Love Me, I'm A Neoliberal.

"It hardly makes any difference who will be the next President. The world is governed by market forces" - Alan Greenspan

The area around Lee Green, even on a gloriously sunny Sunday afternoon, is not the fanciest. There's a bleak looking Wetherspoons pub, The Edmund Halley, under a heavily graffitied tower block, there's a closed coffee shop caled rhubarb & CUSTARD, there's boarded up shops, and there's rubbish blowing around in the wind.

There's also, until they pull down the whole arcade - something that's been on the cards for a while, the Museum of Neoliberalism and as you may well suspect it's not a museum that pays tribute to neoliberalism but one that aims to critique it heavily, to turn you against it, and, and this is a very long shot, to ultimately destroy it.

Fiverr advertisement (2017)

Alerted to its existence by a piece on TheQuietus website, I wasn't sure exactly what to expect except for a supposedly genuine bottle of an Amazon delivery driver's piss. That had made me suspect that there wouldn't be much about the philosophy of neoliberalism or the thoughts of people like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek.

I was disabused of that notion pretty quickly as even the window of the museum had the quote from Greenspan that heads up this assessment on it. It's a small museum, very small, but they pack a lot in. Beginning with a brief introduction to neoliberalism and its attendant evils.

Which are listed:- food banks, zero hours contrcats, Trump, Bolsonaro, and Brexit being some of the lowlights. The museum's curators, Darren Cullen and Gavin Grindon, believe we arrived at these hellish answers by allowing what began in the 1970s as an "obscure and ideological cult" to rise to power and shape our lives in "dramatic and often terrible ways"

Neoliberalism proposed that the market was an ethic in itself and that businesses should be deregulated and freed to control our lives. It argued that the role of governments should not be to have visionary and transformative policies but simply to manage the markets, defend the realm, and protect private property.

It's something you'll have possibly heard Adam Curtis talk about many times and you may have also heard Curtis go on to say that these ideas are neither "universal or inevitable". The Museum of Neoliberalism goes further, correctly I believe, in saying that neoliberalism has, quite recently been artificially placed centre stage in Western society, sometimes violently, as if it is the only ideology available to people.

It's propped up a capitalist society that serves the rich and debases the poor. It not only debases the poor but it holds them up as failures and makes them responsible for all the degradation they suffer. You only have to witness the latest round of Tory MPs mouthing off about working class people not being able to cook or budget properly in an attempt to cover up their lack of policy regarding the cost of living crisis we are all sleepwalking in to to realise how deeply embedded these ideas are in the upper echelons of our society.

It is the mission of this museum to show how neoliberalism has "wrecked our society in ways large and small" and this it does quite easily and with no little humour. What it doesn't do, however, is offer an alternative and in these times of rampant populism, fake news, normalising racism, and social media algorithms that feels to me like something of a misstep.

There's also a slight suspicion that this is a Corbynista project and Jeremy Corbyn has fought, and lost, two general elections and can no longer be viewed as the solution to our problems. I've always thought that when people start referring to politicians by their first name, there's a cult-like feeling about it and, for me, that applies just as much with Jeremy as it does Boris. A serious politician does not need to be spoken about as if they are a personal friend of yours.

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Cullen, Grindon, and their associates don't hold back though. At one point they list neoliberalism alongside serial killers as one of the disasters of the 1970s (though I'm absolutely certain we had serial killers a long time before the 1970s). They're on firmer ground when they take as their starting point the worldwide protests of 1968 (the year I was born) and go on to suggest that because of the rise of new rights and freedoms for everyone including women and LGBTQ+ people, and newly independent nations in Africa and Asia, we were starting to see global inequality slowly reducing and that that in itself was a crisis for the ruling classes.

The likes of Hayek and Friedman proposed an illiberal form of liberalism as a solution and this was adopted by world leaders like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. As well as, even more lethally, the CIA approved Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. A man who had women held captive in football stadiums and raped by dogs.

Essentially, what the world was witnessing was class war but not in the way Crass or Conflict fans would recognise it. It was a class war waged from above. It was a class war that seemed to say that to be rich is simply not enough. Others must become poor to enable that wealth.

The PFI Game

"Our vision is that the forces of the market are just that:they are forces;- they are like the wind and the tides" - Arnold Harberger

Arnold Harberger, a colleague of Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago, was wrong. Markets are not forces like the wind and the tides. Markets are not natural occurrences. Markets are invented and maintained by force. The Thatcher government sell offs of the 1980s and those that have followed on from it were not inevitable like rain but were direct policy of a government whose agenda was to find any part of society that was not run entirely for profit and make sure that that changed.

Be that gas, railways, water, telephone services - these companies would now be run not for the benefits of the customers - or 'clients' - but for the benefit of the market. Companies had to make money for investors and because capitalism is never satisfied those profits had to rise year on year. Which meant that the clients had to pay more to access what had once been a public service.

Inevitably education, healthcare, and social services would be taken over by market forces but because these are such emotive arenas this has been carried out far more insidiously:- in education - academies were created and university fees have been tripled.

'Shock doctrines', where crises are juiced to push through neoliberal policies, have been used to defund public services and to move policy towards deregulation and privatisation. The idea is to float a belief that the NHS, the BBC, the schools, and the judiciary are no longer fit for purpose and have to be destroyed so that something else, something that serves the elite but not the general public, can be created in its place.

