Post-COVID: Do we succumb to neoliberalism or do we embrace collectivity?
Thatcher and Reagan would have been happy to see what has become of our society.
“There is no such thing as a society.”
If Margaret Thatcher’s vision for the world could be summarized with her quote above, she would have felt proud looking at the UK’s COVID response in March 2020 and seeing her life’s mission realized to an extreme.
The extent of suffering we are facing today is due to a system that emerged not by default but by design.
A government telling its citizens to take a deadly pandemic on the chin and go to work would not have been possible if she and her American counterpart Ronald Reagan did not tirelessly work to undermine our unconscious understanding that collectivity is survival.
The legacy of Thatcher and Reagan’s hyper-individualistic, neoliberal ideology is this: The United States over the past 40 years has seen the transfer of $50 trillion worth of wealth from the bottom 90% of society to the top 1%.
That means that while the working class saw no real increase in their wages over the past four decades (despite increased productivity), the combined wealth of the 10 richest people in the world became more than the combined GDP of 85 poorest countries in the world.
We do not actually live in a society governed by free markets and the notion that those who work hard will be rewarded accordingly hasn’t been true for some time now.
While the Great Depression of the 1930s brought the New Deal era to the United States, the 1970s oil crisis brought us Thatcher and Reagen’s neoliberalism.
Furthermore, the Great Recession of 2007-2008 gave us austerity on the side of multi-billion pound bail-out packages for the banks that tanked our economies.
It is the core principle of really existing capitalism that the costs and risks are socialized while the profits are privatized.
This is what Philip Alston, United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights found upon his 2018 visit to the UK:
“In the United Kingdom, 14 million people, a fifth of the population, live in poverty.
“Four million of these are more than 50 percent below the poverty line, and 1.5 million are destitute, unable to afford basic essentials.
“After years of progress, poverty is rising again, with child poverty predicted to rise 7 percent between 2015 and 2022, homelessness is up 60 percent since 2010, and food banks rapidly multiplying.”
Alston also added that “British compassion for those who are suffering has been replaced by a punitive, mean-spirited, and often callous approach.”
Keep in mind that this was before the pandemic, during a time when the unemployment rate was lower.
Meanwhile climate change, the mother of all crises, still hasn’t been solved despite our economists ensuring us that the market will fix it.
That is a bit impossible when in the last 9 years we have to stop irreversible climate change, the fossil-fuel industry (against free-market principles) relies heavily on government subsidies.
What now?
It is not clear what form of social re-engineering this pandemic will bring, but there is precedent for what will happen if the fate of our societies is left solely in the hands of our neoliberal governments.
We should have no doubt that as the ultra-rich are hiding their copies of Ayn Rand and rushing to the nanny state for financial help, they are simultaneously working to reinforce a post-pandemic order which will ensure that the most vulnerable in our society are entitled to nothing more than the breadcrumbs.
Is there anyone left in this world who still genuinely believes something will “trickle-down”?
Since our power as individuals cannot even begin to compare to the collective power of corporate and financial sectors, there’s no point in entertaining the idea that we as individuals will change the world.
Simply put, the world will not survive one more decade of neoliberalism and that is exactly what we’re getting if those who orchestrated the bail-outs and the cuts to social services are left unchecked.
If the next decade is not defined by an unprecedented level of collective action against the neoliberal system, COVID will pale in comparison to what we will witness.