also see it as a Great Reckoning: old bills and debts are now having to be paid. Historical, social, financial, ecological bills.
Historical chickens of many kinds are coming home to roost in what may be called a ‘Great Reckoning’: colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade, millennia of patriarchy and the oppression of women, the massive hidden abuses of the Catholic Church, the lack of democratic societal control of technological development that is built into market capitalism and its enabling state, decades of the class war from above and upward wealth re-distribution that is neoliberal capitalism, centuries of human and industrial exploitation and degradation of nature now threatening climate collapse and global ecocide.
All those oppressed, abused, ignored, denied a voice by the rich and powerful in past and present are now demanding to be heard, their human right to freedom and a voice: nature, women, non-whites, gays and queers, the neurodivergent, the poor, the economically, socially, politically or sexually abused or oppressed.
The Great Reckoning resurgence is finishing the historically unfinished business of oppression, slavery, abuse, ecological destruction. Women, non-whites, the colonised, sexual minorities and the sexually abused, the poor and oppressed, species and ecosystems are demanding to be given voices within the democratic process. In some cases, material restitution or reparations will be necessary sooner or later in order to pay the large historical debts owed (e.g. for slavery, genocide or ecological destruction).
The old oppressive authorities and power institutions are fraying and being called to account: caste and class, patriarchy and homophobia, the churches, racism, colonising states, ecocidal capitalism, oligarchic elites. Over the last few decades these old power institutions have been losing much of their authority over minds and bodies in an increasing number of countries as global modernisation drives us towards One Human Family on One World.
[Another attempt at clarification and ‘pointing’, with respect to the questions of ‘self’, identity, consciousness, spacious awareness, the difference between philosophising and ‘meditating’, the conceptual and non-conceptual … A previous attempt can be found in my July 2023 blog. Photo ‘Afternoon Soliloquy’ by my friend the late Chris Donaldson, 1993.]
NO MIND, NO SELF. MEDITATION AND PHILOSOPHY
Lost in Thought
It would seem most of us are usually lost in thought. I certainly am. Without really being aware of it, we are engaged in almost constant self-talk, mind chatter, rumination, interpretation, memory, judgement. Most of the time we are so identified with this thinking and inner chatter that we are not even aware we are actually doing this. At least in our materially rich, industrialised countries, it just seems our ‘normal’ state of being.
Philosophers of course take this mind activity to another level. As professionals of constant thinking and word production, they are truly lost in thought, with the usual thought content being abstract concepts, ideas. They specialise in having thoughts about thoughts, ideas about ideas.
Most; like the founder of modern philosophy, Descartes, explicitly see themselves from the outside, as no more than ‘things that think’ (res cogitans), which is of course just another concept, another thought. They like to claim and argue about these abstract concepts and ideas.
It seems they cannot step back and simply be aware, consciously observe without immediately thinking, analysing, without conceptualising. Thus they see everything from the outside, through the filter of a concept. The perceived and conceptualised then becomes a, potentially infinite, series of separate, third-person objects, things.
On whatever level, not just philosophers but all of us are of course caught up in this conceptualising and reifying our direct sensory perceptions.
On the few occasions philosophers do step back and introspectively turn inwards, they, again like Descartes, tend to say they can only be certain of one perceived phenomenon: the fact that they are thinking.
They then quickly start talking about more abstract concepts, external third-person things, like subject, self, identity, consciousness, mind and body etc. Thus again verbalising, objectifying the internal process of direct experiencing, they are, without realising it, identifying with their thoughts and conceptualising, and thus unconsciously locating themselves outside their first-person, subjective inner process of observing and being conscious itself.
This consciousness or being conscious becomes a reified thing, a concept that they then find troublingly impossible to deduce from their other guiding concepts of things like matter, molecules, neurons, brain, cerebral cortex. ‘Consciousness’ then famously becomes their materialist ‘hard problem’ (David Chalmers): how can ‘stuff’, a material thing like a brain, ‘produce’ immaterial consciousness, thoughts or feelings?
David Hume and the Buddha
One partial, and famous, exception to this usual objectifying philosophical and scientific procedure was the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume. He reported that when he looked inside he found, like Gautama Buddha two thousand years ago, no entity, no object or thing that thinks (Descartes’ res cogitans), no self or soul. In fact he found no thing at all. No personality, subject, ego. Nothing, i.e. no thing. All he found were subtle, fleeting, complex processes or aggregations of perceiving, feeling, wanting, thinking, associating, comparing.
No Mind, No -Self, or Meditation
Of course, like the words in this essay, it may be objected that these are all objectifying words and concepts too. Indeed they are. However, they are here being used in an attempt to point, not towards other concepts, and thus ‘philosophise’, but towards direct, actual experiences, ones all can experience simply and empirically when they dispassionately observe inner processes, i.e. ‘meditate’, or more exactly, be aware of their always-present awareness.
