I think we have a problem in that people of George Monbiot's age and younger have never known a form of capitalism that is not Neoliberal. They have internalised this identification. The only prominent alternative to Neoliberalism is Chinese authoritarian socialism. And no one in their right might wants that for the UK. I agree that the system needs to change, but I don't think we should frame this as an attack on capitalism, I think we have to talk about Neoliberalism which goes deeper than economics.
What does this mean?
Classical and Social Liberalism
Liberalism is all about liberty. This is great, it has won us freedom of religion, and of speech, and to some extent freedom of economic opportunity. Liberty is clearly a good thing.
Classical Liberalism, the origin of the political right-wing, argued that government should not get in the way of any individual's economic activity. Let manufacturers manufacture, let traders trade. Which in principle is OK.
However, in practice this led to the widespread untrammeled exploitation of workers, to the general degradation of humanity, and very significantly to the French Revolution. Because in practice, without any checks and balances, the new industrialists treated people appallingly badly. Child labour, no equal pay, loads of deaths at work, squalid living conditions.
But of course they weren't all like that. The Cadbury Brothers in particular were not. They moved their factory to the edge of town where there was clean air and water, created a lovely little village for their workforce, and treated everyone with respect. Other Quaker businesses were also good employers. But on the whole the industrialists were monstrous. And the degradation is vividly portrayed in the novels of Charles Dickens.
Social liberalism aimed to level the playing field. Where socialists (the left-wing) would take care of people's needs, liberals want to help them to help themselves. You do this by giving them enough and no more. They argue that there is dignity in work. Except that economic liberal happily removes the dignity from work.
Liberalism was directly tied to the British Empire. John Stuart Mill, a key Liberal thinker worked for the East India Company. Imperialism required some intellectual justification. And there was already a nasty churning mess. Firstly Christianity saw all humanity as fundamentally flawed. People are sinners. People are bad. Workers, in particular are lazy. (See Mercantilism: Six Centuries of Vilifying the Poor). But this also became mixed with a version of Darwinism in which instead of apply to species evolution applied to individuals. The individual took centre stage in intellectual life after the Enlightenment. Romanticism reinforced this, and Mill also loved Wordsworth and Coleridge. Survival of the fittest started to look like a justification of Empire, or exploitation of workers and indigenous peoples. It seemed natural that the new ruling class of industrialists, the bourgeoisie as Marx called them, should be free to rule over others and exploit their labour, even to the point of owning slaves.
But Social Liberalism tempered the worst aspects of Classical Liberalism and was soon joined by a workable form of Socialism (at least in Europe - there are no real socialists in the USA). And this is how Classical Liberalism, what we would term the economic right (small government, free enterprise etc) came to be associated with the political left (looking after people in need). I think this clouds the picture. Certainly I have felt confused because I seemed to be a social liberal and yet I kept finding myself on the wrong side of debates, because actually I'm not a social liberal, I'm a libertarian socialist. The difference is brought out by the Political Compass website.
Neoliberalism
Neoliberalism arose as a response to a perceived attack on the American system of free enterprise. It involved a reassertion of the values of Classical Liberalism combined with some new twists, hence Neoclassical Liberalism or Neoliberalism. Read the Lewis Powell Memo to the American Chamber of Commerce in 1971 for and outline of this kind of thinking. Everything Powell suggested came to pass. For example, conservative businessmen bought up the media and used their wealth to leverage a take over the teaching of economics in universities. They bought chairs and founded schools. They employed the graduates in think tanks and as lobbyists. They imposed a monoculture on business studies in the USA and his caught on around the world. So now, all the journalists and critics have studied the same kind of economics as the politicians and have no effective critique of Neoliberalism. There are critiques, but they are ignored. And note that despite causing the global financial crisis, the curriculum in economics departments around the world has not changed.
In Neoliberalism the liberty of the individual is extended to the corporation which now has the same rights as a person. In this view the corporation should be free to engage in economic activity without interference from government. No environmental controls are desirable since they inhibit economic activity (this was a specific concern of Powell).
Also this is now linked to the idea of the economic market that embodies the micro-economic principle of supply and demand. However, Professor Steve Keen has pointed out that from around the time of the Lewis Powell Memo, the economics profession has known that the so-called law of supply and demand is bunk, but that's another story.
In this view if pollution is undesirable then the market will punish the polluter by reducing demand for their product. Alan Greenspan, long time Secretary of the US Treasury under successive presidents both Republican and Democrat (and personal disciple of the extremist philosopher Ayn Rand) refused to prosecute corrupt banks because he believed that the market would punish them. It did not and eventually we had the global financial crisis. And that crisis was not solved by the market. It was resolved by government. In the UK the government spent the equivalent of one year's GDP to prop up failing banks. The alternative was to watch the world's financial systems collapse leaving society in chaos.
Market forces depend on knowledge. If a polluter can hide their pollution or lie about the impact—as oil and tobacco companies have done for decades—then supply and demand breaks down as an effective mechanism. If the corrupt practices don't come to light or are defended as legitimate forms of economic activity—as happens in the housing and finance industry—then the market does nothing at all. Any imperfection in knowledge or human rationality causes the markets to malfunction. And the ignorance of consumers is a vast abyss because the same corporations who pollute and lie about it also control the media.
