Paul Mason

When you trust your life to an airliner flying at 40,000 feet, you do so because you believe there is a real world, independent of your senses, whose laws the aircraft engineer has understood. However complex that world is, however full of randomness, to retreat from the belief in the 400-year-old scientific method that guides the aircraft engineer would be a seriously retrograde step.

Trump thrust this nicety aside, saying to the racists, sexists and Islamophobes: go ahead and vocalize all the hate inside you. The rallies brought together a mixture of born-again Christians, amoralists from the alt-right movement and porn-addicted right-wing bigots – and created an atmosphere in which they could all yell the word ‘cunt’ every time he mentioned Hillary Clinton.

So Trump represents something bigger than a takeover of the federal government by one fraction of US capital devoted to protectionism and the small state. He represents the triumph of a reactionary theory of human nature in which inequality – of race, sex and economic status – is determined by our genes. This, as we will see, is the problem that’s going to be hardest to overcome, because it is deeply rooted in the economic practice of the past thirty years.

If the populations facing this threat were grouped into resilient organizations and had a strong sense of their own social power, the task for people like Putin, Erdoğan, Salvini and Trump would be harder. Their predecessors in the 1930s resorted to fascism because they had to smash an organized, politicized working class with a strong attachment to democratic rights, and a resilient liberal middle class inspired by the moral values of Christianity. That’s what fascism was: the militarization of a lower-class mob to defeat the organized working class by force, take the state, merge it with the fascist militias and enforce rule by terror on behalf of big business.
This time round they probably don’t need fascism. Solidarity has been atomized, our belief in collective action eroded, our sense of self hollowed out by the routines of market behaviour – and with that, so has the moral basis for liberalism. If you wanted to choose a moment to unleash an attack on democracy, reinforced by machine control of human behaviour, this would be it.

‘The community was poor,’ writes urban sociologist Janice Perlman, ‘but people mobilized to demand improved urban services, worked hard, had fun, and had hope. They watched out for each other, and daily life had a calm, convivial rhythm.’ That was her description of a Brazilian favela in the 1960s – but it could just as easily describe most working-class communities in the world back then.

When I interviewed people from my home town, and asked them what was the biggest thing that had changed working-class attitudes in the past thirty years, the answer was unanimously: credit. Credit destroyed people’s attachment to the one thing that had kept communities like this together for 200 years: work.
From around the mid-1990s, in a poor community, work was something you did to keep your credit card going, pay your mortgage and maintain your mobile phone topped up – it had no intrinsic worth. Under all previous forms of capitalism, for a poor person to borrow vast amounts of money was seen as stupid. Under neoliberalism in its heyday, not to borrow vast amounts of money was seen as stupid.

Ideology, as understood by critics of capitalism, is a set of ideas that masks reality. It is created by what we see and feel, and reinforced by the fact that the elite controls the flow of information. So, for example, in the Soviet Union people were told (and told each other) that they were living under ‘actually existing socialism’, whereas the reality was dictatorship, poverty, misery and inequality.

Ideologies, typically, are defined against clear, visible alternatives. Insofar as they mask a deeper, hidden truth, educated and inquisitive people can think their way out of them – especially if there is an organized counter-power like the labour movement, which warns: treat everything your boss says as bullshit.
What made neoliberalism different is the way it overcame this: it created a reality in which it became impossible to imagine alternatives. Educated and inquisitive individuals found it increasingly impossible to think their way beyond it.

The neoliberal project was in practice an assault on humanism. It enforced the reduction of human nature to economic competition, and it suppressed all attempts to experiment with alternatives.

Before 2008, neoliberalism’s promise was: things will be like this for ever, only better. After 2008 it was: things will be like this for ever, only worse.