Hume’s observation seems to be an empirical ‘scientific’ description of the experience of calm, disinterested inward observing. Also sometimes called ‘meditation’. Interestingly, this no-self observation is also made both in neuroscience (e.g. Brian Hood, ‘The Self Illusion’) and in Buddhism’s Three Aspects of Existence doctrine of ‘anatta’ or ‘anatman’ or no-self.
Some Buddhist spiritual teaching or ‘psychology’ speaks of these observed inner processes not as any ‘self’ entity but as coming in clusters, patterns or ‘aggregates’ (‘skandhas’). These are seen as energised or driven by repetitive patterns of reactive, conditioned responses and attachments that have somehow imprinted themselves as habitual memory loops, dispositions, self-talk narratives, sometimes trans-generationally.
These skandhas are ultimately linked to pleasure/displeasure, desiring, wanting or craving, fearing. When identified with, these aggregations or habitual response patterns easily become dispositions, an illusory sense of self or I, a personality, character, an ego. All are continually reinforced by stories and self-talk (my life, my experiences, my traumas, my problems, my desires etc.)
Disidentifying from these reactive patterns, realising this false sense of self as an illusion without any unchanging, autonomous substrate or substance or ‘thinginess’ is what defines spiritual liberation or enlightenment (bodhi, moksha, satori) in all non-dual spiritual traditions.
Our Original Nature: Spacious Awareness
Thus disidentified from these habitual thought-feeling patterns, one is what one really is: ‘original’ or ‘Buddha nature’, unmanifest, unborn, undying, no entity, no me-thing, a spacious awareness, a formless no-thingness, Presence or Formlessness or Emptiness (‘sunyata’) within which all transient forms or phenomena, including sensory, emotional and thought forms, appear and disappear.
Consciously observing without thinking, ‘meditating’, we realise we are no-thing, the empty, eternal sky of dispassionate observation, the spacious formlessness and alert but calm awareness or consciousness through which pass all the many diverse clouds of thoughts, feelings, volitions, personal dramas and stories, lives and deaths.
All these are but transient waves, powerful waves we may often identify with and feel overwhelmed by, and yet only apparent waves within our eternal unmoved ocean of stillness and (back-) ground of awareness. . (Jesus may point to this using the expression ‘the kingdom of God within you’, and St Paul speak of the ‘peace that passeth all understanding’).
The only reality: the eternal Now
Eternity, the timeless, us? Again, let us step back, look inside (directly ‘in-see’) and consider the empirical facts we observe.
We observe how what we call time, present, past and future, are, like our illusory sense of self as an I- or me-thing, also not entities, objects, forms or things we can see and locate. Rather they are just concepts made of memories and imaginings based on memories, they are narratives, self-talk, thoughts. As with the self, we cannot actually experience the past or future, time itself, as real things.
We realise we can actually never experience anything but what is going on in the very present moment, the Now. A Now in which we may replay the thoughts of the past we call memories or imagine thoughts of possible events we call the future.
We realise both memories of the past and imaginings or expectations of the future can only be experienced right now in the present moment. Past and future exist nowhere else. Not perceiving this, we create an illusion of time, but to stand outside and see our unconscious creation of time is to be outside time in Timelessness. The timeless Now is really all there is …
This direct awareness of Now beyond thought is thus outside time, timeless, eternal, and simply another name for who we really are: Buddha nature, no self, aware spaciousness
A bird calls, a breeze arises, fades. A leaf falls. The moon’s reflection leaves the pond water unsullied. The bird’s flight leaves no trace.
In the current conjuncture, it is easier to imagine an end to the world than to imagine an end to capitalism (Frederic Jameson, Seeds of Time, 1994).
Maria, Bill, Joe, Lin-lin and Amina
Maria has had her workload increased at the child care centre: it’s now six infants instead of three
Bill has to wear a surveillance watch and is penalised if he takes too long getting parcels at the Amazon warehouse
Joe is a farmer contracted to sell to Woolworths at a price lower than his competitors that barely covers his rising costs; he has to clear more land and use chemicals to maximise his output and make some kind of profit.
Lin-lin is a graphic designer now unemployed because her employer has decided AI is cheaper.
Amina is a young worker in a textile sweatshop in Bangla Desh and earns 35c an hour (not enough to cover food and accommodation), and 40c for a shirt retailing in our rich world for $10. (A living wage for textile workers would increase the price of a $10 T-shirt by 10c).
Although Maria, Bill, Joe, Lin-lin and Amina don’t know each other, they share a common fate: they are all caught in the vice of capitalism. All are suffering because their employers or contractors are not interested in their well-being but in their own need to cut costs, maintain or increase profits within a competitive market system. This is not personal or optional, it is what the system demands.
