Chris Hedges hosts a very interesting discussion with Guardian columnist George Monbiot on his new book about capitalism and its modern incarnation, neoliberalism. Monbiot rightly sees capitalism as a supremely “coercive, destructive and exploitative mode of economic organisation.”
Neoliberalism, observes Monbiot, emerged as capitalism’s response to its biggest challenge: democracy.
After centuries of struggle, Western publics managed to win the vote. The capitalist ruling class faced a major problem. The public sought to use its newfound political power to secure other rights, such as labour protections. Workers organised into trade unions to demand a bigger share of the value of the commodities they created. These new voters also wanted a better quality of life, including weekends off and proper housing, and an environment free of industrial pollutants that were (and still are) contaminating the air they breathed, the food they ate, and the water they drank.
Those rights inherently threatened the maximisation of profit — the goal of capitalism.
Neoliberalism offered a solution. It sought to make capitalism invisible to the public by reframing it as the “natural order.” Like gravity, it came to be treated as “just something that was there, not something that was invented by people,” as Monbiot aptly puts it.
“Wealth creators” — the billionaires leeching off the common good — were recast as secular gods. Any interference in the so-called “free market” — in fact, a market not free at all, but carefully rigged to benefit a tiny, monopolistic wealth elite — was considered sacrilegious.
A network of think-tanks, secretly funded by the billionaires, was established to manufacture a consensus about capitalism’s immutability and benevolence — a message that was enthusiastically amplified by the billionaire-owned media.
Central to the confidence trick at the heart of neoliberalism was the suggestion that any dissent, any limit placed on the rapacious greed of the capitalist class, would inexorably lead to totalitarianism, to Stalinism.
Capitalism became synonymous with freedom, innovation and self-expression. To question capitalism was an attack on freedom itself. This idea lay at the heart of the relentless assault on the labour movement that shifted up several gears during the Thatcher-Reagan years of the 1980s. Trade unions were presented as a threat to the smooth working of the economy, to growth and to “freedom.”
This was also around the time the Trilateral Commission was founded by a group of senior Washington policy officials, keen to address a problem they defined as an “excess of democracy.” It is worth noting that the current British Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, secretly joined the Trilateral Commission around 2017, while he was serving in the Labour shadow cabinet. He was one of only two MPs — out of 650 — to be invited to become a member in that period.
Starmer personifies the way neoliberalism has made parliamentary politics irrelevant. British voters, like U.S. ones, now have a choice between two hardcore wings of capitalism. Margaret Thatcher’s TINA slogan — “There Is No Alternative” — has finally borne fruit.
In practice, we are all neoliberals today. Any other way of organising society than the one we have — which depends on runaway consumption, requiring unsustainable, slash-and-burn economic growth — has become impossible for most people to imagine.
Starmer in his London office, October 2023. (Keir Starmer, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
On all of this, Monbiot’s argument is strong and clear.
But I have an urgent question for this critic of capitalism: Is the Guardian Media Group Monbiot works for a capitalist news organisation or not?
Monbiot has always defended his paper as exceptional: the one supposedly “nice” corporate outlet. He has decried all other media as unequivocally as he does capitalism. But he insists The Guardian is different. How?
If he’s right about capitalism, and I think he is, then it is difficult to understand how he has not reached the conclusion that The Guardian too is a product of capitalism’s coercive, destructive, exploitative mode of economic organisation.
The Guardian depends on corporate advertising. In other words, it has to keep its advertisers happy — that is, advertisers embedded in, and enriched by, the capitalist system.
The Guardian is owned and run by a corporation, the Guardian Media Group, that is tied into a complex of other corporations with economic interests entirely dependent on the success of a capitalist system driven by consumption and profit. (Some gullible people still mistakenly believe the paper is owned by some charity-like trust rather than a limited company.)
That The Guardian is deeply rooted in the West’s capitalist system makes sense of why it took such a central role in trashing and smearing Jeremy Corbyn, the only leader of a major British party in living memory to seek to challenge the neoliberal status quo.
