4 - The Invisible Ideology
4 - The Invisible Ideology
Why neoliberal capitalism is like microplastics - impossible to see, clogging your brain
“Don’t be so ideological! We’re just here to talk about finding a positive way to make our working lives more fair and equitable, and take serious action to curtail environmental harm. All we need to do is save capitalism, make it more human - that is, more humane and far-sighted. We don’t need anyone’s extremist ideology to come along and confuse the issue. Let’s just stay pragmatic, and leave the ideology at the door.” Ideology - like an arse, we all have one. But not all of us are keen on, or indeed are capable of, looking at it. It’s attached to us, doing its rumpish job of supporting us when we need to rest for a moment. It might even be deployed to get twerked from time to time, shakin’ our big fat political belief right there in the punters’ faces.
But who walks around every day with it hanging out in the air for all to see? Only a gross exhibitionist, right? Put it away, for gods’ sake.
So it is with our underlying political beliefs. To expose them to inspection and scrutiny might appear as unseemly as unpacking the old butt for a spot check. For the purposes of any political discussion you might care to name, it’s almost unheard of to unfold the unspoken assumptions of what we should do with our money, our resources, our consumption, our working lives. Just rude, really. Because everyone knows what’s the normal and natural thing to do in economic and workplace issues, right? Goes without saying.
Cold-War-Era Soviet joke
A KGB agent and a CIA agent walk into a bar.
The CIA agent says: "You guys sure do have great propaganda machine in the Soviet Union."
"Thanks comrade", the KGB agent replies, "but our propaganda is nothing to yours in the US."
The CIA guy says: "What propaganda?"
The KGB guy says: "See what I mean?"
The “goes without saying” part is what Mark Fisher called “capitalist realism” and George Monbiot is currently going around calling “the invisible ideology”. Jailbird Antonio Gramsci, during the long years languishing in Mussolini’s prisons waiting to die, coined the term “cultural hegemony”. It’s all the same thing: it’s the colourless, odourless, tasteless something in the air that makes you believe that capitalism is the only possible way that can exist, all other possible ways having been tried and failed.
The lie that dare not speak its name. Invisible to the eye and ubiquitous. Current in the anglosphere since circa 1980, but only really coming into its own under Blair and Clinton. Spoiler: it hasn’t been going well in the years since.
Adam Curtis, BBC centrist chappie that he is, is always ready to understand the problem, though as always he’s shy of proposing a solution. Are we all equally prepared to shoot down the truth chute?
Truthpilling Legacy Liberals like You and Me
“There’s much more plastic in our brains than I ever would have imagined or been comfortable with.” The study describes the brain as “one of the most plastic-polluted tissues yet sampled”.
Guardian, Microplastics are infiltrating brain tissue, studies show 21 August 2024
All this invisible ideology is just like those invisible microplastics floating round our world and gettting into our soft tissues, philosophically speaking. For it clogs our brain tissues and makes us more susceptible to secondary oligarchical infections, opportunistic techbro pathologies, and just makes us stupider than we need to be.
One of the most insidious effects of the invisible ideology which literally makes our brains more vulnerable to microplastics - by allowing said brain to contemplate so-called ‘market solutions’ to grave environmental emergencies like microplastics contamination or global warming - is a stark refusal to look beyond capitalism as a systematic way of doing things. This means ‘market solutions’ are the only solutions on the table - and they’re not the solution, they are literally the problem.
Here’s the painful part, centrists and legacy liberals, but once you accept it, it will be like that moment when Keanu swallowed the blue, er… red… whichever pill it was, that caused him to see the true state of affairs. Take both pills at once, just to be sure. Ready?
Capitalism will never allow a humane society, one where people are not treated like components in a machine. It will never allow anyone to save the planet. The system in and of itself is geared like an idiot robot to create the worst possible outcomes: use up people, run through the resources, spew out waste until we choke.
There’s no need to deliniate heroes and villains, though of course we could do that until the genetically-modified cows come home. No need to personalize this with demonic entities like the Trilateral Commission or the “Masonic Conspiracy” as old-style trad-Cath screeds would have it.
It simply is the very depersonalised way our system works. Very soon nearly all investment decisions on the spot and future markets, and in huge vulture and hedge fund firms, will be made by AI, and at that point the system will quite literally run itself without human intervention.
