I
have a simple view of the world as divided into three great groups of
actors: states, corporations and people. The balance between the
three fluctuates in the long term and the short term. Neoliberalism –
the doctrine that state power is too pervasive and the state needs to
be “shrunk” as far as possible – arose from the experience in
the mid twentieth century of the rampaging Nazi and Soviet states and
the violence and bloodshed caused within and around them. The aim of
the prophets of neoliberalism – Hayek, Friedman and others – was
to prevent states from ever being able to do such things again. The
key thrust in the process was to reduce the regulatory capacity of
the state, thereby increasing the freedom of markets. Their
assumption was that increasing the power of markets would enable
ordinary people, however they are conceived – citizens, consumers,
human beings – to live more free lives. Neoliberalism came to the
fore in the developing world in the 1970s and 1980s as the great
creations of the Bretton Woods settlement – the IMF and the World
Bank – began to insist on its principles as conditions of their
loans. It came to the fore in the developed world during the 1980s
with Thatcher in the UK and Reagan in the USA.
At
the same time as the spread of neoliberal practices in the developed
world, globalisation began to bite. The increasing connectedness of
everything everywhere created conditions in which corporations and
financial elites could become footloose and hence beyond all but the
most rudimentary state control. At the same time the financial elites
have worked to capture the people in control of many state
apparatuses to ensure that their interests are always given priority.
This shift in the balance of power means that citizens are as far as
ever from taking control of their own destiny. Given these
circumstances, perhaps the old definitions do not apply in the same
way as they used to. It used to be the case that state control of
productive industry was (for some) self evidently less efficient and
effective than private control. Given that private control is so far
beyond the capacity of governments or consumers to regulate, it
becomes more tenable, perhaps, to work back to state control of
monopolies, like water supply, and near monopolies, like railways.
We
have seen clearly how badly state control can go wrong, and we should
not forget the lessons of history. We now see clearly how badly
commercial control can go wrong, and how far commercial interests
have subverted state regulation, from taxation to the health and
safety of the population. Perhaps it is time to work towards a new
settlement, involving any combination of state action, citizen power,
and other forms of organisation, such as the mutualisation of therailways suggested by David Boyle. The old opposition of markets and
Marxists is no longer sufficient for the new world order, so a new
way of thinking about the relations between states, markets and
people must emerge. (Perhaps that is what some people mean by radical
centralism – I have no idea.)
