BRATTLEBORO-George Monbiot, British journalist, environmental/political activist, and author of several books on political and social justice and the environment, is a regular columnist for The Guardian.
It was his 2016 piece on neoliberalism - what he calls "capitalism on steroids" - in that U.K.-based publication that led filmmaker Peter Hutchison, with colleague Lucas Sabean, to create The Invisible Doctrine: the Secret History of Neoliberalism.
Windham World Affairs Council (WWAC) and its partners will host a screening of the 75-minute documentary on Sunday, March 16, at the Latchis Theatre in Brattleboro.
The film was later re-created in book form and published as Invisible Doctrine by Penguin Random House this year. Monbiot and Hutchison will discuss both book and film at a virtual Literary Cocktail Hour Friday, March 14, at 5 p.m.
The Commons spoke with Monbiot via Zoom last week.
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Annie Landenberger: So The Invisible Doctrine was actually a film first and then the book?
George Monbiot: That's right. It was Peter's idea. After we made that together, remotely, he said, 'You know, this could be a short book.' I agreed with some hesitation, but I'm very glad I did.
I've never written a book with anyone else before. Peter structured it almost as if structuring a film, and we've ended up with these short, punchy chapters, very tightly edited. It races along and manages to get a lot of information and argument into a short space. It seems to have really resonated with people. And that's because of the collaboration.
A.L.: Taking in what's going on now, not only in our country but around the world, have we reached an apex with neoliberalism? Will the Aristotelian pendulum swing back?
G.M.: Well, it doesn't happen like that. There's no automaticity in politics except towards oligarchy. I see oligarchy as the default state of centralized hierarchical societies like ours.
And any democracy we get must be fought for - fought and fought and fought. Our ancestors [suffered] to get the modicum of democracy we have. Our societies are not nearly as democratic as they could be.
A.L.: How can we get there?
G.M.: Peter and I suggest some ways in which we could be greatly democratized: freedom of speech, freedom of protest, all the other fundamental freedoms that we enjoy.
They didn't just appear. There wasn't some organic process, some swinging back of the pendulum, which delivered those freedoms. They required vast social movements, pushing back against extremely powerful forces, often at great sacrifice to achieve things like the vote or "the weekend," which was the result of female garment workers in New York mobilizing for this thing we now all take for granted.
These have to be taken, and they're taken with the help of a major fight with power. So, yes - the pendulum could swing back, but not by itself. It's only going to if very large numbers of us get together and yank on it.
A.L.: You talk about disparity: Is there any hope of limiting - shrinking - today's grotesque disparity between rich and poor?
G.M.: We must hope there is. Historian Walter Scheidel in his book The Great Leveler writes there've been only four factors in history which have ever thrown down great inequality of the kind that we're talking about [now]. One of them is total war, one is total and violent revolution, one is social collapse, and one is plague. Take your choice.
In what economists called "the Great Compression," from 1945 and 1975, there was a great reduction in levels of inequality. The poor did better, and the rich weren't able to take everything for themselves.
[That period] came about as a result of two world wars which, through various means, destroyed much of the wealth and power of the oligarchy and created an opening for completely different policies. It was partly that a lot of their physical wealth was destroyed, especially in their colonies overseas. A lot of their wealth was requisitioned for the war effort.
Taxes were massively raised: In the U.S., they reached 94% and in the U.K., 98%. And there was a creation of a sort of warfare economy that put the very rich back in their boxes. And the warfare state then, after the Second World War, could become a welfare state, in which spending and such taxation could be repurposed to create a better society.
A.L.: That ended 50 years ago.
G.M.: I think we've pretty well run out of road as far as the effects of the two world wars are concerned. And we're back to that default state of society.
So how do we [reverse that] without one of those four terrible forces enabling that change? Action.
A.L.: How do you initiate such action?
G.M.: I think we must have a positive propositional message. If all we do is say, "Your side is wrong, you're a disaster, you're led by the devil incarnate," it doesn't necessarily get us very far.
We've left the field open to the far right, people like Trump, to come along and say, "Here's the offer."
A.L.: And the Heritage Foundation?
G.M.: And Heritage. Yeah. And the offer is that you get to beat up other people, because what people like Trump have discovered and has been known for thousands of years is that it doesn't matter how badly your supporters are doing as long as someone else is visibly doing worse.
It could mean that many of Trump's voters will see a further deterioration in their position, more economic insecurity, worse access to medicine, to health, to education, to housing, fewer good jobs, a deteriorating natural world - all those things which people care about will get worse under Trump.
A.L.: And more othering.
G.M.: Exactly. There's an endless list of people to scapegoat, people to performatively beat up, and as long as you're seeing someone else being performatively beaten up, you can say, "Oh, yeah - I feel pretty good about myself," regardless of how your own position might have deteriorated.
We have to come up with a positive message where you say, "We can actually improve your life, and here's how." This is what Peter and I have sought to do with what we call a "politics of belonging."
A.L.: And that looks like … ?
G.M.: There is one value, which is universal. Everybody wants it. And it's belonging.
Everybody has a powerful urge to belong. We survive together. If we're alone, we fall apart. Mentally, economically, in all sorts of ways. We desperately need other people [and] to feel we belong to something.
So the far right is able to make an offer particularly to lonely young men who feel alienated, who feel they don't belong, who feel shut out: "Hey, come and join us. Look, you'll be completely accepted into our ranks as long as you're white, straight, male. You can wear the same uniform, you can chant the same slogans, you can join our gang and be part of something bigger than yourself."
For people who aren't part of anything, who feel very lonely and isolated and alienated, that's an appealing proposition.
I think what we've got to do on the left is say, "Yeah, we, too, can offer belonging, but in this case an inclusive belonging, a belonging which anyone can be part of. We can bring you into the community, we can treat you with warmth and friendship.
"You don't have to be lonely and isolated anymore, and here's how: Here's what community life looks like with you in the heart of it - valued and welcomed and befriended."
A.L.: I'm coming to grasp neoliberalism, but we've got a wildcard: the overwhelming impact of false information spread out beyond our control through social media platforms.
G.M.: We live in a sort of ambient soup of disinformation. It's everywhere.
The promise of social media was that we could break the grip of the barons. We could each have our own channel. And we could collaborate and come up with great ideas which weren't brokered by some bastard who doesn't give a stuff about creating a better world.
But no, it turns out it's just the opposite. It's worse than before. So we have to build our own channels.
I've given up on X. Now I'm on Bluesky and Mastodon. Such lively, effective media-channel [alternatives] are gradually growing, and X is shrinking.
There's some hope there. But you know, we should use that most powerful of all media we've ever been gifted, which is word of mouth, face-to-face communication.
Ultimately, that beats everything else.
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Editor's note: Stories presented as interviews in this format are lightly edited and condensed for clarity and readability. Words not spoken by interview subjects appear in brackets.
For a further explanation of neoliberalism and the themes discussed in this interview, read this piece Monbiot wrote in 2016 in The Guardian at bit.ly/806-monbiot.
Annie Landenberger is an arts writer and columnist for The Commons. She also is one half of the musical duo Bard Owl, with partner T. Breeze Verdant.
This Arts item by Annie Landenberger was written for The Commons.