The world is experiencing multiple and intersecting crises that threaten an imminent dystopia. Escape requires rolling back the legacy of decades of neoliberalism and global capitalism and rebuilding the public domain through radically transformed institutions based on popular sovereignty.
Never-ending upheavals caused by the health pandemic, climate disasters, war and economic instability have produced real hardship for millions of people. Intensification of food shortages and hunger loom in the developing world, inflation and likely recessions will further hammer living standards in the developed world, especially among the poorer sections of society, and death, dislocation and migration are daily realities in war zones. Understandably there is widespread anxiety and a sense of foreboding about the future.
In the face of these intersecting crises, there is little confidence in the ability of existing political leaders and institutions to find realistic solutions.
To get out of this impasse we need to move beyond the headlines and come to a realistic understanding of its root causes, and how solutions might be developed. Being realistic in this context doesn’t mean being moderate or minimalist. It means demanding a radical transformation of a system which poses existential challenges for the planet and the beings who live on it.
Neoliberal ideas and practices have dominated politics for the last 40 years. It’s time to hold them accountable for the present state of the world. These crises have developed, festered and occasionally erupted in the neoliberal era without an adequate political response being forthcoming. The deliberate hollowing out of democratic processes has been a major obstacle to finding solutions.
The roots of our dystopian conditions lie in the short-term self-interests of poorly regulated capitalism, that have been emboldened and rationalised by neoliberal doctrines. Capital has sought to maximise its wealth and power through unlimited endless growth, whatever the consequences for the environment, and reckless financialisation of the economy that has produced artificial booms and very real busts that have threatened to collapse the system entirely. Social cohesion has been undermined by unprecedented inequality and diminution of public services. Within liberal democratic systems, much of the population is effectively without voice or influence and finds itself, as with the austerity policies of the 2010s, paying the price of a crisis they had nothing to do with creating. Environmentally the writing is on the wall – act now on climate change, or face a catastrophic near-term future. The post-Cold War security order has been ruptured by the conflict in Ukraine and it, and the western sanctions made in response, have surely ended the liberal rules-based international economic order. The knock-on effects of broken supply chains are multiple and various, ranging from starvation in some parts of the world, to soaring energy prices, increased poverty as incomes fail to keep up with inflation, and probable recession elsewhere. All these have exacerbated the migration crisis where millions of people, finding life intolerable in their homelands, have sought to find new lives by crossing international borders, often at unimaginable risk to themselves.
States and public policy have failed. But, despite their failure, suitably restructured they arguably offer the best, and perhaps only means of asserting public control over the private interests that are responsible for fast-approaching disaster. Their potential has been displayed in the emergency responses to the 2008 global financial crisis and 2020 pandemic. To redirect such potential to defending and extending the public interest, and then to normalise it, will require significant institutional redesign to express a democratic public purpose that is stymied by existing political arrangements.
We need to reverse the process by which issues of crucial importance to citizens’ wellbeing have been depoliticised or removed from the purview of democratic politics. Power has been shifted to remote locations (spatially or organisationally) where basic principles of representation (of the people) and accountability (to the people) do not apply. Whatever else populists have got wrong about the state of the world, they are not wrong in claiming that political institutions and elites have escaped the control of the people they supposedly represent and are accountable to.
Areas removed from democratic control, wholly or partly, include capital mobility, trade and investment, and intellectual property rights. In these areas neoliberal rules trump democracy. Monetary policy, too, is often outside politics due to ‘central bank independence’, and fiscal policy is bound by national or international fiscal rules that embed neoliberal principles.
As the scope of democracy has been reduced, so too has support for liberal-democratic institutions waned. Profound disillusionment has been registered in the rise of anti-system parties such as right populists, key votes such as the Brexit referendum, declining voter turnout in many jurisdictions, perceived irrelevance of existing political parties and structures, the increasing isolation of leaders from followers, along with declining numbers of the latter, leaving what political scientist Peter Mair referred to as a ‘void’ between the leaders and the led.
Important issues belong in the political domain, even if there are no guarantees about what decisions will emerge. Repoliticisation is the antidote to depoliticisation. Rolling back the transfers of authority to remote and unaccountable locations will represent a start. There needs too to be more ‘state’, in the sense of public institutions performing functions like planning and equalisation, and using instruments like public ownership. And there needs to be more democracy in how public institutions operate. Second, nation-states must have more autonomy. The nation-state, however imperfect a vehicle it may be, offers the best available prospect for democratic input. It has been disempowered under the existing order, but remains the jurisdictional level that houses the most developed democratic institutions. Compared to it, supranational institutions are far less democratic, less representative, less accountable and more likely to be dominated by appointees whose connection with any part of the democratic process is remote.
The remoteness and poor performance of representative and accountability functions by existing institutions serves capital’s agenda for the most part. Their redesign needs to ensure that popular sovereignty, the authority of the people to determine priorities, prevails over that of special interests such as capital.
Established institutions and practices have long-since passed their ‘fit-for-purpose’ date. A crucial part of reversing the catastrophic policy trajectories must be to devise new institutional structures that can achieve the goals of representation and accountability in new and effective ways based on the roles people play in society, and on their lived experience, rather than on their place of residence.
Stephen McBride is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Public Policy and Globalization at McMaster University. His research deals with issues of comparative public policy, globalization and political economy.
Escaping Dystopia: Rebuilding a Public Domain by Stephen McBride is available on the Bristol University Press website. Order here for £14.99.
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