Corbyn expressing support for Julian Assange outside the London court where the U.S. appeal hearing was taking place, Oct. 28, 2021. (Don’t Extradite Assange Campaign)
It makes sense of why the paper so visibly helped to destroy Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks who exposed the West’s war and resource-grabbing industries like no one before him. He did so by bringing into the light of day classified official documents that proved the ruling class’s crimes.
It makes sense of why The Guardian has been so unconscionably feeble in giving any kind of voice to the millions of Britons, many on the left it supposedly represents, who are shocked and appalled by Israel’s genocide of the people of Gaza, and the utter complicity of the British and U.S. governments.
It makes sense of why The Guardian has been a cheerleader for an entirely avoidable war in Ukraine triggered by NATO’s decades-long expansion ever closer to Russia’s border with Ukraine over Moscow’s protests. It was a move that Western experts long ago warned would signal to Russia that the West was seeking confrontation, would erode the Kremlin’s confidence that the principle of nuclear deterrence could be maintained, and was bound ultimately to provoke an equally violent reaction.
It makes sense of why The Guardian has been paying lip service to concerns about a looming climate catastrophe while actively stoking the very consumer habits and expectations that make reducing CO2 levels impossible.
And finally it makes sense of why The Guardian works so very hard to fashion itself as a uniquely leftwing and progressive publication. In doing so, The Guardian has become capitalism’s handmaiden-in-chief.
When a genuinely leftwing party leader emerges, as Corbyn did, The Guardian can maul him or her from the left much more effectively than papers such as The Daily Telegraph and The Daily Mail can from the right. The bipartisan assault on Corbyn proved far more convincing and credible than if it had been carried out solely by the rightwing press.
Similarly with wars. If The Guardian backs the latest war — as it invariably does – then these wars must be a good thing because the left and right agree. The rightwing press can sell war to its readers on the basis of “terror threats” and a “clash of civilisations,” while The Guardian can sell it to readers on the basis of “humanitarianism” or the need to topple the latest “new Hitler.”
The capitalist system needs a media corporation like The Guardian if only to stop a genuinely independent, genuinely anti-capitalist, genuinely anti-war outlet from ever gaining a foothold in the public space.
This is also why The Guardian has been so central in the effort to inflame fears about “populism” — of both the right and left varieties — and “fake news” on social media. It smears the progressive, anti-capitalist, anti-war left as dictator-appeasers, genocide-belitters and anti-Semites as enthusiastically as it denounces the white supremacy of the Trumpian right. It excels in this, its own specialised form of disinformation.
Which brings us back to Monbiot.
I have written many articles over the years criticising Monbiot. And every time I do so, I am inundated with comments that this is another example of the left eating the left, of sour grapes, of cheap point-scoring.
Which is to entirely miss the point.
This isn’t chiefly about Monbiot. It’s about his function in a capitalist economy — and how he contributes to The Guardian’s role of undermining an anti-capitalist, anti-war left. Monbiot doesn’t have to understand the function he plays to still play it. In fact, all the evidence is that he is entirely blind to his function.
It also highlights how we, the progressive left, are caught in a trap that the capitalist class has engineered for us. Monbiot’s book on neoliberalism, if his interview with Hedges is anything to go by, is doubtless excellent. And because it is excellent, it will win Monbiot more devotees, and more kudos on the left. Which will make him even more useful to The Guardian in proving its leftwing credentials.
Monbiot isn’t chiefly to blame for that. Our gullibility as readers, as critical thinkers, is.
Speaking the quiet part out loud, Joe Biden admitted many years ago that the United States would have had to invent Israel if it did not already exist.
What he meant was that Israel serves a function that benefits Washington elites: as a disguised U.S. aircraft carrier in the Middle East; as the lightning rod for protest as the West projects its violent power into the oil-rich region; as the catalyst for stoking ethnic and sectarian divisions that have prevented the consolidation of a secular Arab nationalism; as the Bible-citing colonial hegemon that has fomented an Islamic fundamentalism to mirror Israel’s Jewish-Zionist fundamentalism; and as an insurance policy, allowing U.S. politicians to smear domestic critics of its Middle East policy as anti-Semites.