"There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women. People must look after themselves first" - Margaret Thatcher

The idea of putting yourself first, the idea that there is no such thing as society - no such thing as the greater good, first took firm route in Britain under Margaret Thatcher but has been turbocharged under the premiership of the lying criminal Boris Johnson. But what is truly worrying is just how many people have bought into this line of thinking.

The Museum of Neoliberalism contains a list of companies that have been privatised in the last fifty years and it runs from the likes of Lunn Poly, Thomas Cook, and Rolls-Royce in the early seventies to the Royal Mail and East Coast Trains in the last decade. The railways are a good example of how this has failed.

Not only are most services worse than before, they are far far more expensive. On its own, that's a shocking state of affairs but when you consider that this government, and others around the world, have subsidised, propped up, and bailed out these private rail networks you have to ask yourself why you're not only still paying taxes to go to the railways but that these taxes are bypassing the network and going directly into the pockets of fat cat investors.

Motorola WT-4000 terminal (2006)

Ever had the feeling you've been cheated? You will have if you work in an Amazon warehouse. Especially if you're legally required to wear a Motorola terminal which instructs you to PICK FASTER. Of course, Amazon don't call them warehouses, they prefer the term 'fulfilment centres' and it's not just Jeff Bezos who uses these things. Tesco do too.

Amazon fulfilment centre staff are expected to work ten hour shifts that usually involve walking about eleven miles per day. Regularly, people are let go because they can't do this - and that includes pregnant women. It's instructive to learn that the first place that made use of these monitoring devices were private prisons operated by G4S. Now, of course, many of us wear similar devices to monitor our step count, how much sleep we get. All in the name of 'wellness'

Something we may be stressing about so much about that it's undoing all the good sleep and long walks we force ourselves to have. At least when we're walking for leisure, we're allowed to visit the toilet. Many Amazon delivery drivers don't have that 'luxury' and, as mentioned earlier, there's a bottle of piss on show.

Taking breaks, comfort or otherwise, or falling ill can mean Amazon delivery drivers may not hit their targets and ultimately lose their jobs. Ken Loach's Sorry We Missed You did a better job of illustrating this insidious behaviour than the Museum of Neoliberalism but, nevertheless, it's a scandal that is worth shining further light on. We have let ourselves become components of society, no more important than office chairs or keyboards, when we should be citizens. Society should work for us. Not us for it.

Bottle of Amazon employee urine (2019)

Serious incidents have become so common at Amazon fulfilment centres that ambulances are regularly seen parked outside them. Is this really how we should treat other human beings?

One way to avoid being treated that way is, of course, for staff to unionise but the neoliberals have an answer to that too. It's to discredit union activity or, in some cases, completely ban it. A compliant press helps demonise union leaders and Margaret Thatcher considered workers who stood up for their rights to be "the enemy within'. Delta Air Lines went as far as to print up anti-union propaganda.

Delta Air Lines Anti-Union Propaganda (2019)

A section in the museum dedicated to BULLSHIT JOBS tells us how laws have been created to reduce the power of unions and how, because of that, the quality of many people's lives have deteriorated. Workloads and hours have intensified while pay has stagnated and windfalls have fallen in to the hands of those already obscenely wealth - hedge fund managers and Tory politicians often.

Freelance work, zero hours contracts, and constantly being on call via mobile devices have contributed to a mental health crisis which I confidently predict is soon to get much worse as the cost of living crisis hits more and more people. I'd even go so far as to predict there will soon be another huge rise in homelessness and a jump in the suicide statistics. Neoliberalism doesn't free us. It enslaves us.

In some cases, it kills us. The dismantling of regulations that began, in the UK, under Margaret Thatcher didn't just apply to businesses but also to homes. Housing quality was lowered and so were fire safety standards and on the 14th of June 2017 we saw the ultimate result of that when the Grenfell Tower in London caught fire and seventy-two people died. 

When Grenfell Tower had been renovated - just one year earlier in 2016 - residents had complained they felt the building had been made a 'firetrap' with the addition of cheaper, but highly flammable, plastic-aluminium cladding. A saving had been made of nearly £300,000 and it was this, in the end - as well as the flammable foam insulation (below), that cost those seventy-two people their lives.

Celotex RS5000 foam insulation

Darren Cullen - Satiricial Anti-Serco Poster (2021)

Grenfell was a tragedy but it was an avoidable tragedy, Serco's failed Covid test and trace system (which cost the country tens of billions of pounds) was a tragedy but it was an avoidable tragedy, and the neoliberal line of thinking has been a tragedy but it has been an avoidable tragedy

The Museum of Neoliberalism makes a pretty good job of showing how neoliberal ideas are exhausted and that the world needs to find new ways to organise itself, ways that help people and not corporations. The Museum doesn't have the answers to that but it is, at least, asking the questions and getting a small number of people to think about potential responses. There's also (see below) a shop with some quite amusing stuff in it.

It's free, it's easy to get to, and it's worth a visit but the conversation regarding the failures of neoliberalism to meet the needs of the vast majority of people needs to be escalated towards far more mainstream channels and soon. The Serco circus needs to come to an end because if it doesn't many more people will die at its hands.