Oh, by the way, we've known that humans don't use reason to make decisions and choices for at least 50 years. Which is why adverts are now all about imagery and emotions rather than facts and information. All decisions involve emotional weighting of which information is salient to the decision. We have free will, but not as classically envisage, not countracausal free will that only relies on reason. We create reasons for our actions on the fly and only after the fact. (See Mercier and Sperber, The Enigma of Reason)
Neoliberalism, like all forms of liberalism is based on the idea of liberty. But proponents of liberty have always made exceptions. And those exceptions have often defined where liberals feel comfortable with violence. Citizens are free but immigrants are not. Soldiers can shoot foreigners but not citizens. Men can vote, but not women. Some of the men who wrote that "all men are created equal" owned slaves. Police target black people. A car may emit deadly toxins and carcinogens but a citizen may not smoke a little weed (for their own good). And so on.
The Liberals have always emphasised the aspects of liberty that most benefit the ruling elite, while occasionally mitigating for the disasters that this causes in society. So austerity increased poverty and homelessness in the UK from 2010 onwards, but hey, two men and now get married and rich people have a choice of which school their kids go to. Liberty, but within limits and almost always to benefit the elite - or at least not to discomfort them. Indeed one might argue that by allowing same-sex marriage secularists were really just thumbing their noses at the Church which has often been the enemy of liberty (especially in the days of Classical Liberalism).
Neoliberalism prioritised the liberty of corporation over the liberty of citizens. So if a corporation decides to cut down the Amazon rainforest, do fracking in Blackpool, or pour toxic waste into a river, then Neoliberalism says that impeding them is only justified if it does not affect the corporation's ability to make a profit. Our rights to clean air, water, and food are curtailed in favour of the rights of corporations to make a profit.
For example, at present as many as 38,000 people die each year in the UK from air pollution according to Public Health England, the government's own advisory board. Now of course every one deplores this loss of life. And some steps are been taken but on the other hand most large UK cities have illegal levels of pollution under EU law. And there is a good chance we'll lose that protection after Brexit. Air pollution is an accepted part of life. Just 272 stabbings in London in 2018 cause a huge public outcry, with the authoritarian arm of the media constantly feigning outrage. 90-100 people die every day (on average) from air pollution and there is extreme reluctance to curtail the main culprit: motor vehicles.
The rights of corporations override human rights, although not always. Still, corporations are always pushing the boundaries of how they can exploit workers and the environment. Many corporations behave in ways that if we encountered them in a person would constitute a mental illness.
Corporation that apparently lack empathy for example and exploit people for profit are like psychopaths. Indeed research shows that executives are more likely to have the mental characteristics of psychopaths. They lack empathy which would stop them from exploiting people through feeling their pain. Many high level politicians literally seem impervious to the emotions that we would normally expect to see in response to suffering.
This is why the picture of Jacinda Ardern, current PM of New Zealand, openly emoting caused a stir. We never see that in the UK. We have curiously unemotional people in power. In fact most of them give me the creeps.
Conclusion
This is what we have to fight against, but it's not capitalism per se. Capitalism is just the investment of surplus wealth in projects. By using their labour workers create further wealth that is shared between all parties: workers earn wages, investor earn profits, and landowners (resource owners) earn rent. And any surplus is reinvested. This is a Marxist definition, but it's as good as any.
There's nothing inherently bad about this. And framing what we want as an attack on Capitalism is counterproductive. We are not against investments and profits per se, I think, we are against corporations being able to override our human rights in pursuit of profit.
If we frame our fight as being with capitalism then we imply, for example that we want to end the concept of private property - this is a key Marxist policy. And how do we do this? Because people are not going to give up their property without a fight. We can nationalise some stuff, but not everything.
The problem is with how we are defining liberty and the exceptions we apply. The extension of rights to corporations which override human rights the first thing I would rescind. My first law would be no one is allowed to pollute. I can't just go next door and take a shit on my neighbour's lawn. There are no exceptions to this. And given that we mostly live in cities now, then some cooperative form of dealing with waste is necessary - sewers and treatment plants, yadda yadda.
But the output of treatment is a vast resource of nutrients we need for growing food. In medieval China, night soil collectors became very wealthy transporting the shit of Changan to the farmers outside the city. The population density inside the walls was greater than modern day Manhattan. Intensive farming was made possible be recycling human waste. Which is also why traditional Chinese cuisine does not involve raw food or salads. Cooking killed the fecal bacteria that were everywhere.
I agree with George Monbiot and Extinction Rebellion that the system is broken and that climate change is urgent. But we have to frame our response in ways that will help rather than hinder. And we have to be clear about the nature of the problem and the possible solutions.
We won't solve any problems through adopting authoritarian forms of government. Indeed one the problems we face is that governments cannot hear the people because they have industry lobbyists shouting in both ears. In my view, liberty has to apply to getting change. We cannot use force to achieve our aims. But we do need to be telling the truth, fighting the lies, and getting the government to take the problem seriously. We do need rapid change and to move our investments away from fossil fuels.
I'll end with this observation. One of the suggestions is that the UK rapidly stops using gas for cooking and heating. Presumably we'd extend to this to Western Europe if possible. However, if we rapidly degassed our economy then Russia and Ukraine would be bankrupt overnight. At the same time the repeated droughts are already affecting wheat crops, their other main export. 190 million people suddenly lose their main source of income at the same time their food supplies start to run out. Can anyone predict what they will do?
Every course we chose will have serious consequences at this point. And yet we must choose quickly and act quickly, because inaction will be the worst. American literary critic, Harold Bloom, dubbed this kind of dilemma the Hamlet Complex. We appear to be in the feigning madness part of the story.
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Keep is seemly & on-topic. Thanks.