Neoliberalism is a disease the world is currently (still) attempting to shake off. It is in obvious decline, but still wreaking havoc. It was conceived by a cadre of extreme (mostly American) economists and implemented by pliant politicians. This is the stage setting for Hegemony Now, by Jeremy Gilbert and Axel Williams, political science professors in England. It reframes the argument, and attempts to show where the Left (continually) goes wrong in its seemingly fool’s errand to right longstanding wrongs and new ones accumulating constantly. I’m not sure it totally succeeds, but it is a gripping ride, if you read on here.

The authors claim neoliberalism came to power with Margaret Thatcher in 1979, and spread like a virus to the USA via Ronald Reagan. It had been festering in pockets all over the West, but notably at the University of Chicago, where the Hayeks and Friedmans of the world pushed it out of the lab and into the streets. Their program boils down to the unfettered market being the answer to everything. It has been proven wrong endlessly, but persists regardless.

It pretends, as Margaret Thatcher claimed, that everyone is alone and on their own. They can depend on no one else, especially their government, to support them, save them or care for or even about them. Society and community are vacant concepts. This led to decades of decreasing public services, as governments cut budgets, leading to services becoming pathetic if not completely eliminated. It led to outsourcing to private firms of longstanding government obligations, which led Britain, for one, to have the worst reputation for things like unemployment insurance in the western world. In these neoliberal leading nations, the post office was forced to become profit making, raising prices and cutting services. University education became a for-profit business, where students became customers, their every whim catered to, from “safe” spaces to gourmet cafeterias. Public education became a competitive wasteland, where teachers were evaluated by the success of their students, and where a well-rounded education was abandoned in favor of teaching to the test. Government outsourcing brought in fearsome new administrators, who saw their job as keeping citizens from the services they applied for, making rules and procedures so onerous that most applicants would fail at some point and be denied.

Every little thing would be better executed by private industry, according to neoliberals. Yet in the UK, privatizing the trains was universally resented. Same for water. In the US, even the IRS had to use private firms to take online income tax forms, for profit, of course. Public hospitals don’t employ doctors any more; they contract with medical firms. Vaccines are no longer the purview of governments; private for profit firms decide who gets them and how much they will pay (Even the WTO thinks countries should ignore the American patent laws over this issue). Microchip manufacturers are sitting back during a supply chain crisis, waiting for countries to offer them billions to increase production – or they won’t build there. Delivery firms famously employ no drivers; they are all private contractors, required to make their own vehicles look like company vehicles, wear the uniforms of company personnel and work to company specifications – without being allowed to be employees of the company. These are the fruits of the “free market”.

It has come to the point where civil servants are required to be obsessed with efficiencies and Key Performance Indicators – instead of administering programs. Services for the public have become fiercely defended barriers instead of a safety net offered to all. But it was never the intent of government for it to be this way. Neoliberal hegemony took over government services, unbidden.

“Hegemony,” the authors say, “is always a matter of smaller groups assembling the resources necessary to rule or lead larger groups.” This applies to political parties or movements, social trends, and economic theories. It has always been the way of the world. For the Left, which does not appear to understand this, the lesson is to apply it, rather than trying to build consensus for its alternative view, as it always has. And which clearly does not work.

This new heaven on Earth was not something any citizen wanted, but which leaders like Tony Blair considered not merely common sensical, but inevitable. The authors point out it was neither, but a concerted effort by the Blairs and other conservatives of the world to impose it. Globalization, which has homogenized the world’s cultures, their architecture, product standards and job descriptions of two hundred countries into one, was not inevitable. It was a clear case of hegemony. Every country now has rap artists, bank towers downtown, too many private vehicles, Walmarts, reality tv game shows, Windows computers and atm cards. Bankers own most of the land. The 1% own half the wealth. Neoliberalism reinforces those trends. Wherever you go today, it’s the same, thanks to neoliberalism.

In this neoliberal world, we are told, everyone’s primary function is to build their own brand. Everyone has to leverage what they have done into glory in order to move up the ladder over the still warm bodies of everyone else. Everything is suspected of being an exaggeration when not an outright lie. Trust is an absurd concept. Teamwork is suspicious; altruism is a black mark. The whole world is a meritocracy, where every step on the ladder must be earned and measured. But “’meritocracy’ was a derogatory, satirical term first coined by socialists and social democrats in the 1950s, who believed that what it designated was a liberal fantasy,” the book says. Farcical in its origins, it is clearly fraudulent in its application.

Financialization took over from actually producing anything. Companies that actually made things are traded like sports cards. Each new owner milks it for every cent it might produce. Whatever services it provides is of no concern. Finance employees are give leeway to gamble the bank’s money, until they suddenly lose billions one morning. But they are not slated to end up in prisons. They just move on. The entire worldwide financial crisis of 2008 resulted in a total of zero criminal convictions. No one was to blame, apparently, for the trillions lost in it and the concurrent recessions around the world. Instead, central banks and governments came to the rescue of the investment and retail banks that caused it in the first place, leaving consumers to fend for themselves. We are paying for that right now, with runaway inflation from all the money printing.