Until then you could look at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, or the Federal Reserve Global Hootenanny held in Jacksons Hole, Wyoming each year. A diverse range of rich people telling us diverse range of poor people that: Yes, it’s all fine, they got this, it’s only a matter of time before things start coming good. Until then, just bear with the slavish misery, the pollution, the ever-worsening economic and environmental conditions, the non-stop war and slaughter, the swiftly spiralling mental health of the next generations. It’ll all come good in the end.
No real conspiracy here. Oh, there are conspiracies, some of them monstrous enough, like the infamous Sacker case where Big Pharma hooked poor America on opioids because it was good for (their) business. Or the way Big Oil covers up the dangers of fracking by buying airtime on mainstream media, and fossil fuels hype the false promise of the mega-scam carbon capture, hijacking billions in public funding for a nonexistent tech. The Volkswagen exhaust-emissions scam, a humoungous grift woth billions. Lots of those. No end of those multibillion-dollar fraud plots, as you’d expect.
But there’s no overarching conspiracy where evil overlords can be replaced by a heroic detective/journalist/hacker who exposes “the crooked system”, like Neil Breen in Fateful Findings (2013).
We may scoff at Breen’s childish film antics here, because in fact exposés like this are published literally every week, and nothing ever changes as a result. But is the normal centrist liberal mindset really any more sophisticated than this? Going back to the discussion referred to at the start of this essay - in reality an amalgam of discussions where ‘ideology’ is rejected in favour of a a ‘pragmatic solution’ that avoids ‘politics’ to ‘save capitalism’ and make it more humane and respectful of our shared environment.
All of the pragmatic solutions proposed by these devotees of capitalism - forming a co-operative enterprise, nationalising energy production to harmonise strategies, avoid private monopolies and better regulate emissions, creating a single-payer healthcare system aka ‘Medicare for All’ - are in fact anti-capitalist, or to state it more bluntly, socialism.
Yet there’s a resistance to this very idea,, especially among many Americans. An April 2019 poll on healthcare terminology found that "universal health coverage" and "Medicare-For-All" polled positively at 63% and "national health plan" at 59% (Kaiser 2019). In contrast, "single-payer health insurance system" and "socialized medicine" respectively polled at 49% and 46%.
What surprises me isn’t that 2/3 of Americans support the national health plan that has never been placed on the table, but that it remains nearly 1 in 2 even when framed as “socialized”. Given the heated rhetoric against the idea of socialism in the media, you’d imagine support would be a lot weaker. Such is the urgency of this issue that will never get a solution under the existing sytem.
Like: National Planning. Dislike: Socialism. Hate: Communism.
What are these things? Not very sure, are we? In fact it’s interesting that political philosophy (like the equally vital economics and law) have never been on the school curriculum of any ‘developed’ country. We much prefer to study medieval battles, calculus, and various types of volcanoes and clouds, don’t we? Useful stuff like that.
It has been stated clearly to me in these discussions about ‘fixing capitalism’ and ‘making workplaces more humane’: “socialism is where the state owns all the businesses and stifles enterprise.” The problem with this easy-to-understand takeaway is that this imagined socialism isn’t actually socialism at all, but rather Soviet Communism or state capitalism.
Here you simply swap out the capitalist dude in the top hat (or black-on-black MAGA cap, Hi Elon!) for a stocky apparatchik in an ill-fitting suit. This is the model followed by the Soviet Union rather disastrously, and also by China until it was modified into something else (call it “pragmatic communism”) that seems to work more-or-less fine-to-rickety, though of course everyone agrees it’s hell because they don’t have freedom like we do.
For a primer on what socialism actually is, you literally couldn’t do better than this informative video by Professor Richard Wolff, who’s dedicated his entire life to making Americans slightly less afraid of the idea of democracy in the workplace.
You might well discover that real socialism isn’t less democratic, but actually (shock twist ending!) more democratic than capitalist ‘democracy’ - you know, the one that never puts the option you want to vote for on the table. More democratic, if nothing else, simply because the 8-to-12 hour stretch you spend at work becomes democratic rather than the tyrannical dictatorship that is current labour practice.
Democracy 24/7, instead of just one day every four or five years - what’s not to love?
Suggested Reading
Grace Blakeley - Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom (2024)
Mark Fisher - Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? (2009)
George Monbiot & Peter Hutchinson - The Invisible Ideology : The Secret History of Neoliberalism (and How It Came to Control Your Life) (2024)