Canadian electoral politics and the global loss of legitimacy of the neoliberal project

Charles Posa McFadden and Karen Howell McFadden 19 May 2020

Here we illustrate our argument for a path out of the existential crisis which now faces humanity by identifying resolvable intellectual contradictions we have identified in the context of a leadership contest within the Green Party of Canada. This illustration is not a critique of the Green Party of any country. The Green Parties today play an essential role in the global struggle for a more just, democratic and sustainable global community. Our intended audience is not solely fellow Canadians, but anyone, anywhere who is concerned to find a viable path out of the present existential crisis that threatens humanity and all life on Earth. The form of unity we need in this struggle is achievable only through clarity about the nature of the challenge we face. It is only achievable through continuing discussion and resolution of differences.

Those of us active in the struggle for a future for humanity can never have the advantage of hindsight in relation to that future. The struggle to find a better way is always and necessarily a vast scientific experiment, one which requires imagination, intellectual courage and knowledge of achieved scientific wisdom. Reaching empirically testable and ultimately validated consensus is always the goal of scientific inquiry and a necessity for those who seek a better way forward.

An elaboration of the argument we illustrate here can be found in either eleven brief articles recently published by the online journal Green Social Thought or in seven thematic chapters, both versions accessible through our website, greensocialdemocracy.org, under the title, Achieving an ecologically sustainable civilization.  

The existential crisis we face is understandably accompanied by a crisis within the political elite and in the nature and organization of forms of government created to protect and preserve the rule of the propertied classes. This is nowhere more evident than the paralysis of the federal government of the United States and its descent into political rule by the duopoly of a now neofascist Republican Party and a Democratic Party whose leadership is more concerned with the preservation of its own privileges and propertied status than with placing obstacles in the way of corporate power, including even effective obstacles to corporate neofascist takeover.

The political crisis to its south is mirrored within Canada, whose parliamentary form of government is patterned after the compromise reached between a once ascendant English capitalist class and the ever-present descendants of Britain’s former feudal rulers. Such a parliamentary government, with its semblance of democracy, but with concentration of political power in the hands of the leaders of the contending political parties, themselves largely controlled by an army of corporate lobbyists, wealthy political campaign donors and private for-profit mass media, has evolved into an ideal form of government for the present descent of global capitalism into a global rentier civilization, one in which the people find themselves increasingly trapped by seemingly eternal debt to those at the very top of the economic pyramid.

The British and Canadian forms of parliamentary democracy are only rivalled in their compatibility with rentier capitalism by such other examples of descent into autocracy as the republican forms of capitalist democracy established in the late 18th century by revolutionary USA and revolutionary France. While both republican and Westminster forms of parliamentary democracy were historically justified as advances over feudal autocracy, neither of these forms of capitalist democracy can make a credible claim to such a status today, not in this period of the descent of industrial capitalism into rentier capitalism, the latter increasingly less distinguishable from feudalism.

We argue further that neoliberal policy has been the route of the propertied classes to a global rentier civilization with fascist overtones. That should be logically evident from the policy itself and empirically evident from its results, which include increasing wealth and income inequality, leaving an increasing proportion of humanity at the bottom of the economic pyramid in a rentier form of slavery to the financial capitalist oligarchy at the very top, increasingly abandoned to the ravages of global health pandemics, environmental chaos, and declining individual and communal resources needed to withstand these forms of violence. All this without yet mentioning victimization by more direct forms of violence.

We need only remind ourselves of the content of the neoliberal capitalist project to understand our present predicament. While originating during the early twentieth century as the promise of a re-invigorated liberalism which would once again produce an expansion of the freedoms associated with the early victories of the rising capitalist class over feudal autocratic rule, neoliberalism didn’t make much headway politically until the economic crises of the 1970s and 1980s, expressed as relative stagnation.

While neoliberalism arose first within the core capitalist countries, we argue that its influence extended across both the supposed iron curtain and across the political boundaries between the core imperialist countries and their former colonial subjects, explained by the dependency of all countries, whatever their proclaimed social goals, on capitalist market-based commodity exchange. The ascendancy of neoliberalism after that period was reflected in both public policy and accompanying arguments that capitalism is:

• An eternal human system for making our way through nature, that it
• functions best in the public interest through a reduction in regulations and laws that are said to inhibit its initiative, that it
• brings increasing equality and wealth to the world’s impoverished peoples, that it
• can be trusted to manage nature in the long-term interests of humanity, that in the face of partial failures, its promise can be re-invigorated by
• the application of austerity policies, reducing public debts acquired during episodes of “profligacy” by further deregulation of capital and reductions in public investment in public welfare, and that it
• is a system in which public welfare is best served by private for-profit initiative.