The C-Word Taboo
It is doubtful that Maria, Bill, Joe, Lin-lin or Amina will use the word ‘capitalism’ and see themselves as its victims. Why is the word almost never mentioned, even by progressives? Is there a kind of social taboo around using this word? If so, why? In whose interests is this apparent conspiracy of silence by which capitalism is made invisible?
Consider our contemporary world and its deep, interdependent crises. Climate catastrophe, ecocide, toxification, the collapse of life support systems and thus civilisation. Far-right populism and fascism, crisis of liberal democracy, stratospheric inequality (with 1% owning almost half the world’s wealth). Uncontrolled, run-away technology, epidemics of loneliness and mental health issues, loss of social trust and cohesion.
Can anything be changed in all this without naming and understanding the economic and social system directly or indirectly creating these dysfunctions, capitalism?
Granted, it is often hard to understand systems. Unlike the simple, material phenomena and individual actions of daily life, they seem invisible. You can’t ‘see’ a system. You can’t ‘see’ a relationship. But you can sense and understand both. So, here is an attempt at a simple, very general definition of capitalism.
General Definition of Capitalism
Capitalism is a social and economic system in which Capital reigns.
Capital is money that MUST grow, accumulate, make a profit.
Capital grows by, ultimately, extracting or exploiting ever more resources, natural and human.
This usually happens in cycles of boom, bust, quit until potentially everything has been degraded, destroyed and/or turned into a profit-making commodity to be bought and sold. Society has then become a total market society in which Capital and commodities reign, a society in which ‘things are in the saddle and ride mankind.’ (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
Capitalism is a class system in which the few ultra-rich owners, managers and beneficiaries of Big Capital have the power and rule over everyone else and make all the key decisions. Capitalism is inherently oligarchic and undemocratic.
Capitalism has from the outset been based on the plunder and looting of both nature and the Global South.
Capital as Amoral Cancer
Capitalism is the ultimate driver of our life-threatening climate, ecological, democratic and civilisational crisis, a crisis unprecedented in its depth and scope.
It is the ultimate driver because of Capital’s inherent need to perpetually grow and accumulate and this simply cannot be on a finite planet. It is pathological. ‘Infinite growth’ is, as the saying goes, the ideology of the cancer cell. Like a malignant cancer cell, it needs to be limited, controlled or eliminated so healthy cells and beings can thrive.
Whatever its own PR hype, Capital is inherently amoral. It can care about nothing but its own growth.
In 2022 one senior US ‘investment’ banker broke through the PR hype and spelled things out. The average loan length at his bank was seven years, so: ‘Who cares if Miami is six metres under water in 100 years? What happens to the planet in year seven is actually irrelevant to our loan book.’ (P. Frankopan, The Earth Transformed, p. 636)
In 1991 World Bank chief economist Lawrence Summers suggested that the economic logic behind dumping toxic waste in lower-wage countries is ‘impeccable,’ arguing that such actions could be justified based on capitalist cost-benefit analyses related to pollution and health impacts merely on poor people. He wrote: ‘a given amount of health-impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.’
Similarly, a draft economic chapter to a 1995 IPCC report calculating the cost-benefit ratios of climate change policies valued a dead American or European at $1.5 million, a dead citizen from a ‘low-income’ country at $150,000, and that although there would be five times as many deaths in the poor nations, the ‘dollar mortality cost’ of our OECD (rich-world) deaths would be twice as great.
This amoral social system is historically new, its mechanism unknown to previous societies which were all based on some kind of spiritual belief and morality.
Trade, markets, money, even interest-taking (‘usury’) were all known, but they never ruled economics, much less society, as they do now under capitalism, and especially under its current version called neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism
Neoliberalism is industrial capitalism’s latest iteration, beginning with Pinochet, Thatcher and Reagan in the 1970s after the end of the post-war growth boom and welfare state consensus.
Neoliberalism has been a conscious class war from above. Its aim: to shift wealth and power back to Capital after its temporary weakening by the Great Depression, World War II, Social Democracy and its Keynesian, interventionist welfare state and downward wealth redistribution.
Its radical liberal ideology was formulated by economists like Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises in the 1940s and then throughout the 1950s and 60s propagated by Big Capital-funded think tanks, lobby groups, conferences, academics, cartoon and print propaganda (e.g. Reader’s Digest with eight million subscribers), often via secretive ‘dark money’ donations. By the 1970s there were about 500 Capital-funded neoliberal propaganda think tanks in over ninety countries.