Similarly, capitalism would need to invent a Guardian, if it did not already exist. And in turn, the Guardian would need to invent a Monbiot if he was not already one of its columnists.
The Guardian is critically important to neoliberalism’s efforts at maintaining the legitimacy of capitalism by making it invisible. It does so by suggesting capitalism’s righteousness is so uncontested that it enjoys universal political support. Meanwhile, The Guardian needs George Monbiot so that it can demonstrate to the left that all sides are being given a platform, that the free press really is free, that there is no need for any greater pluralism.
The fact that Monbiot has written a book critiquing capitalism and neoliberalism is another of the great paradoxes of the system. But sadly, it is one that The Guardian, and capitalism, can not only accommodate but weaponise against the left.
If this is difficult to accept, consider the climate catastrophe. The Guardian is probably the most outspoken corporate media outlet on this topic — though, admittedly, that is a very low bar indeed. Many readers are absolutely committed to supporting The Guardian financially each month because of its coverage of a climate crisis already upon us. And yet the Guardian Media Group is embedded in a system of consumption promotion — of flights to paradisal destinations, and of luxury cars — that is fuelling the very climate disaster The Guardian is supposedly sounding the alarm against.
In other words, it is propagandising for the very consumption model that it is also warning us is destroying our planet. It works because human beings have a very large capacity for cognitive dissonance, for accommodating two contradictory thoughts at the same time. It is precisely why propaganda is so successful, and why we make such poor critical thinkers unless we exercise this faculty like an additional muscle.
Monbiot is as much a victim of this human tendency towards cognitive dissonance as anyone else. In fact, he appears supremely vulnerable to it.
As I have noted in a previous article, Monbiot has been a consistently outspoken champion of the West’s endless wars, apparently oblivious to the fact that they are integral to capitalism’s efforts to rationalise vacuuming up huge sums of money to enrich the wealth elite through the war industries rather than looking after the public, and that these wars come at an incalculable cost to the environment, as the destruction of Gaza and now Lebanon should underscore.
As I wrote two years ago:
“Monbiot holds as a cherished piety what should be two entirely inconsistent positions: that British and Western elites are pillaging the planet for corporate gain, immune to the catastrophe they are wreaking on the environment and oblivious to the lives they are destroying at home and abroad; and that these same elites are fighting good, humanitarian wars to protect the interests of poor and oppressed peoples overseas, from Syria and Libya to Ukraine, peoples who coincidentally just happen to live in areas of geostrategic significance.
Because of the vice-like corporate hold on Britain’s political priorities, Monbiot avers, nothing the corporate media tells us should be believed – except when those priorities relate to protecting peoples facing down ruthless foreign dictators, from Syria’s Bashar al-Assad to Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Then the media should be believed absolutely.”
But worse, Monbiot isn’t just gullible. He has been the corporate media’s most effective attack dog on the anti-war left.
He has expended a great deal of his time and energies on policing the left’s discourse and smearing its most long-standing figureheads, from Noam Chomsky to the late John Pilger.
He has tarred both as “genocide belittlers” in at least two columns for questioning what the West’s “humanitarian wars” are really about. And he did so while he was also claiming to be too busy to make the time to write a column about Assange’s years-long torture and show trial for doing journalism about the West’s war crimes.
The West’s latest “humanitarian war”— Israel supposedly “defending itself” through genocide against the Palestinian people it has been belligerently occupying for decades and whose lands it has stolen — has been an especially hard sell for the corporate media. But it is precisely where we were bound to end up by ignoring – or worse invalidating – the voices of figures like Chomsky and Pilger who were trying to show us the bigger picture of what these wars were really about.
And Monbiot served precisely that role at The Guardian of invalidating them.
Read his new book on capitalism if you need to. Absorb its lessons. But remember, the biggest one is this: Monbiot can be right about the wickedness of capitalism while himself being thoroughly complicit in its wickedness.