It has spread to the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, which impose neoliberalism to be in the club and partake of its offerings. This came to the world’s attention when Greece nearly failed under the weight of idiotic debt it took on at the behest of Goldman Sachs for all kinds of bad infrastructure investments. The Greeks ousted their government and replaced it with radical leftist party Syriza to go in a new direction, as far from the neoliberal model as possible. It was humiliating for Syriza to have to accept the horrific terms of the rescue loan from the IMF, but it had no alternative but to sign. The Syriza government thereupon resigned rather than defend its forced hypocrisy. Greece went into a recession from which it has yet to recover. Austerity is the way of life there now. Just like in the UK, which is in a permanent state of austerity, having released the rich from any responsibilities at all. Money-launderers get knighthoods if they make donations properly.

Neoliberalism, like any good pyramid scheme, works best for those at the top. But, the authors say, “the fact that neoliberal policies demonstrably do not lead to increases in ‘social mobility’, despite this often being claimed by advocates as their overriding political objective, is clear evidence that neoliberal capitalism tends toward the concentration wealth rather than its even or just dispersal across a population - as predicted by Marxist theory in its criticisms of liberal economics.” We were warned.

The book says neoliberals did it by bribing consumers: “Consent to the entire neoliberal project has been secured largely by persuading populations to accept private ‘empowerment’ as consumers as a substitute for the partial reversal of social democracy, and for the weakening of representative democracy itself, after its high point of effectiveness in the post-war period.” Allowing them to run up unlimited debt for goods from around the world lined the pockets of the neoliberals and trapped ordinary consumers globally. Consumers thrilled to the music of choice; bankers to the muse of debt.

The authors say this is unsustainable. They say anyone who studies how humans operate and interact sees this plainly. And there is backlash and retrenchment. Populists and authoritarians are being elected to sweep out the old, because people see them as the only ones who can and will. It might be a high price to pay, but they say these leaders are the only ones who can save their country. Even the USA.

Ordinary citizens have been hammered by neoliberalism and the massive inequality it has forged. Trillions of dollars have been socked away in secret overseas trust accounts where they avoid taxes, leaving the lesser paid to foot the entire tax bill and/or forgo services for lack of tax receipts. The authors say: “Neoliberal economics is a method for the production of precarity.”

And consumers hate it, passionately: “Opinion poll after opinion poll, as well as more in-depth research into public opinion and attitudes, showed that the unraveling of the welfare state, privatization of public assets, continuing attacks on labour, tax cuts on the rich and deregulation of finance were never popular policies.” The Third Way, as espoused by Bill Clinton and particularly by Tony Blair, was just a different way to implement neoliberalism, it turned out.

And once entrenched, there’s no getting rid of it: “Every hegemonic ideology that has reached a certain level of success begins to pass itself off as the only possible way of seeing the world. This is inherent to the process by which contending ideologies try to become ‘common sense’.” It is intellectual dishonesty at its highest, and is on exhibit worldwide. The authors call this state “generative entrenchment”. This is where “a system becomes more powerful the more it is depended upon, and shapes those entities that depend on it by becoming and important basis on which they depend,” reinforcing each other continuously.

Today, humungous internet platforms are the agents of neoliberalism, forcing businesses to participate and submit, and consumers to subscribe and submit. They are well above the law, only occasionally bowing to a demand for more taxes that make no dent whatsoever in their hegemony of the world. The authors say Big Tech has less time constraints and therefore more power than mere politicians. It’s a combination of consent and coercion, and everyone who cares already knows it, but can do nothing to rein it in.

This is a powerfully written book, immediately obvious yet a completely different view of the western economic values foisted on the whole planet. Unfortunately, it bogs down in its insistence on showing the Left where it has gone wrong and what it needs to do to succeed. Basically, the left needs to take on the tactics of the neoliberals and implant its values directly and forcefully. It’s not nearly enough just to build a grassroots organization, hold protests, and elect the occasional candidate. The book is full of recommendations for the Left to rise and score a few points for equality and fairness, where it is always coming from behind, it claims.

The one pointer for the Left the book never mentions is the single biggest solution – a charismatic candidate. Despite all the self-contradictions and nonsensical programs fomented by neoliberal politicians (and they are endless), the one thing the Left does not have or foster is an impressive leader. Tony Blair, despite leading the Labour Party, is no leftist; he is a clear and classic example of a neoliberal. The same goes for Barack Obama. And especially Bill Clinton. People voted for them thinking they would achieve real change at long last. They all proved to be more of the same, and worse.

America needs a charismatic leader who is the opposite of a Donald Trump, neatly shown in the latent popularity of Bernie Sanders. The UK needs one who is the opposite of a Tony Blair (Everyone is the opposite of a Boris Johnson, so it need not be elaborated). In Hegemony Now, readers will come to understand that is the only way out.

David Wineberg