Before I got into fashion and sustainability, I studied politics at university. My life has taken a sharp turn since then, but I’m grateful for my student days because they helped me understand how the world works, and who it works for. In the three or four decades that millennials like me have been alive, young people have been reckoning with the brutal truth that democracy works for the few, not the many. In the years following the 2008 financial crisis, quality of life declined for the most of us while the billionaires got richer. At the same time, politicians have been sacrificing our futures to protect corporate profits. It’s easy to point the finger at capitalism for the mess we find ourselves in, and you wouldn’t be wrong if you did, but that’s not the entire picture.
There’s a philosophy behind the particularly hellish version of capitalism that we’re living through. It’s called neoliberalism, and you’ll find its fingerprints all over the climate emergency, as well as student debt, unaffordable housing, collapsing public services and skyrocketing inequality, to name just a few of our many intersecting crises.
Neoliberal ideas are the status quo on Ivy League campuses, on the floors of Wall Street and in the corridors of Washington. The ideology is so widely accepted that we just assume it’s how the world works. It casts a shadow over our lives every day, but we never talk about it. As George Monbiot explains, it’s as if people living in Soviet Russia had never heard of Communism.
But what is neoliberalism, exactly? What is it all about, and what does it mean for us as human beings?
Back in the 20th century, neoliberals like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek became the dominant thinkers in economics. To Friedman and Hayek, competition was the most important driving force in society. Human progress came from people trying to out-do each other —inventors making something no one else has done, entrepreneurs figuring out new ways to be richer than everyone else, executives fine-tuning their companies to be even more profitable. Political philosophers call this phenomenon “the market”, which is basically shorthand for business. The idea is that the market —aka business — is the most natural way of pushing humanity forward, and that slowing down the market with unnecessary rules and regulations is immoral.
So when it comes to society, neoliberals want the government to be as small as possible. Taxing people and using the money to fund things like education and healthcare would get in the way of the market and all its glorious innovation. And when it comes to business, neoliberals say that taxes, laws and regulations are red flags —we should have as few of them as possible, so our natural inventiveness can thrive through the market.
The flip side to all of this is that if you’re poor, or depressed, or sick, then neoliberals don’t care. Sure, you might have grown up in a poor town with underfunded schools and no job opportunities, but you can just leave and go somewhere else. If you stay, then your poverty is your own fault (you will be completely unsurprised that the OG neoliberals were all white men).
Friedman and Hayek’s thinking was fully embraced in the USA and the UK. After Ronald Raegan was elected President, he told Americans that “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem." Margaret Thatcher famously told Brits that “there’s no such thing as society” when she was Prime Minister. Neoliberalism is what sets the US and UK apart from other capitalist countries like Sweden and Germany, where taxes are high and governments spend them on free education and universal healthcare. You can be a capitalist and still believe that society should help people who need it, but you can’t be a neoliberal.
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In the decades since neoliberal economics became the status quo across the rich world, corporate profits have skyrocketed. Independent businesses have found it harder and harder to keep their doors open in a world dominated by corporate giants. Inequality has become more and more extreme.
And the world’s richest and most powerful countries have avoided taking serious action on the climate emergency.
