On Capitalism and Neoliberalism (an extract from Mystical Anarchism: A Journey to the Borderlands of Freedom)
This article was originally published in Winter 2015 for Kosmos Journal. See the original article here.
Author: Alnoor Ladha
Alnoor’s work focuses on the intersection of political organizing, systems thinking, structural change and narrative work. He was the co-founder and Executive Director of The Rules, a global network of activists, organizers, designers, coders, researchers, writers and others focused on changing the rules that create inequality, poverty and climate change. TR started in 2012 as a time-bound project and an experiment in temporary organizational design, exploring new ways of how to work, play, and make trouble together. Alnoor comes from a Sufi lineage and writes about the crossroads of politics and spirituality in troubled times. His work has been published in Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Truthout, Fast Company, Kosmos Journal, New Internationalist, and the Huffington Post among others. He is a board member of Culture Hack Labs, a co-operatively run advisory for social movements and progressive organizations. He holds an MSc in Philosophy and Public Policy from the London School of Economics.
Twitter: Alnoor.ladha
On Capitalism
How can we even begin to organize the better world if we do not fully understand the current system?
Having a mystical worldview does not abdicate us from rigor or from politics. Many of the most spiritually enlightened people I know will say things like, “I’m not political” or “Politics creates dualities between good and evil.” Politics is just about power. Who has it? Who doesn’t? Who gets to decide? And why? As we discussed earlier, ideology, and therefore politics, is always present, whether we recognize it or not. Ignoring it doesn’t remove our responsibility; it contributes to the status quo, working against the interests of the poorest and most vulnerable amongst us. As Howard Zinn says, “you can’t be neutral on a moving train.”
We must be conscious and critical of our current economic and political structures—the operating system, if you will. We must recognize that this system is dependent on the misery and exploitation of other human beings. As Dieter Duhm reminds us, “Behind the material consumption of our society stands the indescribable anguish of billions of our fellow beings. It stands behind the menus of our restaurants, the doctors’ prescriptions, and the numbers on the stock market. The wellbeing of one side is achieved through systematic murder on the other. Countless human beings and animals pay with their lives for our daily intake.” [5]
Capitalism is simply an extension of colonialism, slavery, patriarchy, imperialism, and deep racism. For those of us who have benefited from this system, we must be cognizant of the moral implications. In a lecture at Carnegie Council in 2012 the political philosopher Thomas Pogge said, “The affluent are quick to point out that they cannot inherit their ancestor’s sins. Indeed. But we violently defend our entitlement to the fruits of these sins: to their huge inherited advantage in power and wealth over the rest of the world.”
We must also be aware that the butchery of capitalism is not a historical relic. Capitalism constantly requires a state of war and conquest (e.g., from Iraq and Afghanistan to the structural adjustment programs of the World Bank and IMF) in order to ensure access to resources. The system is dependent on the destructive extraction of fossil fuels that is irreversibly devastating the only planet we have. Its hunger for more—for everything— is insatiable, which forces us to constantly work more hours for additional ‘growth’ and ‘wealth’ that the majority of us will never see. These are not ‘bugs’ in the system, to use coder language, but rather the core feature, the very logic of the system itself.
For every dollar of income created in the US since 2008, 93 cents goes to the top 1%. [6] Therefore, growth creates inequality from its inception. Climate change is not manmade in the traditional sense that we think about it—climate change is capital made. Every dollar of wealth created heats up our planet because we have an extractivesand fossil fuel-based economy. Capitalism turns natural resources into commodities in order to attract and generate ever more capital. It locks us into path dependency where we can never take a risk of slowing growth. We even subsidize our own destruction by giving the ultimate agents and benefactors of this production and consumption—corporations—more subsidies and more power.
On Neoliberalism
Although neoliberalism and capitalism are not the same thing, we can accurately describe our current brand of global capitalism as neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism is based on three tenets. First, it defines our relationship to each other through a competitive lens (am I better, richer, etc.?), which inevitably leads to ordering society through rigid hierarchies. It equates material wealth with life success, which is equated to virtue (e.g., rich people are good, poor people are bad—i.e., re-interpreting poverty as a moral failing). And it holds that the individual is the primary unit of power, an idea best captured by Margaret Thatcher’s famous quip that there is no such thing as society, just individuals and families.
From an economic point of view, neoliberalism advocates the bankrupt policy of trickle-down economics, the concentration of wealth in private hands through explicit subsidization of corporations. This directly leads to the extraction of wealth from the poor to the rich. Since our jobs and our identities are offshoots of this system, we are incapable of breaking free of the logic. We have all had to create our own stories in order to cope within the system. People at the World Bank or USAID or the Gates Foundation think they’re helping the poor (and at a micro-level maybe they are) and people in ad agencies think they’re being creative (and at a micro level maybe they are), but they are, in fact, ensuring that the murky waters of the status quo stay toxic. What Hannah Arendt once called the banality of evil has transmuted into the banality of good.
We are told that people of merit rise to the top of the system. But as John Ralston Saul argues, the system finds the people that are best constructed to further its own existence and draws them to the places they can best further the system. [7] Since the very lifeblood of modern capitalism is the energy derived from material consumption, it is inevitable that those who single-mindedly and ‘successfully’ desire, adore, and glorify consumption to the point of gluttony will fit neatly and effortlessly into the seats of power.
Operating successfully or even moderately well in this system makes us transactional beings who reduce each other’s vital humanity to tools by which we value-maximize short-term profit. We are quick to point out the misery accumulated by communism or fascism. But capitalism, especially neoliberal capitalism, is a form of distributed fascism. What a few despotic elites once did to a massive population, most do to each other now, in the hopes of accumulating more wealth, status and hedonistic pleasure.
This is our background condition, the ubiquitous backdrop for all of our lives. If we want to reconnect with spiritual truths, the first essential challenge is to disconnect just enough from the economic machinery and its incessant propaganda to recognize neoliberalism for what it is and what it does to us.
Read the full article Mystical Anarchism: A Journey to the Borderlands of Freedom here
References
[5]. Duhm,D. (2015). Terra nova: Global revolution and the healing of love. Bad Belzig, Germany: Verlag Mdiga:13.
[6]. www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-10-02/top-1-got-93-of-incomegrowth-as-rich-poor-gap-widened.
7]. Ralston Saul, J. (1993). Voltaire’s bastards: The dictatorship of reason in the west. Visalia, CA: Vintage Press.