The key aim: to wind back the ‘tyranny’ of state regulation of Capital and intervention benefitting labour and the poor. Capital (aka ‘the market’) should be ‘free’, i.e. allowed to do what it liked. Capital should regain complete power and renewed upward wealth redistribution to the ultra-rich.
Neoliberalism’s chance came after the end of the post-war growth boom and the ‘stagflation’ crisis of state-interventionist Keynesianism in the 1970s, particularly after Nixon’s abandoning of fixed exchange rates and the inflationary oil price shock of 1973. Chicago economist and Hayek-student Milton Friedman became an enthusiastic supporter of brutal Chilean dictator Pinochet’s and President Reagan’s new neoliberal (‘monetarist’) policies.
Reagan’s policies were spelled out for him as two thousand proposals in the twenty-volume ‘Mandate for Leadership’ document by the Heritage Foundation, a Big-Capital-funded neoliberal think-tank: shrink the social welfare state and public services, tax cuts for the rich while massively increasing military spending and Presidential executive powers.
Tne new ‘third way’ Social Democrats (Hawke-Keating, Clinton, Blair), originally working-class-oriented parties, quickly jettisoned Keynesianism and pursued the same neoliberal policies of deregulating Capital (often as ‘self-regulation’ or ‘let the markets decide’) and weakening union collective bargaining (‘enterprise bargaining’). Supposedly ‘opposing’ parties became the two wings of the one neoliberal party, differing in only relatively minor details.
The labour market was made more ‘flexible’ and precarious and the social safety net weakened, state assets were privatised and ‘managerialised’ or public services reduced (‘expanding opportunity, not bureaucracy’), the state entered ‘private-public partnerships’ and pursued free trade and offshoring etc. Real wages stagnated or went down, many became the dual-income working poor as wealth and income inequality soared to new heights.
With Social Democracy now also neoliberal, politics and representative democracy became totally one-dimensional, a de facto One-Party state even more dependent on vacuous spin-doctoring, and increasingly lost any legitimacy in the eyes of the marginalised. This also increased with the outright lies of the Iraq invasion and, rather than punishment, the state bail-out of speculative finance Capital in the Great Financial Crisis of 2008.
Neoliberalism, Democracy Crisis and Far-Right Populism
With a lack of true party-political choice and no prospect of relief from declining real wages and living standards under neoliberalism, many people became susceptible to right-wing media- and demagogue-led distractions, conspiracy fictions and scapegoating. Authoritarian ‘strongmen’ fulminate against ‘woke’ culture and experts, refugees, immigrants, Muslims, transgender people and often promise a ‘return to traditional values’ or ‘greatness’ of the nation.
Having taken over and delegitimised representative democracy, neoliberalism now ushers in a new form of authoritarianism, autocracy, and potentially, fascism. Not only real-estate billionaire Trump but Silicon Valley capitalists like Thiel and Musk are open about their autocratic desires. Musk lauded the German far-right AfD for maintaining ‘German values’ against immigration, Thiel noted that ‘I no longer believe that freedom [for Capital to do what it likes] and democracy are compatible.’
Trump is one such autocratic demagogue (like Putin, Orban, Netanyahu, Erdogan, Modi, Bolsonaro, Milei). His campaign team was largely composed of people from the neoliberal think-tanks funded by the far-right Koch brothers, Exxon and others. As Monbiot and Hutchison put it: ‘In other words, the lobby groups funded by oligarchs and corporations were no longer influencing the government. They were the government.’ (The Invisible Doctrine, p. 66)
As with Reagan, his policies were also written for him by the Koch-brothers- and Big-Capital-funded Heritage Institute (under the same title ‘Mandate for Leadership’).
This time its capitalist neoliberal agenda included far-right Christian Nationalist ‘culture war’ elements against ‘woke’ diversity and equality programs, abortion rights, ‘cultural Marxism’. Otherwise, the neoliberal agenda included radically cutting government size and spending that supports effective public services and support for the poor, the dismantling of the liberal elements and departments within the state and their replacement by far-right Trump-loyalists, the radical extension of Presidential executive power, reduced/flat tax rates, the repeal of any support for decarbonisation and climate change policies, massive increases in military spending.
As we are now seeing, far from being identified with freedom and democracy, capitalism and neoliberalism, always the oligarchy of the wealthy, obviously can, and often do, take the political form of outright autocracy or fascism. Conversely, a truly democratic, socially just and ecologically sustainable world would necessarily be a post-capitalist one.
May the air not load your lungs with plastic May starry sable nights still sing to your clear eyes May fine food from fertile fields still fill you
May the love, quirks, challenges of real people people your days May real songbirds and dogs faithfully dog your steps through the vertigos of the virtual May books and trees still curl your minds inwards, enfold you in the calm aura of their presence
May you remember you are the silent sky within May your Being not be lost in your doing May you remember
memengineering 