How neoliberalism and globalization created the populist revolt in the West

Larry Kummer, Editor

7 years ago

Summary: Here is an excerpt from one of the most powerful explanations I have seen for the role neoliberalism and globalization as drivers of populism in the West. Our political future cannot be seen without understanding this. {First of two articles today.}

Here is one of the most illuminating essays I have read in a long time. It links the rise of populism — so inexplicable to liberals — to the ideology of neoliberalism that has unleashed giant multinational corporations, allowing them to grow without restraint and gain power by playing nation against nation and worker against worker. It is long but worthwhile reading. Here is the conclusion. Read the full essay!

Conclusion to “Somerdale to Skarbimierz“

By James Meek in the London Review of Books, 20 April 2017.

“True, the optimistic version of the story goes, the EU was wrong to allow Poland to offer Cadbury a subsidy to move {its factory from Britain}. But in the long run, in Europe as a whole, everyone benefits. Eastern Europe gets richer and catches up with Western Europe; instead of 400 million people working and shopping and 100 million people working and queuing, you have 500 million people working and shopping. A bigger market, greater prosperity for all, a peaceful commonwealth, warplanes into chocolate.

“The chief of the many flaws in this version is that at both ends of the Somerdale-Skarbimierz journey, the new jobs are worse than the old Somerdale ones. Even supposing all the redundant Somerdale workers, and their children, found similar low-skilled jobs, they would never be as well-paid as they were at Somerdale, and, crucially, wouldn’t have the same generous final salary pensions.

“Some of the Somerdale workers’ children, no doubt, will enter the higher-wage higher-skill world of the professional tech class, but the flipside of Matt Cross’s optimism is that those jobs will be few, and the zero-hours army many. The outflow of old-style manufacturing jobs, with good pay, conditions and pensions, couldn’t be matched by any foreseeable inflow. ‘People at the lower end of the workforce,’ Cross said, ‘start to lose their engagement in the workforce and the jobs they can get are very temporary jobs, minimum wage jobs, the Sports Direct-type model.’

“‘They weren’t our jobs,’ Silsbury told me, explaining why, in spite of the good redundancy offer, he’d been ready to fight for Somerdale. ‘We were just the keepers of those jobs. We needed to hand them down to our children and our children’s children.’ Nicholls said he’d been able to retire at 57 and live comfortably, without working, on his Cadbury’s pension. He has a caravan in Dorset; he goes fishing; he visits National Trust properties.

“Shareholder capitalism’s race to the bottom means that the generations of non-graduates who come after him – ‘there’s nothing wrong with someone who hasn’t got the ability to be a thinker’ – face precarious decades of low-wage warehouse work, followed by poverty on the state pension. Nicholls started out as a trainee chef; now his son is one. But his son is 32. He earns just above the minimum wage and has no Cadbury’s to move to. Nicholls’s daughter works for the RSPCA. ‘She’ll never get a big pension, so that’s where she’ll lose out. She’ll always be like she is now, just managing.’

Thatcher: “There is no alternative ” to neoliberalism.

“‘What we had, if you stuck with it, you saw an end game. Now there’s no end game. You keep your head above water but the rewards, at the end, don’t come through. Once Thatcher started her game and sold off our houses, our kids are in private rented property, and that seems to go up every year, and wages don’t. It’s going to be a just-managing society. In our generation, the state pension is like a top-up. We are going to have a generation going back to living on the state pension, like the 1930s and 1940s. Do we really want to go back there?’

“At Mondelez in Skarbimierz, where casualisation, cost-cutting and fears of being undercut by cheaper labour elsewhere prevail, the target the workers are theoretically aiming for, economic parity with Western Europe, is disappearing from view. The equilibrium, in other words, when the Poles catch up with the Britons, will see a European economy that is, overall, much bigger, but where working-class Britons will have fallen back, and working-class Poles will never enjoy the security and prosperity of their vanished British counterparts in what now seems a mid-20th-century golden age.”

——————- Read the full article at the London Review of Books. ——————-

Conclusions

Neoliberalism unleashed multinational corporations. The result for most people in the West has been stagnation of incomes and decreased hope of better lives for the young. Meek tells that not in the fashionable abstract clinical fashion of Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein, so beloved by the upper class professionals — but as a ground-level view of a specific town, of specific people. As tales of people do, it winds back and forth to the conclusions described above.

Liberal and Left parties ignore such stories at their peril, risking loss of the working class to the Right.

About the author

James Meek was born in London, grew up in Scotland, in the 1990s lived in Russia and Ukraine (becoming The Guardian’s Moscow bureau chief), and since 1999 lives in London. In 2003 Meeks followed the invading American armies to Baghdad. He was named Foreign Correspondent of the Year in 2004 in Britain’s Press Awards for his reporting on Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. In 2015

He published his first short stories while a student at Edinburgh University in the 1980s. He has written many novels including McFarlane Boils the Sea (1989), Last Orders (1992), Drivetime (1995), The Museum Of Doubt (2000), The People’s Act of Love (2005), We Are Now Beginning Our Descent (2008), The Heart Broke In (2012), and Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs to Someone Else (2014 — winner of the Orwell Prize in 2015).