Invisible Doctrine is a concise, clear text on how the rightwing bent of the 80s--on, have landed us in our current political landscape.

In easy to understand language, Invisible Doctrine breaks down the effects of Chicago style economics and clarifies leftist economic theory. Nearly all economics education in the US is taught from a right-wing perspective and most of the books out there about leftist economic theory are a bit hard to jump into without some previous exposure to the subjects. Invisible Doctrine is a book I'd recommend to friends who maybe haven't ever read about economic theory. It is broken down very well and is a quick, enlightening read.

There's a lot covered in this book in a short span of pages but I learned a lot and feel so glad for the opportunity to have read it.

4.5 rounded up. This book is short and concise, and feels like an intermediate beginner (caveat I know) to the understanding of leftist politics and what the left is fighting against. This book takes complicated topics and makes them easy to understand - I haven't taken an economics course since my freshman year in high school but I was able to feel like I understood what was going on. Dives deep into how the current system of neoliberalism works and how it weakens the average person through the weight of helplessness, making it even harder to push against.

The book is also laid out incredibly well -- after a chapter on climate change and how neoliberalism has just rapidly increased our speed towards global devastation is a chapter on hope and how it only takes 25% of people to believe something for a large change to take place (which is a bit scary when we consider some of the statistics on what people currently believe but it was laid out in a positive light).

This book is heavy, but I really enjoyed it. This book is NOT nonbiased, and so there are likely going to be a lot of negative comments from people who disagree. To be fair, for the sake of brevity there were a lot of things that were slightly hand waived away or said without explanation. If I hadn't read other books that had said the same thing, I would have been slightly worried about this book's lack of depth covering for lack of substance behind what they're saying. This book is well sourced and well written, and is great for those who don't want to pick up a giant book of theory but want a deeper understanding of the current system.

Thank you to Crown Publishing and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review!

I requested this from NetGalley on the strength of Monbiot's essays in the Guardian. Good call: Invisible Doctrine is a short, crisp, angry, lucid primer on what, exactly, neoliberalism is and how it intersects with extractive capitalism to give us a world in which the rich control more and more of the earth's dwindling resources while the rest of us work too hard and generally suck it up. I highlighted any number of one-liners and whole passages.

Many of the book's insights are ones you're likely to have encountered before -- neoliberalism "casts us as consumers rather than citizens"; systemic failures (such as climate catastrophe) are framed as individual failures (why aren't you recycling more???). But if, like me, you don't know much about economic theory, or about the economists (Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek) whose ideas brought us to our present pass, Invisible Doctrine is your book.

I especially appreciated the discussion of rent, meaning not what you pay the landlord every month but what those who control "crucial and nonreplicable resources" charge the rest of us for access to them. For example, when a public service is privatized, we pay the new owner something extra for access to that service, and this is the new owner's profit, aka rent.

Also new to me was Monbiot and Hutchison's analysis of the "frontier." To the extent that capitalism depends on the extraction of finite resources, it has to keep finding new places to extract those resources from: hence the frontier. (The authors' index case is the island of Madeira, whose name means "Wood" and which has been deforested in its entirety.) Not that I came to Invisible Doctrine ignorant of the financial impetuses behind colonialism, but this specific application of the idea of a frontier made me see expansion from a fresh angle.

There's more, quite a lot more -- offshoring; the drawing of a distinction between conspiracy theories (supported by evidence) and conspiracy fictions (convenient distractions from real conspiracies, such as Big Tobacco's project of hiding the evidence that cigarette smoking causes cancer); finance as a complex adaptive system, & the implications thereof; etc., etc. -- but let's keep this review to a reasonable length.

I have complaints, of course. In some places, mechanisms could have been spelled out more clearly. Here, for instance: "When, in 1971, Richard Nixon abandoned the system of fixed exchange rates, he opened the door for speculation and capital flight." Uh ... okay? So how'd that work? To be fair, detail is necessarily going to suffer to some extent, in the interest of brevity and accessibility, and anyway Monbiot and Hutchison's analysis is convincing regardless.

Toward the end of the book I started muttering, "Okay, but how are we supposed to fix this?" The authors answer that question with reference to Murray Bookchin (he whose ideas influenced the extraordinary experiment in democratic rule that is the Kurdish region of Rojava). They have differences with Bookchin, and they point out crucial omissions in his work:

He fails to deal adequately with transnational issues, especially the problems of global capital, global supply chains, defense against aggressive states, and the need for universal action on global crises (such as climate and ecological breakdown).

They also argue that Bookchin's decentralized democracy can coexist with representative democracy, which is probably just as well given that the fewer things it's necessary to undo completely the better our odds.

I don't know that I'm exactly left with any hope, but at least I'm in a condition of better comprehension and less despair. Thanks to NetGalley and Crown for the ARC.

Thank you Crown Publishing for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own. No review was required in return for an advance reading copy and no review was promised.

I reviewed Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism, by George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison.

As the authors defined the problem: “The role of governments, neoliberals claim, should be to eliminate the obstacles that prevent the discovery of the natural hierarchy. They must cut taxes, shed regulation, privatize public service, curtail protest, diminish the power of trade unions and eradicate collective bargaining. In doing so, they will liberate the market, freeing entrepreneurs to generate the wealth that will enhance the lives of all.” It a right-wing economic view that has the inevitable result of the rich get richer, at the expense of everyone else, while having the big element of trickle down (aka “voodoo”) economics.

I agree with the authors that neoliberalism isn’t really free market economics, but instead “it’s quite the opposite. Neoliberalism is the tool used by the very rich to accumulate more wealth. Neoliberalism is class war.”

The effects of neoliberalism have been disastrous for the world. Just in the US, “Since 1989, America’s super-rich have gown about $21 triillion richer. The poorest 50 percent, by contrast, have become $900 billion poorer.” And the doctrine has also wrecked great havoc around the rest of the planet.

The book points out that even seeing the devastation that neoliberalism wrecked on the world economy in 2007, the doctrine is still dominant. It is just one of many examples of the terrible effects of neoliberalism that the book describes.

Among the big harms of neoliberalism is how its proponents had gotten the corporatist wing of the Democratic party to embrace it, most notably, the administrations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, thus preventing the party from embracing much equalitarian economic policies that the base of the party desired. The authors made the mistake of claiming “We are all neoliberals now.” Just because corporatist politicians are does not mean the rest of us are too. The author attempts to defend the Clinton and Obama administrations by putting a spin on them they weren’t true believers. But, the record of their actions speaks too loudly. I would have liked the authors to go into detail about that aspect, but their failure to do so didn’t affect the overall message of the book or its quality.

I give this book an A. Amazon, Goodreads and NetGalley require grades on a 1-5 star system. In my personal conversion system, an A equates to 5 stars. (A or A+: 5 stars, B+: 4 stars, B: 3 stars, C: 2 stars, D or F: 1 star).

This review has been posted at NetGalley, Goodreads and my blog, Mr. Book’s Book Reviews. It will also be posted at Amazon, as soon as the book is released to the public on June 4.