Second of three parts
What has the neoliberal era wrought?
(2) This brings us to our world in crisis. Understanding the core defining dynamic of neoliberalism as the state implementing an agenda of privileging capital and elite profits and wealth over everything else reveals a common thread in the multiple overlapping crises we face today.
The crises are different expressions of the crises of capitalism at different levels; each is, in its own way, rooted in the relentless expansion of profit-seeking activity. They are exploding now, but their contradictions have built up under the many decades of neoliberalism since the 1970s.
The COVID-19 pandemic emerged from aggressive urban and market expansion into nature. Inflation is brought about by degraded domestic agriculture, increased corporate control of food systems, and financialization in commodity markets. Recessions are from grossly imbalanced economies whose aggregate demand is diminished by poverty, whose supply is compromised by liberalization, and whose debt is bloated to artificially sustain profit-making.
The alarming democratic decline and backsliding everywhere is because political systems are being distorted and bastardized to serve the narrowest of elite interests. Too often, these tip into authoritarianism and repression. The wars that have erupted are just the most violent expressions of conflicts over resources, territories, and nations.
The increasing frequency and severity of extreme weather events is real. This is driven by the accumulation of distress over the capitalist-dominated Anthropocene epoch. The relentless, competitive drive of corporate profit-seeking and consumerism and the persistence of capitalism’s GDP growth obsession bring us closer and closer to the brink of mass and planetary extinction.
The shocks share systemic roots. In today’s much more interconnected world, however, they also interact and feed off or reinforce each other. The impact on people depends on where in the world they are and on which side of prevailing power imbalances they are. The distress is much more distressing in some than others.
We are compelled to consider these multiple crises in what must be constant strategizing and tacticizing, and re-strategizing and re-tacticizing.
(3) Can a technological revolution speed up successful social development that has been so elusive for so long – such as through this so-called 5th Industrial Revolution? This fifth iteration ostensibly means going beyond efficiency and productivity gains to more harmonious human-machine collaborations and the improved well-being of employees, customers, companies, and society.
The world has supposedly gone through the first, second, and third industrial revolutions, is in the middle of the fourth, and is careening into the fifth. Looking beyond the obvious differences from the 18th century and the first industrial revolution, how much have these great leaps in technologies really contributed to fixing social underdevelopment? The expanding poverty and vulnerability of billions of people gives an answer.
We should be skeptical. Far too many people in the Philippines and many countries like it have yet to realize the promise of previous so-called industrial revolutions in the most important sense of majorities fully benefiting instead of just a few really prospering. This spin on emerging but anxiety-inducing technologies looks suspiciously like how neoliberalism was periodically sweetened with promises of improvements in the quality of life through the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), or the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), or social protection and the like.
Technological progress is impressive because it proves the huge creative potential of people and the immense possibilities to build a society without poverty. Yet science and technology (S&T) in the abstract clearly isn’t enough to improve everyone’s lives. New technology is always dazzling but there’s more than enough experience from past technological “revolutions” to teach us to be more measured in our enthusiasm.
We’re awed, excited and endorphin-overloaded by cutting edge breakthrough technologies in robotics, artificial intelligence, 3D printing, nanotechnology, neurotechnology, biotechnology, quantum computing, energy storage, and more – but where are the generalized breakthroughs in improving everyone’s lives?
Let’s take the example of basic agricultural technologies. The advanced robotics and precision systems being developed are making agriculture unbelievably industrialized. This is unbelievable, especially if you’re a poor Filipino farmer today who still relies on hand tools and farm animals – these are technologies already in use five millennia ago in Mesopotamia in 3,000-2,000 BC. Put simply, it isn’t because of the lack of S&T that there’s still vast rural poverty in the country.
What really happens and who benefits from technologies is determined by who’s in control of these. The distribution of benefits is determined by the balance of political and economic power in society. There’s still much that has to be fixed here first to make the purpose and trajectory of technology serve the common and universal good.
The regressive logic of capitalist market profit-seeking and competition severely constrains how technology can serve human well-being and a sustainable society. Advanced information, communication and artificial intelligence technologies have enabled “gig economy” and “platform work” which have made jobs more precarious and workers more disposable. The concern that fifth industrial revolution technologies will be used to monitor, steer and sanction workers in pursuit of corporate efficiency, competitiveness and profit is very real.
(4) If not technological fixes, what are our solutions? They are many, they have to take place at many levels, and so we also have to be very many pushing for them. There are a couple of key points.
The state and our governments have so often been at the forefront of our problems. Still, it has to be stressed that it’s only the state that can respond at the scale needed for the magnitude of the problems at hand. National and local government are the most important means to development.
A number of measures are essential to rapidly and permanently improve the lives of the billions of people making up the working class. None of these are possible without state power and centralized action:
- Navigating and then reforming the international financial and economic system which is so dominated by mega-capitalist interests;
- Coordinating the complex economic activities and major investment decisions needed to transform the economy;
- Promoting and protecting progressive economic alternatives on a large enough scale to overcome entrenched market power;
- Ensuring education, health and housing for up to hundreds of millions of citizens in each of our countries;
- Responding to worsening climate-related disasters, restoring our ecosystems, and transitioning to more sustainable economies need huge resources;
- Redistributing wealth and generating revenues across the entire economy;
- Managing or cajoling powerful foreign and domestic corporations to operate according to the national interest rather than mainly private profit; and
- Resisting foreign monopoly capital and oligarchic elites of the status quo, whose opposition will intensify and become more violent the greater the gains we achieve.
These measures are the essential backdrop to more specific efforts at social development and welfare measures. The critical need for a more responsible and reliable people-oriented state to ensure essential basic needs, regulate self-serving private economic activity, and guarantee that society serves common social goals should be obvious.
Temporary measures are intrinsically bounded and localized. They are of course still necessary though and cannot be cavalierly dismissed as meaningless quick fixes or mere band-aid solutions. People in distress today have to be supported today simply because they are distressed and in need; but this is also what makes the distant vision of a better future real, concrete and convincing. Small-scale efforts are also important venues to incubate innovative ideas that can be expanded on a larger scale for more expansive benefits.
Under current economic arrangements, targeted protections or assistance are vital assertions. But they will never be large or numerous enough to really deal with the magnitude of the problems at hand. The system simply will not allow it – as the stubbornness of exploitative biases against women, immigrants, racial minorities and other vulnerable groups clearly shows.
It is naïve to assume that short-term interventions will somehow accumulate to a fundamentally humane and people-oriented world. This is despite how technologically advanced and innovative the micro-interventions might be. So many welfare interventions are chronically demanded in the first place because immiseration and inequality is so chronic. This only shows how resistant the system is to real, broad-based and sustainable social development.
Again, social development demands confronting how expansive public power is being systematically used to support narrow private profits.
How might this expansive public power be instead used for the common good? (To be continued)
(This paper was presented at the 10th International Consortium for Social Development (ICSD) Asia Pacific Biennial Conference with the theme “The Fifth Industrial Revolution Amidst Multifaceted Disruptions: Harnessing the Power of Social Development,” held on October 22-25, 2024, University of the Philippines)
