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.
Welcome!
Now in our fourteenth year, this website was launched September 1, 2010 in response to the convergence of growing inequality within and between countries and a rapidly developing ecological catastrophe. After several years of further participation in the social justice, democratic and environmental movements of the people and discussions with many of our friends in these movements about draft essays we have posted to this website, we believe we now have a relatively brief, coherent set of eleven arguments that can serve as a basis for further discussion and development by those committed to taking action to reverse the neoliberal tidal wave and move forward to the achievement of an ecologically sustainable global civilization. These were completed by spring 2021. Our further arguments, including updates on our prior posted ones, can be found in the What's New Section which accompanies each page. - C&K McFadden
What's New
Winter 2024
Charles Posa McFadden with assistance from Karen Howell McFadden and Scott Cameron McFadden
The Path to an Ecologically Sustainable Future is that of Class Struggle
Summer - Fall 2023
Charles Posa McFadden with assistance from Karen Howell McFadden and Scott Cameron McFadden
Charles Posa McFadden with assistance from Karen Howell McFadden
An alternative to destruction by capitalism: The case for communism
Winter - Spring 2023
Charles Posa McFadden with assistance from Karen Howell McFadden and Scott Cameron McFadden
For a future beyond capitalism
1. A contemporary lens for addressing the existential crises we now face
2. For a future, we must end the systemic causes of destruction and waste
3. Meeting the urgent need for revolutionary political renewal
Fall 2022
C & K McFadden (Sept. 2022): Capitalism is genocide and ecocide
Winter 2022
C McFadden (Feb. 2022) For Canada: On Freedom - A response to the “Freedom” Convoy
C & K McFadden (Feb. 2022) For Canada: A House Divided
C & K McFadden (Jan. 2022): The Need for an Ecosocialist Revolutionary Movement
Fall 2021
C & K McFadden (Sept. 2021) For Canada: For a future: Organize!
Winter 2020-21
C McFadden (Feb. 2021) How scarcity necessitates a more ecologically sustainable global community and digital technology makes that feasible
C&K McFadden (Dec. 2020) Can Greens avoid the pitfalls of capitalist electoral politics?
Spring 2020
C&K McFadden Canadian electoral politics and the global loss of legitimacy of the neoliberal project
Fall 2019
C&K McFadden Beyond Marx for a 21st Century Revolutionary Perspective
Spring 2019
C&K McFadden To Change the System, We Must Know the System!
Fall 2018
C&K McFadden, we either escape the internal logic of capitalism or descend with it into barbarism
C&K McFadden, We Need an Updated Manifesto
Don Fitz, Revolving Doors
C McFadden, The Greens Have It Right
Don Fitz, Is Nuclear Power a Solution to the Climate Crisis
CANADA
C&K McFadden (February 2022) A House Divided
C McFadden (February 2022) On Freedom - A response to the “Freedom” Convoy
C&K McFadden (September 2021) For a future: Organize!
David Gehl (2018), Fight Climate Change Not War
C&K McFadden (2018), It is time for Canada to do the right thing by its First Nations
George Hewison (2018), WINNIPEG 1919 & THE COLD WAR
George Hewison (2018), Art Manuel - "Unsettling Canada
NEW BRUNSWICK
Charles & Karen McFadden, An Historic Turning Point on the Journey to Recovery from Capitalism and its History of Colonialism: Reclaiming Wolastoq Ceremony
Charles McFadden, Decolonizing the U.S. & Canada: The People United for a More Just Sustainable Future
REVIEWS
Charles McFadden Is Canada a force for good in the world, as many imagine? Review of Tyler Shipley (2020) Canada in the World: Settler capitalism and the colonial imagination
Karen and Charles McFadden, Can emergent early 21st century neo-fascism be defeated without coming to grips with late 20th century restructuring of capitalism into a global system Review of William I Robinson (2014) Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity
Karen and Charles McFadden, A Dominant Capitalism or a Sustainable Environment? Why we can't have both. Review of Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster (2011) What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism
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